"Did I just fail?" Alex asked himself with slight confusion. This had never happened before.
"What's going on?" he wondered. The problem was obviously the new cultivation method, but why did it have a problem? It wasn't that it didn't suit him, right? He clearly learned it.
"Wait, does just learning it not mean that it suits me?" he wondered. He decided to check the status page.
[Player Name: Yu Ming
Cultivation: True Disciple Realm (1,000,000 True Qi : 53%)
Body: Sun God's Divine Yang Body
Talent: God
Spiritual Roots: 5 elements Yin-Yang roots
Cultivation Method: Winter Moon Cultivation Method
True Qi: 1,345,224
]
There was the problem. 53%. He only had a 53% chance to break through, and he had failed this time. He hadn't checked it before he pressed the button, but the chance was probably the same that time as well.
"Sigh, so this isn't really a good cultivation method for me, is it?" he thought. With only half a chance to breakthrough each time, his rate of cultivation would be pretty much halved.
He was pretty sure that he had lost a significant amount of Qi during the previous breakthrough, perhaps all of the 1 million True Qi as the status said was required to breakthrough.
"What do I do now?" Alex thought. He clearly needed to break through as he had already set his mind.
"Sigh, surely I won't fail twice," he thought and pressed the breakthrough button once more.
The Qi inside of him started moving through the same route once more. They moved around the meridians and when they reached the starting point, Alex felt a small 'boom' go off inside of him.
He had successfully broken through. "Phew! Thank god," he thought. He didn't have to waste more pills just to break through as he was dreading.
"Oh right, is the percentage the same or did it go higher?" Alex wondered and opened his status again. His heart sank when he saw it.
52%.
It didn't remain the same or go higher as he expected, instead, the percentage had gone down. 'Is it going to go down every single breakthrough?' he thought.
At a 1% reduction per breakthrough, he was going to lose about 45% of success chance throughout the entirety of True Realms. That would be horrible.
Having only a 7% chance to break through to the Saint realm, where one single mistake could put you on a Qi deviation and ruin your entire cultivation… Alex needed to get rid of this method soon.
However, it was a gift from his master, a graduation gift not to mention. He felt guilty at the thought of changing it.
"It's fine," he thought to himself. "I can keep using it for a little longer. At least the True disciple realm. I can change it after that."
It wasn't like he could change to any random cultivation method either since most mortal and earth grade cultivation methods would also have the same horrible chance at breakthrough.
His only hope was to find some random heaven or higher grade cultivation rank in an auction.
"Oh right, it's been 6 months since the Pink Cloud Auction halls bi-annual auction. Surely they will have something good like that, right? I will wait until then," Alex thought.
He still remembered the auction where he sold his pills and got his first big money. It was the same auction where he learned about beast handling, about Heaven's Impact skill, about the Yin Gathering tree.
"Hopefully I will find something good in that auction," Alex thought.
Once he was done, he stood up and left his house. He walked down the mountain and went to check the right alchemy garden where the Yin Gathering tree was planted on.
He greeted the elders he knew there and was allowed entry to the garden based on not his identity, but the authority he had from the time when he became Ma Rong's disciple.
He walked up the mountain, looking at the different plants that weren't destroyed at all. He had picked up all the alchemy ingredients 2 months ago, leaving only the immature ones, and somehow they were still growing.
'So the tree will take a while to grow, huh?' he thought if it even grew at all. After all, the Yin gathering tree was a hard tree to grow. It was a tree that rarely grew fruits and the fruits rarely had seeds in them.
It wasn't just anywhere that the tree could grow either, it needed an appropriate environment with plenty of Yin Qi to grow. Which, to be fair, he had provided with the Umbra flower he buried along with the seed.
When Alex reached the top of the mountain, he saw a small budding tree about half a meter in height. It had really small leaves and only a few branches. This was definitely the Yin Gathering tree, however…
"Oh no!" Alex said as he saw how malnourished the tree looked. The branches looked weak and dangled downwards, the leaves were started to grow yellow, even the newly grown ones. It looked like it could fall at any moment.
The tree wasn't growing as well as he had hoped it would. "What's going on?" he wondered. He got close to check it.
"Eh? Yu Ming?" A voice called him from the side.
Alex looked to the side to see his master flying down from above. "Master? What are you doing here?" he asked.
"I came for this little guy," she said, pointing at the small tree.
"It looks quite bad," Alex said.
"It is," Ma Rong said. "We didn't think much about what we were doing, and now this little guy is suffering the consequences." Ma Rong landed next to the plant and slowly touched it.
"What do you mean?" Alex asked. He couldn't understand what he was supposed to think about. They had a seed, he had an extreme Yin flower, so he planted it.
Was there really anything else left to consider?
"A Yin Gathering Tree requires a Yin environment to grow," Ma Rong said. "This place isn't one."
"What do—" Alex stopped and looked to the north. "The Forbidden Fields?" he asked in surprise.
"Yes," Ma Rong said. "It has been getting larger and larger for a while. Its influence has already crossed the river and come way over on this side."
"What? Such drastic changes took place in the Forbidden Fields? How? When?" Alex asked in surprise.
"I don't know when exactly it started, but it was after you went in there last time. I remember a wave of energy coming from the north at that moment. It must've knocked away most of the Yin energy in the surrounding."
"If not for the Umbra flower, and me coming here to pour in my Yin Qi every day, I doubt this little guy could even grow up at all. Even this almost dead-looking plant is already a miracle," Ma Rong said.
She touched the ground around the stem of the plant and closed her eyes. Slowly, Alex could see the white mist escaping from all over her body, but mostly from her hands that were touching the ground.
The fear that Alex had already forgotten about reappeared when he saw his master use her body constitution. He still didn't know why it was happening, all he knew was that he was instinctively scared.
Ma Rong finished putting her Yin on the ground and got up. Just as fast as she released her Yin Qi, she constrained it as well.
"So the Yang from the Forbidden Fields is leaking here as well?" Alex asked. "That's… that's dangerous. That means pretty soon no one will be able to cultivate here, will they?"
"I'm afraid so. If the Forbidden Field's suppression reaches here as well, soon Scarlet City would cease to exist. Even if it did, it would be a place only mortals would live in. That is assuming it's not overrun by the beasts in the Forbidden Fields," Ma Rong said.
"Do you have any solution to this problem?" Alex asked.
"None as of yet," Ma Rong said. "I'm planning to inform the Emperor about it soon and see what they offer. "Worst case scenario… we might have to leave this place and relocate to someplace else."
"That's terrible," Alex said, however, he had no idea what could possibly be done as well. 'Hopefully, the storm from last time doesn't come again,' he thought.
Ma Rong left soon after and went to deal with the different things. Alex left too and went to check on the next alchemy garden.
Before he even entered the other Alchemy garden, he could already see the thick fog from outside.
Going in only made him happier. The formation was working just as it was supposed to. The multicolored Qi that the fog was made up of was helping the ingredients grow at a much faster rate, as well as allowing for the high tier of ingredients to grow as well.
"This is pretty good," Alex thought. Soon, he was sure that even saint-rank ingredients would take root here and grow properly.
"Who knows, maybe this will help cultivate a Saint realm cultivator as well," Alex thought optimistically. Although his optimism immediately washed away, like cotton candy in water, when he realized that this place would probably not last very long now given what was happening to the Forbidden Fields.
"Sigh, I hope everything turns out fine somehow," he thought. This was in regards to all the problems going on around him lately.
Pearl, his cultivation method, the choice between the Hong Wu sect and Tiger sect, and now this problem with the Forbidden Fields.
Nothing seemed to be going properly for Alex right now.
He shook his head and let the bad thoughts disappear. Then, he walked away from the alchemy garden and went to the Core disciples mountain.
