Alex trained for a couple of hours. He wanted to use the sword of Spiritual energy he had finally managed to create, but he was still having a hard time understanding how to grasp it.
Or maybe he didn't grasp it at all. He didn't understand what he was supposed to do. For some reason, that part of the skill wasn't written on the stele.
'I wonder why?' he thought. By the time he left the Training hall, he could at least say that he could easily form a spiritual sword while also concentrating on one other thing… half the time.
The task was so hard that he felt pride in just the slight bit of success itself.
'It's quite demanding of my spiritual sea though,' he thought. If he could make as many swords as he wanted at the same time, he was sure that he would only be able to make about 20 swords.
It was because he had to take time to create each one that his spiritual sea would replenish in time for another sword.
'I don't have anything to do tonight, so I guess I will train with it,' he thought.
He looked at the sky outside and figured it was a little past noon right now.
'What do I do now?' he thought. 'Ah, I should go make some pills.'
He had used up quite a few pills, so he needed to create some healing pills as well as some more that he could use to buy himself a cultivation method for himself.
'Let's go to the production hall then,' Alex thought and walked away from the Training Hall.
Alex got himself an alchemy room in the Production Hall, one that cost him full price because of his absurdly low badge number.
He chuckled to himself when he had heard the price. He shook his head and brought out his cauldron before placing it down on the furnace.
He thought to himself what he was going to make and what ingredients he would be needing for it. If he were to be honest to himself, he was feeling a little nervous about what he was going to do.
He hadn't by himself made any pills yet, so he was both anxious about it, and looking forward to it at the same time.
"No, I can do this. I know what to do. I just have to take a deep breath, and follow the recipe," Alex thought.
He waited for the cauldron to heat up to the appropriate temperature and dropped the first ingredient in.
'8 times— Counterclockwise— 4 seconds per rotation,' Alex knew what he had to do. He sent out his Qi and started moving the ingredient.
He followed the recipe as well as he could, even though it felt incredibly awkward to him to be taking pills.
After half a minute or so, when the ingredient finally turned to powder, all the energy in the ingredient seeped out of it.
Alex felt something wrong with what he was sensing. 'Is that… correct?' he thought. The energy was… just a tad bit stronger than it was supposed to be.
He thought he followed the recipe very well, but it seemed he was still making some mistake somewhere.
'Where did I go wrong?' he wondered while preparing his next ingredient.
He had to now drop the temperature to about 520 degrees before dropping the second ingredient, and he needed to do that in less than 5 seconds, or the powder would start burning.
He controlled the flame with his Flame Mastery Scripture and lowered the temperature to his desired temperature. However, it didn't go down as fast as he wanted it to.
Alex panicked a little and dropped the temperature all the way down to 500 very quickly and brought it back up to 520 degrees right around the time he was to drop the 2nd ingredient.
'I'm… safe right?' he asked himself. He dropped in the 2nd ingredient and followed the recipe.
As for the 3rd ingredient, he had to increase the temperature once again. He thought he was following his instinct and his muscle memory, but once again, he timed it wrong.
He increased it way too fast and had to work to bring it down a little, but it wasn't as smooth as last time, so he knew he screwed up, even if just a little bit.
'Am I really that bad without my real soul to help make the pills?' Alex worried. He knew he just needed a bit more training to get back into business, but it made him feel that everything his body was put through with the other soul was in some ways useless if he had to do it all over again.
He continued with the pill making and after about 15 or so minutes, it was time to form the pill.
He was surprised to notice something. He knew what he needed to do to form the pill in a single one, or if he wanted to, split the pill into two.
"I didn't know I had that knowledge," he said to himself and continued with forming a single pill since this was his first one.
When the pill was out, he had ended up forming a 29% Harmony pill. That… wasn't so bad for a first try, however, he was still disappointed. His other soul would've probably reached about 34% easily.
'How are we the same soul and yet so different?' he thought to himself and proceeded to continue improving.
He closed his eyes and thought of the mistakes he made.
'Spent a bit too much time on lowering that temperature. That temperature went high abruptly. That temperature…'
As Alex continued revising what he had done, he came to get to the conclusion that all the major mistakes he had done… had something to do with the temperature.
"Wait a second," he thought. "That's so weird. Why is only the temperature being affec—"
Alex's face changed when he got the inkling of what was happening. It had happened before… with his master the day she got her new body constitution.
"Am I going through the same thing as Master did?"
