"Side effects of eating too many pills? There's something like that?" he wondered and sat down to read the book.
At first, Alex didn't give much thought to the book as the title felt more of an attention grabber than something that was actually true.
It was like those clickbait titles he would find on the internet all the time. However, as he kept on reading, his eyes narrowed as things that he hadn't thought of before but were clearly important were mentioned in the book.
According to the book, when one consumed a pill, the pill needed time to take effect. Even after the pill did take, there would be some lingering effects that would take time to leave.
This was theorized to be likely due to the powder of the pill getting stuck on the walls of the meridians as they are sucked in through the bloodstream when the body is trying to absorb the energy.
Alex knew that the bloodstreams of a person did mix with the person's meridians in some places, so there was merit to the information.
But was it really correct? Alex for one had never faced this problem even though there were a few times when he consumed pills consecutively.
'Actually,' he thought. 'Now that I think about it, I never really did eat a pill normally, did I?'
'Aside from the few times when I needed to heal, all the pills I ate would usually turn to Qi, with my body destroying the powder too, wouldn't it?' he thought.
Alex quickly realized that he had no understanding of how pills actually worked. Until now, he had simply gone along with the fact that they worked.
"I see, so it must be true. Pill toxins… they must be quite serious then," he thought. That got him to thinking just how many toxins a normal player's body must have amassed from eating all the pills they did to improve their bodies so far.
'Was that one of the reasons why their cultivation base was so bad?' Alex wondered. That certainly had to be true in some part.
Some of those pill powders themselves could be harmful too, and while one's body could probably fight against such minor harmful substances, ingesting a lot of them could lead to serious problems.
Alex went on to read more of the book and came across sections that talked about remedies if one had a lot of pill toxins.
One of the methods was surprising to eat a pill that dealt with the toxins. Pills made of ingredients that would break down the power that jammed one's meridians and help with the proper flow of Qi.
Another method was to get an expert physician to use their Qi to push the powders through some crack in the blood vessels.
These were the cures of the pill toxins. The book also went on to explain the methods of preventing pill toxins.
The most obvious one was to limit the consumption of pills as much as possible. The less pill you ate, the lesser the chance of pill powder being stuck in your meridians.
The other, more difficult way was to consume pills with very high harmony. Unfortunately for Alex, the book didn't mention why that helped, only that it did.
That was the end of the book, so Alex closed it and fell into thought.
'What's the difference between high harmony pill and a low harmony pill?' Alex thought. It was obviously the difference in harmony.
'Or more accurate, the difference in the amount of energy each pill has taken in,' Alex thought.
From his understanding of the Structure and Composition of a pill, he understood that the more amount of perfectly clumped together the mixture of the powder was in a pill, the better the harmony would be.
'So, does that mean that the powder of the pill that does hold the energy gets easily absorbed and even breaks down into individual pieces of powder, while the one without energy in it simply stays clumped up?' Alex wondered.
If that were true, he could see why pills with high harmony would result in fewer pill toxins, and vice versa.
Alex mulled on the information for a while, taking in everything he learned about pill toxins.
In the end, all he needed to care about were not eating too many pills, and that better pills were always better.
'I can see why pills with higher harmony would be sought after more. It was not just the effectiveness of the energy, was it?' he thought.
Alex went back to the shelf and put back the book, before taking out the 2nd of the 3 unique books.
He read the title of the book to himself.
"Poison pills are almost as important as healing pills."
Unfortunately, the second book wasn't as interesting as he had hoped it to be.
The book about poison simply spoke about how important poison was to an alchemist. It spoke about the minute differences poison could have that not all healing pills could cure.
As such, people needed to learn about poison so as to be prepared against them. Knowing about poisons would help someone create antidotes way easier than not knowing about the poison.
All the book did was make Alex remember to learn how to make poisons. He had been meaning to do that for a long while, but he had forgotten about it due to the events he had been through in the crimson empire.
Alex stopped. 'I have been through?' he thought. That was wrong. He had never been through anything. It was his clone soul that went through everything in his body.
'Why do I think of the events as something I did?' he thought. He had noticed this a while ago, but now it had become way more prominent.
No longer did he think of what his clone soul did as 'someone else's work'. For some reason, it had become his own in his mind.
The distinctions between what he did and what his clone did were slowly but surely vanishing from his mind.
At this point, it wouldn't be wrong to call the current him and the one that was controlled by his clone soul the same person.
'Am I getting used to my body after being suppressed? What is happening?' Alex thought.
Alex didn't have a clear understanding of what had happened outside of the game. Those memories were still very vague to him.
However, the memories inside the game were now as good as his.
He shook his head and focused back on the poison book he was reading. The book didn't really have anything interesting for him to read further, especially since he wasn't used to making poisons at all.
He would revisit it once he had at least delved into making poisons. Now that he had learned about the poisonous swamps to the east of the empire which he would have to visit for the purpose of getting the Two Colored, or Three colored Poison Lily, he would certainly get into it soon enough.
Alex then took out the final book that had piqued his interest among the many on the shelf.
A book named 'Simple Usage of formations in Alchemy'.
