Alex pulled the cauldron out of the water and looked at it with a happy expression. He felt like hugging it, but he didn't do so.
He had already taken care of the Crystalscale Crocodile's core and would use it sometime later when his cultivation base reached a close enough level.
He had also taken some of the crocodile's crystal scales and had hoped of making some mental defense artifacts with them.
Alex didn't have to open the cauldron to see that everything inside was as it should be.
A fire formation, A barrier formation, 3 healing pills, and 20 True spirit stones. All right there inside with no damage.
'That golden light… it must have been Shen Jing who put it here, right?' he thought. That was the only thing that made sense.
Then, Alex took the cauldron and went up the river to the location where he fought the crocodile first. Then, he found his way back to the cave.
At first, Alex was a little worried that he wouldn't be able to take the cauldron into the cave given that it wouldn't fit in his storage ring at all.
However, when he did try to, he could somehow teleport inside with his cauldron in hand.
'That does make sense since it is an item I refined. If I can teleport with the sword, I should be able to teleport with the cauldron,' he thought.
Alex sat down when he reached the inner cave and rested for a few moments before he started cultivating. He ignored the cauldron for now as he wanted to be at his peak before he tried anything.
He cultivated for a full day before his lost Qi had returned to him. At the same time, he tried to calm the Yang aura that was desperately trying to get out of him.
After he was done with that, he opened his eyes and got ready to practice some alchemy.
Alex dug out a little piece of land, using the True spirit stone to run the fire formation plate. With a single spirit stone, Alex was sure the fire would burn for almost 5 days nonstop.
With 20, he could practice for 100 days. That was more than enough to gain some insight into what he was going to practice, or so he hoped.
During the last 3 months, Alex had gathered a lot of ingredients. They were still dwarfed by the number of ingredients he used to hold in his storage bags back in Crimson Empire, but this one was quite great as well since almost all of the ingredients he had acquired were for True pills.
Alex had found many ingredients but ignored most that he couldn't make pills with.
He could try to make new pills as he did back in the barrier after he had killed Zexi, but that was not his intention at the moment.
At the moment, he was just trying to practice making pills with structure and composition in mind.
When his cauldron was hot, he put the first ingredient into it. Alex had a recipe to follow, and he did, turning the first ingredient into powder not long after.
Then, he stopped. Instead of putting in the next ingredient, Alex took the powder out and set it aside. He made sure to not leave a single speck behind in the cauldron.
Then, he did the same thing for the 2nd ingredient. He put it in, did what the recipe told him to do, and pulled it out.
He did the same for the third, the fourth, all the way to the last ingredient.
Doing so obviously removed all energy into the air, but Alex didn't care for that at the moment. He was more so focused on the powder as that was where structure and composition came in.
Once all the ingredients were powdered, he pulled up a single speck of all the ingredients and put it in his hand.
Then, Alex took a deep breath and enhanced the vision in his mind. Is it looking through a microscope, the specks of powder magnified in his spiritual sense to the point that he could see what they all looked like?
Somehow, Alex didn't feel as much strain as the last time he had done it when his mental strength was nearly 6 times as weak as now. Well, that was to be expected.
Once he saw the shapes of the powder, he tried to fit them together. The powder shapes acted like puzzle pieces that came together to form a larger puzzle piece.
Unfortunately for Alex, he didn't know if these puzzle pieces were working puzzle pieces or not.
His brilliant mind worked to look through the specks of powder, trying to find an orientation in which they would all fall together with no gap inside.
Alas, he couldn't find any. No matter the changes he made, the highest he could go in his estimation was 80%.
80% sounded incredible, and it was, but only on paper. In reality, there were a lot of aspects to pill-making that would bring this down quite a bunch.
The ones he knew of were the age of an ingredient before it was taken, time passed after it was taken, mistakes while following the recipe, grade of a cauldron, and of course, the ability of the alchemist himself.
These things would surely bring the harmony down by a lot. So, Alex needed to increase the theoretical potential to as high as possible so that even when he made those mistakes, he still ended up with a high-grade pill.
Alex thought of changing the recipe a little. Alex wondered what he could change and saw that if he used the portion of the 4th ingredient twice, he could cover quite a large gap in the structure, which could surely increase the potential by about another 5-8%.
Alex took another speck of the 4th ingredient and tried. As expected, it fell into place, giving him quite a bit of joy.
"Hah, if I just use twice the amount of the 4th ingredient, I can do it," he thought, but then stopped and frowned.
"No, that won't do," he thought. Having a little less energy in an ingredient, or a little more didn't really affect a pill-making process to a high level.
At best, they would just cause to pill to lose of a bit of harmony by not having all the combined energy having a place to inhabit.
However, if Alex really did double an ingredient, the increased amount of energy from that one ingredient would change the structure of the entire pill, making the later incoming ingredients interact differently with the massive energy of the 4th ingredient.
So, increasing the ingredient amount was not the way to go, unless he wanted to end up with an entirely different pill instead.
What Alex really needed to do, was change the structure of the powder by changing the speed, rotation, and temperature with which he interacted with the energy.
And that was something he had no idea about and couldn't figure out by thinking. For that, he needed to sit down and burn those ingredients to see how the powder came out.
Alex spent half a day on a single ingredient, trying to form every type of shape he could while keeping the same rate of release of the energy.
Then, he moved on to the next one. He spent 2 consecutive days learning with just 4 ingredients. Then when the mental fatigue hit, he stopped cultivating.
After going back and forth between practice and cultivation, Alex finally managed to make almost every single shape of every single ingredient for his pill.
Then he closed his eyes and sank his thought into his memories. From all the different memories, he searched for the shapes that would fit together the best.
Because he had spent the last week preparing, it didn't take him very long to find a solution to the puzzle.
He quickly compiled a recipe based on that combination and finally, for the first time in nearly 5 months, proceeded to make a pill.
The pill he was going to make, the one he had been practicing was called the Disciple's Ascension pill. Unlike its grand name, it was just a pill that helped the True Disciple realm cultivator have a higher chance during breakthrough to the True Master realm.
It was one of the easiest pills to make, not because the process was easy, but rather because of how readily available the ingredients were. They were True rank ingredients but grew like a weed in most places where humans didn't step in.
If cared for, these ingredients would grow even more easily. In a forest as dense as these lands, there were more than enough ingredients here to occupy Alex's time for almost a decade.
After a decade, there would be enough growth to occupy another decade.
Alex prepared the cauldron and recalled the recipe one more time to be sure, and started making the pill.
Alex put the first ingredient in and put all of his focus on the task at hand. Since he had made so many powders of the same ingredient, he didn't want his muscle memory taking over and ruining this attempt.
Once he was focused, the process became easy. He took out the 2nd ingredient as well and tried that as well. That too was converted into powder rather easily.
The 3rd, 4th, 5th, all the way to the last ingredient, it all easily turned into powder with the shape he wanted.
With that, the easy part was over, and next came the hard part.
Now, Alex had to conjoin each individual speck of powder into a group like puzzle pieces.
