"Profound Revolutions of Myriad Combinations, huh? Quite a big name it's got here," Alex said as he read the front of the book with a serious look.
Even without reading very much into it, he could tell that this was it. Still, he continued reading for a little longer until he finished the introduction.
Then, he put the book down and started thinking a bit as he drank the tea. After a minute, he looked at the old woman.
"How much for this?" he asked.
"Only 6 Saint Spirit stones," the woman said.
Alex frowned when he heard that. "6000 True Spirit stones for this?" he asked suspiciously.
"It's not just any book, you know? It's an immortal grade skill book," she said confidently.
Alex frowned a little. He was too used to getting Immortal grade books for free. Having to pay for one just didn't sit right with him.
Also, because of that, he was unaware of how much techniques even cost in the first place.
In fact, if he thought about it, books of Immortal rank should have their cost in Saint spirit stones, not True spirit stones. This was way too cheap when he gave it more than a second's thought.
But, given the lack of resources for the Western continent, maybe this was the appropriate price.
"Fine, 6000 it is," Alex said and brought out a storage bag. Before he brought out the 6000 spirit stones from it, he stopped for a moment and looked at the table.
"Can you tell me more about this?" he asked the woman while pointing at the prosthetic arm. "I assume you put it here because of my condition."
The old woman smiled. "Sure, let me explain it to you," she said and picked up the wooden arm.
"This artifact was created by Yuan Yening, an excellent artificer that works exclusively for our Spiring Mist Pavilion. As you can see, it is modeled after a real human arm, and can change its shape or size depending on your wish, although it will take some time so that won't be useful in a fight," the old woman said.
"What will be useful is the fact that it is made up of materials that are perfectly capable of conducting Qi without any resistance. And it works with each and every type of Qi, aside from the ones that aren't natural of course," the woman said. "But I suppose you won't be using Blood Qi or some such."
"What grade is this?" Alex asked.
"Saint Earth grade," the woman said.
"Then it must cost a lot," Alex asked.
"Is another 8000 True Spirit stones a lot to you?" the woman asked.
Alex smiled and handed her the 6000 spirit stones. "It seems I am capable of only buying the book for now," he said.
"You can come for the arm any other time you like. I doubt anyone will require it very soon," the old woman said.
Alex nodded and left after taking the book.
The woman sat for a while doing nothing as she knew there was no one waiting outside the door. She looked at the items in front of her and then at the teacup that Alex had drank from.
It was empty. A curious look appeared on her face as she brought out a talisman that contained Alex's information. There, she added a single piece of information.
"Has incredible mental strength and won't succumb to normal mental influence."
* * * * *
It had been 7 days since Alex had returned home, so he decided to go home for today and learn the technique in private.
Pearl and his mother welcomed him back and they talked for a while. Alex told her exactly what was going on in the guild as well as his trip to the Spring Mist Pavilion.
"Oh, you need some money? Master gave me some a few days ago. He said it was your money," she said and brought out some spirit stones that Qin Shan had handed to her for the many pills Alex had made for him before going to the poison swamp.
"It's fine. You can keep it for now," Alex said. "I'll go learn this new technique now," Alex said and left the room.
Back in his house, Alex brought out the book and started learning it.
As he started reading, he understood what it mean. He flipped through the pages as he finished reading it all in under 10 minutes and in no more than 5 more minutes comprehended it all.
Now, he just needed to practice it on some things. So, he brought out his cauldron and a few ingredients to test it out.
To begin with, he decided to make common rank pills as his priority was to get used to the technique first.
When the cauldron heated up, one by one, Alex put in the different ingredients.
Although he was testing out the technique, Alex wasn't making some random pill, however. It was one of the pills that he had changed the recipe to before he knew how it could be done.
After getting to the True realms, the Alchemy God's Knowledge skill had allowed him to have a knack for finding flaws in a recipe for common pills simply based on instincts.
He didn't need that now with how he had learned to fix the recipe on his own, but this one was much faster than the other one and required far less use of ingredients.
Alex could fix the recipe in a day and it would be nearly as good as what he could do in 2 weeks.
However, the only reason he didn't use it any longer was that it could only be used for Common pills. Also, it wouldn't be as perfect as the manual one.
Once the energy and the powder were ready to combine, Alex used the technique. As he circulated the technique, neutral Qi escaped from him and lingered in the air, waiting.
Alex nodded to himself as he knew this would happen. He then reached into the cauldron with his spiritual sense and started finding the different shapes of the powder, and used the technique to put them together.
Once he did, the technique then automatically followed what he did to as many things as possible. His Qi would go through the cauldron find the many different powders and try to make the same shape as he did.
Once the powders were combined to form as many individual combinations as possible, Alex used Elemental Guidance to move the energy in the cauldron into it.
Then, once everything was done, all Alex had to do was use the other technique in the book to form a sphere with the pre-combined powders.
That was perhaps the easiest part of the whole task. The powders underwent a revolution around the cauldron as they came together to form a single pill out of the many combined powders.
With a wave of his hand, Alex brought out the ready pill and stared at it.
"65%?" he thought as he looked at it. "Did I mess up that much? I must've left it in the cauldron for too long while I made that first combination then," he thought.
This being the first time he was using the technique, he didn't expect it to become an Immortal grade pill.
Still, he expected it to come close to it. This was far from that.
"Guess I will have to train in it a bit longer then," Alex thought and started making more of the same pills as well as the other pills.
The more he used the technique, the more familiar got with its who aspect. It didn't take him long to realize that there were ways to make the process easier on himself.
Alex made 3 types of pills in his process to train and experiment with this technique.
The first type was pills whose recipes were unaltered.
The second type was pills whose recipes he had altered but didn't know the shapes of the powder.
Last were the pills whose recipes he had altered and also knew the shapes of the pill as well as the combinations.
After experimenting with these different pills, he had come to learn quite a lot about his new technique.
First of all, it was imperative that he knew the shapes of the powder. It didn't matter how good the recipe was if he couldn't turn it into a pill fast enough and instead let the powder burn away.
Second of all, while the technique was incredible, far better than simply randomly making the powders into a pill. It couldn't hold a candle to the pill formation technique in his Pill-splitting technique, which was capable of forming the most efficient pill on its own.
Lastly was perhaps the biggest problem with this technique. It used all the powder in the cauldron. On the surface, that looked like it was working perfectly, but most of the time, you didn't want to use all the powders.
If there were excess powder in a pill that didn't have other powders to combine with, you ran the risk of creating asymmetry, which would reduce the effectiveness of the pill even if it held all the energy it could, to begin with.
So, if Alex wanted to make the perfect pill, he needed to make sure he had the perfect amount of ingredients from the start. For that, he would have to get rid of even the tiniest bit of extra material from the ingredients before they went into the pot.
Once he did that, the result Alex received were much better than earlier.
In fact, with pills of the third type, he was starting to touch on the Immortal grade.
