Once Alex was done figuring out how a whip worked, he tried it again for a while with the Saint-ranked whip and returned back after the tree was burned to a cinder.
He wanted to go to the beast realm right now, and start searching for the location where the Undying God's inheritance was left behind. But there were a few more things he needed to do before he went on fully focusing on his other goals.
First, there were still pills whose recipes he needed to fully convert. Now that he was starting to see the Saint realm being just a few years away, he needed to be prepared for it since he would be making Saint pills mostly.
Alex spent the next month or so doing that very thing. With the amount of pills he had already fixed, fixing these few pills became incredibly easy.
Not only did he know what an ingredient's powder shape would be, he was also starting to be able to guess it just based on what the ingredient was.
Flower petals for example were mostly of the same density, making each of their shapes similar when put through a similar process.
Similarly, branches, roots, barks, and even beast's muscles and bone powders were in many cases similar.
As such, in just that single month, Alex finished nearly every pill recipe he had left. As for the ones he didn't finish, he decided to slowly do it as there was still quite a while before he reached the Saint realm.
After that, Alex went over to the Poison Valley and got back some parts of the Corrosive willow that he could later grow into another willow tree and hopefully get enough of them to forever have the barks for when people needed to improve their Earth spirit roots.
During the rest of the days, Alex cultivated himself and helps his mother cultivate as well.
He would make Immortal rank pills of the highest qualities to help his mother's cultivation speed up to the point where she would reach True Emperor in just a year or two.
She was already at True King 6th realm by now, so it wouldn't take her much longer.
He hoped he could help her learn some Dao, but that was something each person had to do on their own, and Alex couldn't really aid in that at all.
So, for the rest of it, he focused on his own thing.
Alex made a habit of doing exactly 3 things at night before he would cultivate.
First, he would use up his little Saint Qi he had to try and refine the Flaming Whip. With how it was going, It would take him months before he was able to do that.
Next, he would use the True Qi he had to refine all the other weapons he had.
After winning not only the Alchemy competition but also gaining third place in the Tournament of Champions, Alex was given a lot of gifts from people that wanted to meet him or only congratulate him on his victories.
Alex did go and speak to a few, but the talks were usually about them trying to see if they could rope him in, which never really worked.
Still, he got a lot of different artifacts from the people, of which he took every single sword and cauldron.
He was now refining them just to get them ready for when he would need them.
At the same time, he would also use the first stage of the mask to completely deplete his spiritual energy, which only took about 10 minutes with the mask.
Once he was lacking in True Qi, Saint Qi, and spiritual energy, he would sit down and cultivate throughout the night to regain them all for the next day.
That continued for another month before Alex no longer had any weapons or cauldrons to refine and moved on wasting his Qi with the ring on his finger.
Alex had sort of stopped trying to refine the ring for the most part as he wasn't seeing any improvements on it. No matter how much Qi he was using to refine it, it kept on absorbing his Qi while not doing anything.
At some point, he had simply stopped giving the ring any more Qi. He would still try it from time to time, every couple of months, but that would only result in him being disappointed.
However, now that he needed something to waste his Qi on before cultivating, the ring became the perfect item to do it with.
Or, at least that was what he had thought.
About a month after starting to refine his Whip, Alex was finally successful. Which meant that he now needed to spend his Saint Qi elsewhere.
What better place to do it than the ring?
Alex refined the ring with both Saint Qi and True Qi for about a week or so, when suddenly it expanded again.
He nearly didn't understand what had happened when he did manage to break through the ring's stubbornness to not expand.
"I knew there was more," Alex thought as he quickly took off his spirit-suppressing mask and looked at the ring.
The red ruby still looked the same, but the space inside was much larger than before.
It went from having 20 cubic meters of space to about 25 cubic meters.
'What changed?' Alex wondered and looked through the space. As he did that, Alex noticed something that he did not believe he owned.
It would be hard to forget an object like this that was so big.
Alex quickly pulled it out of the storage bag and tried to keep it in the air. However, before he could realize what happened, the Qi he was trying to use to keep it afloat suddenly wasn't there anymore and Alex was forced to grab the object in the air.
When he did, Alex immediately strained as the giant object he hugged was at least a few hundred tons in weight.
Alex felt his feet sink into the ground as he quickly used his Qi to reinforce his body and lighten the weight a bit.
He tried to float it with his Qi, but for some reason, his Qi didn't work around it.
Alex used his senses to see what it was, but even without them, he was already getting information about the object in his mind. After all, it was a plant.
More accurately, it was a seed from what he could tell. A giant, heavy seed, but a seed nonetheless.
If a seed was this big, Alex could only wonder how big the tree would get.
There was something weird about the seed, however. While Alex was getting the name of the seed, he wasn't getting any information on its elemental alignment or its age.
That was something that he always got with any type of plant. Of course, there were a few exceptions to that, but surely this seed couldn't belong to one of those exceptions, right?
Alex looked at the brown seed that he could barely hug fully, and read out its name that his mind was constantly spewing out.
'A seed of the World Tree?'
