ETERNAL CULTIVATION OF ALCHEMY

After an hour or two of failing to come up with any recipes, Alex knew he had to change his perspective on everything he was doing. The greater clarity and thinking capacity his mind worked on at the moment helped him understand that more clearly than ever.

But how did one suddenly change their perspective? What direction could Alex change his perspective to?

With his heightened mental state, one of the things Alex had been thinking of previously came to mind.

It appeared to him that there was a possibility that the reason he could not form new recipes was that he was limiting himself to just pills that worked inside a person.

Alex’s first thought was to try and expand his shrinking horizon and try to see the pills as more than just something to be eaten. But at that very moment, perhaps due to the effects of the pill, he had a feeling that it would be far better for him to keep that bias.

In fact, he began thinking of ways to justify his bias.

If anything made with alchemy was not meant to be eaten, then it could only be considered a failure of the Alchemist. Whatever the pill did, it needed to do inside a person’s body.

There were many types of pills, some with weird enough effects to make one wonder why such a thing was even possible. And from everything Alex had learned until now, there was one thing in common among the pills that he made.

Pills usually activated on their own.

The criteria for the activation of even the lowest of pills had never needed to be deliberately activated. To activate the effects of the pill, one only needed to eat it. No matter who ate it, whether it be a human, a beast, or a plant, it would affect them the same.

Considering pills never did anything on their own, Alex reasoned to himself that he was correct in considering this line of thought.

He tried to come up with opposing ideas too. Just considering one side of the argument was surely not the way to do these sorts of things.

So, he tried to think of pills that could act without being eaten.

He came up with two types of pills. One was a pill that needed to be deliberately activated, like the exploding pills, and the other was pills that came out of the cauldron already activated.

Flames burned under Memory as the cauldron came to life again, and Alex pulled out a set of recipes for the fire and water exploding pill he had just made.

In his current situation of increased mental capacity, Alex decided that he needed to learn everything he could about the first type of pill as well as he could.

As Alex remade the pill, he let his mind wander and think through whatever was happening with the pill. The quality of the pill was the least of his worries at the moment.

When the final pill came out, Alex came to a conclusion that millions of alchemists should have come to from ages young to old.

This was a sort of pill that was prepared with the intent to cause a failure on its inside. When that failure was triggered, usually by flooding the pill with an excess amount of Qi, the energy inside the pill fell out of balance, resulting in a destructive reaction that led to an explosion.

These were the types of pills that Alex had come to consider a failure, and even after checking this, he came to the conclusion that they were a failure.

Of course, exploding pills were not the only type of pills that needed a trigger. There were other pills, such as ones that, when used, caused poison to spread in an area or caused hallucinations. These pills didn’t rely on a failure within the energy combination to be put into effect.

Alex brought out the recipes for a Saint pill of similar effect. With Memory strong in its current bond with him, he began making the pill.

As the pill was made, Alex understood more about it.

Unlike the exploding pills, Alex found it difficult to call these pills failures. So, was he wrong in everything he had thought of so far?

As Alex thought about it, he came to think of an answer to his question.

These pills were not failures, but that did not mean that he was wrong. What these pills did was spread their influence in a surrounding area that would eventually have to be consumed by someone. They could breathe it in or simply absorb it through the pores on their skin, but they would consume it.

And Alex always believed pills needed to be consumed to be pills.

His belief had not been stumped yet, but there was a possibility that it would be by the remaining type of pill he hadn’t thought about.

There were pills that passively did something the moment they came out of the cauldron. The most important one among them that Alex remembered was the Nullifying pill.

The Nullifying pill was meant to reverse the effects of another pill on a human body. These pills were usually made by budding alchemists who needed to test out their new pills or older alchemists who needed to test alchemy ingredients that they had no idea about.

Alex paused for a moment, unable to decide if he considered the Nullifying pills as true pills or not. Certainly, they were not failures, were they?

The thing that confused Alex the most about them was that they neither needed a trigger to start nor did they need to be consumed to be used. In fact, all Nullifying pills got used up on their own even if no person ever ate them.

The Nullifying Pills came out of the cauldron strong, needing a person to consume them immediately to make use of them. If left alone, they would react to the air itself and end up being used up.

Since that was the case, Alex could only end up with the conclusion that maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was more to everything he thought about, and maybe he was wrong.

After all, if even a single pill did not go along with his belief, then was it even a correct belief?

The Nullifying pill was just that one single fact that brought down the tower of thoughts and beliefs Alex had built over his entire life as an Alchemist. It was a straight jab into his understanding that he hoped would one day lead him to find the Dao of Alchemy.

Alex still needed to test it all, so he started preparing a Nullifying pill. He wanted some sort of truth, some hint into the pill, or even just a change of perspective on how these pills worked. Something that could explain to him just what was going on with them.

Memory was with him every step of the way, trying to help him make the pill as much as it could. As the pill came close to completion, Alex’s eyes narrowed.

‘Wait a second. That’s not right.’

The thing that went on inside the cauldron at the moment was not something Alex had come to consider before.

Before Alex had even formed the pill, the energy within the cauldron was already trying to draw in other energy to stabilize itself. Or rather, it was reacting to any energy it could find.

And the way the Nullifying pill was made, any energy would react to it and stabilize it. That was how it countered pill effects, after all.

In that case, if the Nullifying pill started doing what it did before the pill itself was formed, then was it really a pill?

Alex argued with himself that a pill didn’t need to be formed for the energy to be considered a final product. If it was possible to house that energy in some other body, it would still do its work.

In that way, Alchemy was about the merging of those energies and had nothing to do with the powder itself. However, at the end of the day, Alchemy was made with ingredients, and those ingredients were refined into powder that could only be turned into a pill that was also the perfect vessel to deliver that energy.

That, however, still failed to uphold Alex’s belief that all pills needed to be consumed to be of use. While one could argue a Nullifying pill was supposed to be eaten, the fact that it worked without that reduced his burning belief to mere embers.

‘Unless,’ Alex thought suddenly as an explanation came to him.

Nullifying pills were always active before even being formed into a pill because the energy was half-complete and reacted with anything it could find to complete itself.

In normal circumstances, a half-complete energy combination that was left unchecked would create an explosive reaction. However, in the case of Nullifying pills, due to the way it was used, the way it reacted with anything else was by nullifying its own energy with it, never resulting in an explosion.

When the Nullifying pills then reacted with all energy and slowly died down, it would finally stabilize into a stable pill. The pill did nothing in the end, but that was just the result of its neutrality.

In a way, the Nullifying pill was never activated since it was never a pill in the first place. It was just a coincidence that this half-made pill did not result in a dangerous imbalance.

As Alex found the explanation he had desperately searched for, he closed his eyes and began to sink deeper into his own belief of what a successful pill was.

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