Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Chapter 2220  A Cruel Set Up

Momo's food arrived at the house the next morning, brought over by a motherly woman. Once the woman left, Alex went to see Momo who was in the middle of eating.

"Master," she said, quickly putting down the utensils.

"Eat. Don't mind me," Alex said, sitting close by. Momo nodded and resumed eating her food.

"I've prepared the book for you," he said. "You will need to read it during the day and be ready to use it by the night."

"Oh…" Momo said, looking down at the book. She read the name and flipped through it to see what it wrote. At this stage, they couldn't truly cultivate on their own with their Qi alone, so they needed help.

The technique was more of a breathing technique to simulate what gathering Qi through cultivation techniques was like. If not, no person could begin cultivating on their own.

There wasn't much to learn as the book was quite small. Momo nodded after flipping through it all. "I should be able to learn through it."

"Good," Alex said. "I will come back later tonight to see that you don't make any mistakes. I will have to head over somewhere for now."

"You are leaving?" Momo asked.

"Pearl will stay behind. Ask him if you need something," Alex said and walked away.

He needed to go further away to find Immortal ingredients to make his pills. The more he found, the more pills he could make, and the more he could earn in the end. He left the place, flying as far away as he could to finally reach a section of the land where there were Immortal spirit veins nearby. Plants that grew here were no doubt of Saint or Immortal grade. Exactly what he needed.

He searched around for a while, seeing what he could find. He spent a few good hours searching through the forests to find what he could.

He found a solid few ingredients but they didn't help him make any pills. They belonged to different recipes and Alex needed some more from the same recipe to make the pill.

He could make some new pill, that was too much trouble instead of just trying to find more ingredients.

"Oh!" Alex thought in surprise when he came across a tree. He felt joyous at the sight of the tree.

A Cherry Blossom Apple tree.

Its seeds were one of the 14 ingredients he needed to find for his pill. He hadn't thought that he could find it on the very second day.

He quickly scanned the tree for the apples and immediately frowned when he recognized there were none at all. The flowers were still and bud and it would take decades for the fruit to grow.

"Dammit!" he said softly. This was a bad timing. However, the fact that he found the plant was a good sign. If there was a single plant in this forest, then there was a good possibility that there were more in this forest as well. He just needed to find them.

He went around the forest for a while until he found another one. He scanned that cherry tree as well and found no apples there at all. All the flowers were still budding.

"What the hell?" Alex thought, confused. Something was very wrong about the whole thing. He continued searching for more and found another plant.

This one was the same as well. There were no fruits at all. In fact, this one didn't even have any flowers. Not even buds. At this point, Alex finally understood that he wasn't going to find any here.

Alex looked around the tree, scanning it very carefully now. This time, he didn't look for what was there, but rather what was not there. After looking at it that closely, he immediately recognized signs of the fruits and flowers being plucked away.

The reason he hadn't found anything here was because there was nothing for him to find. It had all been taken away, most likely by the committee.

"Damn them," he said softly. Not only were they making him start from the ground up, they weren't even letting him find ingredients so easily. That likely meant that the likelihood of him finding anything from his recipe was very low.

He either had to go to extreme locations to find it, buy it from the stores, or wait for it to grow back.

He couldn't wait for it to grow back.

"So I either buy it or I try and find it in some other locations," Alex thought.

He doubted the committee would be so cruel as to take away all the ingredients. Most likely, only the ones in this continent were removed so that they would have to leave this continent to go somewhere else.

"I'll need to go to the Great Fog Valley and see what I can find there," Alex thought. If he found nothing there either, his suspicions would be complete.

Alex stayed around until late afternoon and found what ingredients he could. Then, he returned back to the village so he could make the pills.

After arriving, he checked on Momo for a bit. She had read through the book and had asked Pearl about what confused her. Pearl explained everything as clearly as he could.

Momo was clear about almost everything fundamentally, so all that was left was for her to perform it practically. She had tried a few times and had ended up coughing a lot as she couldn't do exactly what the breathing technique suggested she did.

Still, she was getting there, and she had the book before her to make sure she was doing nothing wrong. In a day or two, she should have been more or less cultivating.

"When does your food arrive?" Alex asked.

Momo looked around at the setting sun. "A little after dark," she said. "An hour later or so."

Alex gestured for her to get up. "You wanna watch how pills are made? Come with me."

Momo got up enthusiastically, following Alex over to the next room.

Alex sat her down in front of her, placing his cauldron before him. "You won't be making pills just yet, but learning what you need to do will be a good starting point."

Alex brought out a cauldron, a formation plate, and the ingredients. n/o/vel/b//in dot c//om

"Making pills is about 3 parts. The flame, the cauldron, and the ingredients," Alex began explaining.

The formation plate he had set up underneath the cauldron burst aflame and it steadily burned the cauldron above it.

Momo was a little surprised to see the fire come out of nowhere.

"That's a formation plate. I'll teach you about it later. For now, focus on the alchemy itself," Alex said.

Momo nodded, surprised by the mysteries of the cultivation world, wanting to know more about everything. She forced herself to focus on just what her master was saying and showing to her.

Alex looked at her, understanding her sense of astonishment. Her mind wondered with each new thing and would for a while until he explained everything.

"You control the fire to heat up the cauldron to a certain temperature. And at that temperature, you put in the ingredient and do what the recipe says."

Alex placed in the first ingredient and started showing her how a pill was made.