160 Clones
Alex sat down on his bed and looked at the book in front of him. "The hell did I pick up?" he wondered with a strange face as he looked at the title on the page.
How to create a clone.
"A clone? Like another one of yourself? Master didn't say anything about these other than that it existed," he thought as he started reading. The book in fact told what methods one could use to make different clones. It didn't teach the 'recipe' on how to create a clone but taught more of the methods to create one.
The first method mentioned in the book was using dead bodies. If you took a recently dead body, you could have it resurrected with a part of your soul inside of it.
The upside of this method was that there was no other requirement aside from a few materials to fix the corpse before resurrecting it with your own soul.
The downside was that it took forever to properly integrate your soul into the body since it used to host another one. Also, it needed the real body to control it at all times, otherwise, it would be like a mindless puppet.
The second way mentioned was to grow another body using a sample of the real body to create an entirely new body. This new body would grow a soul and mind of its own with memories from the real body.
The upside of this method was, the clone had its own mind and had free thought. The growing process could be accelerated if needed, and the clone would be ready in just a few weeks. The real body also didn't need to provide part of its soul to cultivate a new body.
The downside of this method was that the clone could not be controlled by the real body at all. Also, the clone did not have any unique bodily constitutions or spiritual roots. Meaning, the body was born a mortal.
There were possibly other ways out there, but the book only mentioned the two. "So, I could make a body of my own? I wonder how that would work." He wondered.
After he finished learning the book, he kept it inside and decided to immerse himself into the other knowledge he had gathered the last few days. Some regarding cultivation, some regarding talismans, some regarding formations, some regarding artifact creation, and most of all regarding alchemy.
He had managed to find alchemy books that recorded stuff he hadn't read even in Hong Wu Sect. "So the explosive pills that Huo Tu used most likely came from Spring Song sect, huh. And the talismans from Little Dawn sect?" he wondered.
"Oh yes, this is interesting. Making specific pills catering to specific requirements. Finding out new recipes on your own? Can I even do that this early?"
At this point, he knew about a couple of hundreds of recipes and needed to understand the reason behind why they did what they did. "I should start focusing on the elemental aspects of the pills more," he thought.
He kept remembering more and more of what he read. "Hmm… so Meridian Tempering helps make the meridians stronger and carry more Qi around. Is it different from the tempering I have to sit through during body cultivation? Now that I think about it, I've never seen what cultivation really looks like. I keep falling asleep as soon as I use it."
He started wondering how different normal cultivation was from his body cultivation.
"Since it says Mind Tempering helps increase your mental strength, I wonder if it will have any impact on my spiritual sea." After thinking about it for a bit more, he decided to eat some more cores.
He found himself in the familiar landscape of his spiritual sea, fighting against a snake monster. "Urghh… I hate not having my sword with me." He started throwing punches and palms of golden and yellow color.
Within a few minutes, the snake was dead. From a small shadow at the surface of the lake, a yellow aura was released that devoured both the snake monster and Alex.
'Hmm… should I breakthrough right now?' he wondered. "I should wait until after today's lesson at least," He thought.
He decided to go check his progress in the training hall. After about half an hour, he had gotten all the results he needed to know. His physical attacks were doing damage as much as 3 realms higher than his normal attack. Introducing Qi to those physical attacks increased the damage by a small amount depending on the grade of the technique.
At the moment he had only 2 physical attacking techniques. First was the Smiting blade which dealt the same damage as normal attacks, but had a more penetrating force behind it. While the second attack, the 1st strike of the Elusive Heavenly sword dealt 4 realms higher than his current realm.
The Palm of the Sun and Iron Fist punch did the same amount of damage even though they weren't reliant on the physical body. He could make sense of why the Palm of the sun was so strong. But Iron Fist punch was still a mystery to him.
The Palm of the Sun used Yang energy, which his body and Qi provided plenty. However, he didn't have anything that increased the power of the Iron fist punch other than the mystery blood essence that entered his body.
The other attacks increased a little in damage compared to normal cultivators due to his thick Yang Qi and a body that went through Mortal Cleansing. Still, they weren't as substantial as the other techniques.
"I got strong so quick that I don't even know exactly how strong I am. Now that I think about it, have I even tried flying in while? I should go do some tests in the forest before I log out for dinner."
"You might want to go on a small walk as well, won't you Pearl," he said as he looked at his left arm. Thinking that he got out of the Training hall after paying the fee and walked towards the southern forest on the other side of the sect crater.
