1957 Perfect

Alex searched for a few specific ingredients but found none. He specifically searched for the White Canvas Daisy, but there was no listing of it. Thankfully, he did learn that the ingredient was, in fact, real, and not something that was named wrong.

The staff members had heard of it.

Unfortunately, it was also very, very rare, it appeared. He would have to go to auctions and other places to find them.

Alex continued going through the ingredients in the shop and came upon a section labeled 'Perfect Ingredients'.

"Perfect?" he thought and walked towards them. From far away, he could see that they were regular ingredients that were being sold all around. They were priced quite high, but then they were also called perfect.

He wanted to check the talisman on the bench before him to see what that meant. However, when he came close enough, he heard a girl speak behind him.

"Dear customer, your pills have been analyzed. If you'll come with me."

"Oh!" Alex turned around. He looked back at the perfect ingredients just once and then turned back around to follow the girl.

The girl took him back to the woman with the cyan robes and hair in a bun. She was ready with a talisman and all of his pills.

"We have managed to analyze all of the pills, and we can buy them all for a total of 4430 Spirit stones," she said, handing over the talisman to Alex.

Alex took the talisman and looked at it, seeing a detailed list of all the pills he was going to sell and all the prices alongside it. The pills were not of the best quality, so the most he got for any was 150 Spirit stones.

With an average of around 100 spirit stones per pill, it was a good amount he managed to earn. After all, he was only selling the ones he didn't need.

"I'll take this," he said. There was no point in bargaining. "Oh, and I should've asked earlier. Do you guys buy poisons by any chance? I didn't see anywhere in the shop, so I wasn't sure."

"Poison?" the woman asked with furrowed brows. "We will buy it if it is an ingredient, but we don't buy poison itself. As you may have seen, we don't sell pills that can be used to harm others."

"I see," Alex said. He did have a few ingredients, but he had no plan of selling those. Thinking about ingredients got him thinking about the perfect ingredients again.

"Oh yeah, I wanted to ask about those too." He pointed in the direction of the ingredients. "Why are they different? What makes them perfect? Are those just high-grade ingredients?"

"In a way, yes," the woman said. "They are high-grade ingredients. But they are at a level where they can't be any better. Those are the best you can find."

Alex was a little surprised. "What makes you so sure that it can't be any better?" he asked.

The woman chuckled a bit. "We know because we make them. We use techniques to improve the ingredients to become as best as they can, to become perfect. They hold the most energy."

Alex's eyes slowly turned wide, unable to believe that such a thing was being done here.

'They have the Supreme Elemental Accord too? Was that not something special that only people with all seven spiritual roots can use?' Alex thought. His shock was apparent for the woman to see but she showed no reaction to it.

Such looks of shock were an everyday thing for her now.

"You may look through them and see if you wish to buy some," the woman said. "Or if you have some ingredients you wish to improve, we can do it for you too for a price."

Alex didn't pay attention to her words as a lot of things went through his head. The main thing he wanted to learn for now was if they were truly using Supreme Elemental Accord or if it was some other technique.

"Is this technique for sale?" he asked. "If it is good, I wouldn't mind buying it."

"Oh, I'm sorry. It is not for sale," the woman said. "The knowledge of our formations are secret that we do not let anyone else know."

Alex's face changed imperceptibly. 'Formation?' he thought. So it was not a technique after all? Still, he wanted to learn more about it.

"Do you know where I can get some more information about it?" he asked.

"Only our store uses these formations, so you won't be able to find them anywhere else," she said.

"Nowhere?" Alex asked with a look of incredulity. "Just your one shop on the edge of the continent owns this formation? I can't find it anywhere else in the world?"

The woman hid her laughter with her hand. "The Silkstone Alchemy store can be found throughout all three continents. And throughout all the continents, we use our formation."

"Oh…" Alex said. "So I can't learn about those formations anywhere, huh?"

"I'm afraid not," she said. "These formations were purchased at a very high price from the Medicine world, and so our store is secretive about how it works."

"I can understand that," Alex said. He was also surprised to hear about a place called the Medicine World. That was the first he had heard that name.

He wondered what about it made it have that sort of name. Were there worlds called the Poison World or Formation World?

"Do you wish to use our formations?" the woman asked him again.

"No, I'm alright," Alex said. "Would you mind bringing me my spirit stones?"

"Of course," the woman said and took him to a counter where she quickly completed the transaction and gave him his spirit stones along with a talisman that detailed the trade.

He had a few of those now that he had bought a pill and a few ingredients.

Alex thanked the woman and went to check on the recipes, but the very sight of the price made him think again.

Even the cheapest of the recipes were in the upper 3 digits, and those were the generic ones that Alex already had. The good ones were in the upper 4 digits and some even reached close to a hundred thousand Spirit stones.

There was no way that Alex could afford those recipes with the amount of money he had right now. Even if he did, he wouldn't buy those.

The pills made from those recipes cost just a fraction of the recipe's price, so it was always a better financial decision to buy the pill and not the recipe. After all, he could just reverse-

engineer the recipe from the pill.

'I really need to get started on learning that,' he thought. There were a lot of things he needed to get started on.

He spent not a minute longer in the Alchemy store and began finding his way to other stores in the city. He wanted to go to a library or an information store, but he needed to sell the things he had.

So, he made his way to those stores first, starting with a Formation store.