757 The Real Hell

As Alex tumbled through the air, his body got more and more sluggish as he failed to fly and finally ended up crashing onto the ground.

The ground crumbled as Alex found himself deep underneath it.

It turned out that the ground was actually fully ice.

Even then, Alex felt pain all over his body. Not only that, he felt the cold as well.

Without hesitation, Alex pushed out as much yang as he could from his body to protect himself while he tried to climb out of the ice.

There was barely any Qi for him to use so he had to claw his way out of the ice.

When Alex finally managed to drag himself out of the ice, he realized what a horrible thing he had just done.

The ice had isolated him from the coldness that was up there, but now, he was open to the elements and was fully bombarded with the coldness.

Alex once again tried to use his Qi, but it barely worked. He barely managed to even take out a healing pill for himself.

'So cold,' Alex thought as he shivered vigorously. He looked back up to the cliff top only to see a horrified Jaguar.

"I need to climb back up," he thought to himself but he wasn't sure if he could. The cold was way too much for him.

Alex once again reached into his storage ring and difficultly pulled out some pills, talismans, and formation plates.

Immediately, he activated all of them. The formation plate landed on the ice and created a barrier. The talisman fell in front of Alex and started generating heat, and the pill also heated his body from the inside.

Alex felt a sense of relief as his body was heated. However, in just a few seconds, it all came to a stop.

"What?" Alex was shocked by the sudden cold that followed the lack of heat. He quickly checked the items and realized that they were all exhausted.

"No way!" he thought. He had barely used it for a few seconds and it was done. Only the pill that was inside his body lasted a normal amount. Unfortunately, that little heat couldn't stop him.

Alex continuously spread out his yang, but it wasn't helping much against the cold. At the same time, he spread his spiritual sense but it barely went past a dozen or so meters.

"What the hell? Not only my cultivation base is suppressed, but even my spiritual sense. This is starting to feel a lot like the Forbidden Fields," he thought.

He looked back up at the cliff and shouted, "Senior! What do I do?"

The jaguar didn't know what to answer. He was simply way too surprised that Alex had even managed to survive in a place that would likely cause trouble for even Immortals.

It was hard for him as a Saint Realm to stand in the vicinity. He couldn't imagine how a True Realm cultivator could survive at the heart of hell.

"Can you see a way to climb back up?" he shouted back at Alex.

Alex looked around and noticed nothing but cliffs. "No!" he shouted. "Let me try something."

Alex couldn't fly, so he decided to climb the cliff with his bare hands. He went up to the cliff wall and grabbed onto a piece of rock.

Immediately, he felt pain shoot through his palm and he had to let go of it. "Argh!" Alex cried as he looked at his palm and saw deep red marks as if he was burned.

'Dammit! Ice burns,' he thought. If he tried to climb this cliff without any support, by the time he was halfway done, he would lose his fingers to frostbite.

He would be willing to let that happen if that helped him reach the top, but it didn't, so he was forced to stay away from it.

"I can't climb this. It's too cold," Alex shouted back.

Then, he sat down on the ice and started cultivating. That was one way to improve his healing, and it was also a chance to see if he could produce more Yang to protect himself.

Alex barely finished a full circulation of his technique after nearly 2 minutes. The Qi in his body had slowed down to a half and it was getting hard to cultivate.

The Jaguar kept thinking of ways to get Alex out, but nothing worked.

The place down there was so cold that no matter what he tried to do, the cold would destroy it.

"Dear Lord, how am I going to answer them if I let this kid die," he worried.

Alex felt a bit better as he cultivated, but it was still quite cold. As he waited for ideas to get out of this place, he started thinking of something.

'This is definitely like the Forbidden Fields. Stagnant Qi, no spiritual sense. I'm half-surprised I can even cultivate at all,' he thought.

His mind slowly drifted to the scene of the dying tree that he promised to take care of the seed. The 3 yellow leaves were full of yang.

The object is full of Yang that he grabbed and subsequently ate.

A Treasure.

'There's a treasure here,' Alex realized as his eyes opened. 'A treasure that far surpasses what is normal.'

Alex stopped his cultivation technique for a moment and switched to the Winter Moon cultivation technique.

Not even a second later, a vast amount of Yin entered his body and started getting rid of the Yang. Alex instantly stopped, but his mind never did.

'This valley really is full of Yin,' he thought. 'No wonder there are so many Yin treasures in the surrounding. Just what sort of treasure could cause create this much Yin?'

Alex started getting excited and stood back up. He stopped cultivating a new hope that appeared in his heart.

When Ma Rong had problems with her Yin Constitution, she had gone to the Forbidden Fields to take care of it.

Which meant, if he stayed around here, he could likely have his constitution fixed as well. He wanted to cultivate the Yin the speed it up, but that was most likely a bad idea considering he would freeze to death before he could fix himself.

"Maybe I should get closer to the treasure and stick around," he thought. The valley wasn't big, maybe a couple of kilometers wide at best, so Alex was more than sure he would be able to get close to this treasure.

"Senior, I will look for other ways to get out of this place," Alex shouted and walked away from the cliff side.

Unlike with the Yang tree, Alex had no idea or feeling that led him towards a path, so he was forced to walk around the place in the freezing atmosphere.

Alex forced out as much Yang in his body as he could, which surprisingly increased even more.

It was as if all this time, his body hadn't even been trying to create yang, and only did so now because Alex needed to.

Even then, somehow the cold was getting to him. Alex shivered his way through the entire valley in search of the treasure.

After going around for hours searching with just his eyes as his senses refused to work much, Alex still didn't find anything.

Night fell soon enough, but Alex kept searching. It didn't really matter much for a cultivator if it was night or day, so he wasn't really worried.

Unfortunately for him, it mattered to his surrounding. Without the day full of the Sun's yang, the Yin in the air grew ferocious and soon  Alex started feeling colder than ever.

If this continued on, Alex would freeze to death. He tried to bring out some pills to eat, but they too didn't help much at all.

'I need heat,' he thought as he shivered in the cold, but where in this frigid hell could he even find any heat?

'No,' he thought. 'Every object has heat. Even cold ones.'

Suddenly, his authority over the surrounding grew and the world moved to follow his command. The cold air around him grew colder as Alex drew heat from it.

He felt a warmth that he hadn't felt in over hours and was more than happy. However, the heat didn't last long as the colder the air got, the more difficult it became to bring out heat from it.

As such, Alex was forced to move away from this place where the air was particularly chilly than the rest.

As he moved, he started using his Dao of Heat Conduction to fight against nature to more heat from the cold surrounding to his hot body.

Alex was more than glad that he learned this Dao as he wouldn't have survived today without it.

Alex couldn't stay in one place to gather heat, so he kept moving around until he reached a location where there was barely any heat to pull from.

'Did I walk around in a circle?' he thought for a moment but he saw something that surprised him a lot.

In front of him, in what looked like a really small puddle was some liquid. He got closer and realized it was water.

"What?" Alex thought in surprise. "How the hell is there liquid water here?"

However, upon close inspection, Alex realized that it wasn't any normal water. He started feeling the cold yin aura pierce through his yang aura and Alex soon realized what he was looking at.

'A puddle of yin water?!' Alex thought in surprise.

A single drop of this water had helped him revert many months' worth of yang. He could only imagine what a puddle of it could do for him.