958 Weak
"Brother! Are you okay?" Pearl asked as he looked at Alex who lay sprawled on the ground, his hands twisted around, and bleeding from different parts of his body.
"Arghhh… I'm fine," Alex said. His body slowly healed. His wounds closed, and his wrongly bent arms retwisted themselves to their correct positions.
The broken bones took a bit longer to heal, but they got there too after a little while.
He stood back up and looked at the Blood Rhino with clear shock, surprise, and happiness on his face.
The Rhino was never this strong when it died, which meant that the power in it came from his blood. 'So my blood really had progressed quite a bit huh?' he thought.
He looked back at the wall where he was thrown and was glad that it wasn't destroyed. The saint formation used in this building was quite strong from what he could see.
He turned back towards the Rhino and smiled. "Come hit me again."
The Blood Rhino moved the moment it got the order. Alex watched the rhino approach him with an incredible speed, and something changed in him.
Blood poured out from every pore in his skin and quickly formed an armor on him. The rhino slammed into Alex, but this time around, he didn't budge even a little bit.
In fact, he didn't even feel any of the damage that was dealt to him, just a bit of pushback that he could handle.
"That's… weird," Alex thought. He had just made the rhino so his blood aura wasn't quite as well as it should be, and yet his armor had managed to block the rhino.
Either the blood armor skill was strong even when used with blood of lower quality, or the Blood beast wasn't as good as it should be.
Which was to say, his blood aura had lost strength when he used it to make the rhino.
Alex's immediate assumption was that the beast core had fought off his blood aura, which was why the resulting beast was weaker.
But, he still wanted to be sure, so he pulled out the book again and read the description regarding blood beasts. He had read it already, but he wanted to make sure.
"… strength depends on its cultivation base, or the owner's blood aura, whichever is higher. The probability of forging a blood beast goes down if the core is from a beast with a cultivation base stronger than the owner's blood aura."
"Keeps instinct, but no intelligence. Follows commands without exception. Needs around 20 liters of blood. Uhhh… Ah! there it is." Alex finally found what he was looking for.
"Efficiency of the created blood beast depends on the difference between the beast's cultivation base and the owner's aura. The greater the difference the lower the efficiency," Alex read.
"Damn, could've just written the resulting blood beast gets weaker if you use too weak or too strong beast cores. Would've been easier to remember," Alex thought and put the book aside.
He looked back at the rhino and thought to himself. "So… Saint Condensation 7th realm, enhanced by my blood aura reached somewhere in the middle of Saint Formation realm in terms of strength."
"Can that be considered a big enough gap?" Alex wondered. "It's big enough to result in lower strength from the beast I guess."
Alex still wasn't certain how weak it was, but he guessed it wasn't more than a realm or two at best.
"I guess I can ignore that for now," he thought. He moved away from that thought and started testing the Rhino.
He wanted to see if it genuinely had no intelligence, and just how much instinct it had retained.
It soon became clear that the book was correct and the beast didn't hold any intelligence at all. Unless Alex gave it orders, it would simply sit there doing nothing.
It would try to dodge attacks just based on instinct from when it was alive, but aside from that, it didn't do anything else.
He would need a different environment to test more, so he stopped the testing for the day.
The blood beast flew into the Blood God's Manual, and the book flew into his body, disappearing somewhere his senses could not follow.
After that, Alex sat down and began cultivating.
Alex had the Snake core in his storage too, the one he had killed alongside the Rhino. However, he knew he needed to improve his blood aura for a while before he could make another blood beast.
He spent the next 3 days deep in cultivation until someone came and knocked on his door.
Alex opened the door to find Ma Tianxin waiting for him.
"Senior, Master has asked for you," he said.
"Senior Huang wants to see me?" he asked. "Let us go on then."
Ma Tianxin took him back to the tower at the center of the sect, where he stood outside a door and let Alex enter.
Alex went in and saw Huang Xinyi sitting by a table. "Ah, young man. You're here," he said and called Alex to sit next to him.
Alex walked over and sat next to him. "Did you have something to say to me, senior?" he asked.
"Yes," the old man said. "You do know that a small group of us will be leaving for the Demonic forest tomorrow right?"
Alex nodded. "That is when you are going to take me along, no?" he asked.
Huang Xinyi gave an awkward smile. "I was hoping you would have changed your mind by now," he said.
"I'm afraid that will be very much impossible, sect master. Unless there is something of importance that requires my attention elsewhere, I will go to the Demonic forest," he said.
The old man sighed and brought out a small storage bag. "Here, it's what you asked," he said.
Alex took the storage bag and sent his spiritual sense into it. Instantly, Alex's eyes went wide from seeing the number of beast cores in there.
Ranging from the Saint Condensation realm, all the way to the mid realms of the Saint Foundation realm, there were nearly 3 dozen cores in there.
That was quite a lot more than he had been expecting to get here. "I hope this will help you change your mind," he said.
Alex looked at the cores with wide eyes, showing a clear look of surprise in them that would have been hard to prevent anyhow.
He counted the cores and realized that most of the beast cores belonged to beasts in the Saint Condensation realm.
While that was quite good when looking at it from the outside, if he wanted to make Blood beasts out of them, it would be a rather bad use of his blood.
He would get many results like the Rhino or worse, where his blood aura would go down in strength by a few realms.
Alex didn't want that.
"I'm afraid I will still have to insist on going to the demonic forest," Alex said. He wasn't going there for just the cores after all.
The cores were just a benefit. He was going there to train and see how he faired against the stronger beings in the real world.
"Are you sure? I will have to insist you do not go," the old man said.
"There's nothing you can say that will change my decision, sect master," Alex said.
"Fine! Be ready before the sun rises tomorrow. We need to arrive at the forest before sunrise when most beasts are inactive," the sect master said.
"I will do that," Alex said.
After that, he returned back to his room and took out the many cores to look at them.
"Should I use all of it to make blood beasts?" he wondered. He would at least use some to test out the difference in the strength of the blood beasts forged using various different cores.
Alex put the cores aside after deciding that and started gathering some blood. Any free time he had, he would now start gathering blood so that he could use it later on.
He cultivated for the rest of the day and overnight, and finally before in the dead of night, he walked out to find the elders getting ready to leave. Alex greeted the few seniors he knew and the rest he wasn't familiar with.
"Ah, you're here," the sect master said. "Let us leave then."
