981 Malleability

The mad immortal said a few more things before he left, but Alex couldn't focus on those words at all. His mind was occupied with the new knowledge he had just received.

"There are so many worlds out there… just like our own?" he asked. Alex knew there were multiple ones, but he had never thought there would be as many as the stars in the sky.

"Yes," Godslayer said to him. "There should be nearly 33 worlds with Immortals alone, and nearly 70 where the highest Spirit veins available are Saint rank or True ranks. Maybe even just common rank."

" The demons and humans used to control half of the lands, but after the war, the demons had to give up the majority of their land in a truce for the humans to not destroy them. Now, the demons barely control a third of it," Godslayer said.

'33 Immortal lands,' Alex thought in shock again.

"Wait, so where do you go when you ascend?" Alex asked.

"Unless you have someone that is willing to take you to some special place, this realm will send you to wherever it can," Godslayer said.

"Then you do not know where I could end up when I reach the Immortal realms right?" he asked.

"No," Godslayer said. "Also, forget about these things for now. Your question revealed no result. Don't ask him about his sect, ask him about himself. We need to find something so you don't die and by correlation, I don't die."

Alex quickly nodded. "I will get to it," he said.

After cultivating for a while, he got back to making the pills. He didn't focus on making pills any more than he focused on practicing his techniques or learning how to make better swords.

A few more months passed by with barely anything changing. The only thing of importance that Alex could think about during these times was the fact that an entire year had passed since his arrival here.

And yet, he was nowhere close to any of his goals.

He had not made many swords or a cauldron. He had not improved his cultivation base.  And he had not, purposefully, completed the pill yet.

Alex could see the old man was incredibly annoyed now whenever he failed to make a pill that survived the lightning. If he failed any more times, he couldn't be sure that the old man wouldn't just kill him right there in his anger.

Alex needed to be very careful.

He told the old man that he would feel more confident if he had his cauldron, so he requested a 3 months period where he would only focus on creating artifacts.

The old man thought for a bit and accepted. He even gave him some books on artifacts that Alex read.

The book had insights into various things that Alex didn't know about regarding artifacts, but it wasn't very useful when making something so simple as swords or cauldrons.

Alex had made a few more swords until now, spending about 100 tons of ores in between the swords, anvil, and hammer, but the one he was going to try now was perhaps his greatest endeavor to date.

He was going to refine nearly 40 tons of Ore into a sword.

To even begin the process was a chore. The amount of time it took for him to pulverize 40 tons of ore was not something that could be easily done in a single day.

Alex had to spend nearly 5 days, in between cultivating, to completely pulverize them. After mixing the broken ore in the water he was able to get rid of most of the dirt and soluble objects in the ore.

Then, Alex started smelting the remainder of the ore.

He had to do it bit by bit, so it took Alex almost 6 whole hours to completely refine the 16 tons of pure tungsten.

The sword he was going to make would have the same amount of metal as the anvil and hammer combined.

The tungsten had cooled down by the time he was done with smelting it all, so he had to send it all back to the forge, this time to simply heat it up.

Once the molten metal was out, Alex poured them on the enlarged Anvil and immediately started compounding it even before tempering it.

He wasn't doing it for no reason. Godslayer had told him to do so.

Tempering and Compounding were interchangeable in terms of when in the process they could be performed. However, tempering something that was compounded was nearly as hard as the number of times it was compounded.

Alex knew this, but he had no choice. With more metal than the anvil could hold, he had to compound it all for the metal to even be manageable.

Alex immediately started hitting the metal with his new hammer and quickly compounded it without regard to its size at the moment. He only wanted to make it manageable.

Once the metal was compounded 4 times, Alex stopped and began hitting it in a rhythmic pattern to temper it.

Compounding it 4 times meant that the sword would now be 4 times as hard to temper. However, Alex didn't lose any hope or keep any doubts in himself.

He did what he had sought to do and after what felt like a very long period of time, he successfully tempered the metal.

Godslayer was in his ear the whole time, aiding him through his task, telling him what to do.

"Compound the sword now," he said. Alex had compounded it 4 times already, but the remaining metal was still nearly 4 times as big as what a normal sword would look like.

So, he still needed to compound it. He still needed to make it smaller and thinner.

Alex struck the hot metal as hard as he could to continue pounding the metal in itself. He compounded the metal without stopping, but even as he tried, the compounding got harder and harder, until he couldn't compound it anymore.

The sword was still very large, nearly 2 and half times as large as he would want it to be, so he needed to compound it more.

But he couldn't anymore, and that was a problem.

"Dammit," he thought to himself. "I can't do it anymore."

"Keep compounding," Godslayer said.

"I can't, I don't have enough strength," Alex said.

"Then find some," Godslayer said.

Alex paused for a moment and immediately a line of blood poured out of his palm, onto the hammer and he started using the new strength to compound it.

With Saint Core 1st realm level of strength, his blood gave him a boost in power that nothing else could at the moment.

As soon as he used the blood manipulation to add strength to his hammer strikes, the compounding became easier and the 2 and a half times larger metal shrunk to about 2 times.

Then, the toughness of the metal showed once again. This time, he couldn't compound it even when he used his blood as powerfully as he could.

"Dammit," Alex thought. "I chewed more than I could swallow. I shouldn't have started with 40 tons of ore."

He complained, but he still tried. The 2 times as large blade of metal shrunk just a little more, but not much after that.

Alex tried and tried and tried, but he couldn't do it anymore. If anything, he was going to have to either make swords from this one pile of metal or use a heavy sword himself.

"Godslayer, what do I do?" Alex asked desperately.

"I can't help you in this matter. You are too weak," he said.

Alex frowned, but he couldn't fault the remark. He truly was too weak to compound it any further.

'Maybe I should stop,' he said and looked at the rectangular piece of metal. 'If only I could make them thinner.'

"Thinner…" Alex spoke softly as his mind remembered something from nearly 10 years ago.

It had been during the time he worked as the Royal family's alchemist in the Radiant City when he was training with Shen Jing.

Shen Jing had shown him something interesting at that time. He had taken his metal sword and thinned it without the sword losing its strength.

Alex was a little surprised when he remembered it. 'He was compounding it?' he thought.

He was using the property of metal to be easily deformed without breaking itself into bits. He was using the property of the metal that allowed it to be made into a sword in the first place.

Alex remembered the property, and now that he had made quite a few swords and was working with metal for quite a while, he understood it clearly too.

The metal cooled in front of him, but Alex couldn't find the strength to care.

"Kid? Kid!" Godslayer called for him after seeing Alex move away from the anvil and sit down. He was still going to call when he noticed that Alex had lost himself in the mysteries.

Even the mad immortal noticed when the sky moved and the worldly laws descended onto the separated space he had managed to create with the help of formation flags left behind for him indirectly by the Snow Immortal sect's founder.

The laws fell and settled onto Alex as he learned an entirely new dao that he had not expected to learn any time soon.

He had learned the Dao of Malleability.

Alex opened his eyes and contemplated the new understanding he had just gained. After a few minutes, he stood back up and walked over to the anvil.

With this newly learned Dao, he was sure to be able to compound the remaining metal to the desired size, which he would then turn into a sword.