984 Surviving a Lightning Strike

"Memory? A memory of who?" Godslayer asked.

Alex couldn't help but get melancholic. "My master," he said. "She taught me alchemy and treated me like her own son. If not for her, I would've been a dumb little kid who went by his days knowing nothing about cultivation. Maybe I would've even died by now."

"Did she die?" Godslayer asked.

"Yes," Alex said. "An untimely death. She died trying to protect me from someone that wanted my body to turn me into a clone."

"I see," Godslayer said. "Then it's a good name."

Alex nodded. He looked at the gray color and shook his head. "I will need to paint it to make it look better."

"What colors do you plan on using?" Godslayer asked.

"Green and Yellow," Alex said.

"Like your previous cauldron?" he asked.

"Oh… I didn't realize I was going for the same color," Alex said. "I actually intended to use Green and Yellow because they are the colors of the robes of the Hong Wu sect and the Tiger sect, the only two sects that I will ever consider myself a disciple of."

"Although I will have to do that later. I don't have any colors for now," Alex said. "Besides, I need to focus on making pills that succeed in their tribulation soon. If not, the madman might just kill me."

Alex kept everything away and took some time to rest. After he was done resting, he began preparation.

He had to pass the tribulation, yes, but before that, he needed to do something else. He needed to break through.

Alex had spent close to 15 months in this place, and while it was too quick for him to breakthrough in his heart, he needed a change in himself so that the old man wasn't suspicious when he did manage to finally make a pill that he could protect from the lightning.

After a day of preparation, he finally started his breakthrough and was done with it in just a few hours.

"That was quite easy," he thought to himself. While he hadn't strained himself and his cultivation through fighting, he had done so with alchemy and blacksmithing. The amount of effort it took to make a single sword with Starforged Tungsten in it was akin to fighting a Saint Foundation realm beast for a long time.

Alex rested for a few more hours and began making the pill once more. This time, he was prepared to protect the pill from the lightning.

He put Memory on the stove and started heating it. With how high a boiling point the Starforged Tungsten had, Alex, could pour all the heat into it without worrying.

However, it did become worrisome when he realized that he truly needed a lot of heat. "Geez, 160 Tons of metal can't really be heated that easily can it?" he thought.

Fortunately, Alex didn't have to heat up the cauldron all alone. With a wave of his hand, he could use his Dao to make the world heat it up for him.

Once the cauldron was sufficiently heated up, Alex teleported in the first ingredient and started refining it.

Since this was the first time he was making said pill, he was very afraid of what he might do wrong. However, to his surprise, everything went relatively well.

He wasn't used to the rate of change of heat on a 160-ton weighing cauldron, so he needed a little more time to completely change the temperature than previous times.

Still, it did not cause any problem at all, and Alex was successful in making two pills, out of which one reached 100%.

Then, the cloud started forming over his head again.

The old man had been away, resting since doing anything hurt his wounds. He hadn't felt this much relief in over a year, and finally, when the pain was going down, he felt the change in energy close by.

The last time this had happened, the old man had realized that Alex had learned a dao. However, this time he sensed it was different.

'Oh, it's the pill cloud,' he thought. For something that was supposed to save his life, he wasn't very enthusiastic at all.

After all, all the enthusiasm he had before had gone down the drain ever since he realized that Alex was simply too weak to be able to help him.

'He's just wasting ingredients at this point,' the old man thought. Still, there was that hint of hope, that tiny little thing that told him deep down that there was a chance.

And as such, he could not help but want to go see what happened. His mind told him to ignore what was happening and rest, but his heart told him to go because… who knew what would happen.

"Dammit!" the old man cursed and stood up. As soon as he did, anger filled his heart as the pain flared over the right side of his body. His burned meridians stung like ten thousand bolts of lightning striking at once.

His flesh burned like when he had been charred by a lightning bolt. His mind involuntarily remembered the 6th lightning bolt that fell from the sky.

He had managed to survive the first 5, but it was the 6th one that had put this wound on him.

"Ugh!" he quickly shook away any of the memories from his past. He did not want to recall the failure that cost him not just his body, but also the lives of many of his sect's elders and the sect's longevity.

He did not want to remember the lightning bolt that signaled the downfall of his sect.

The old man painfully spread his spiritual sense out of himself. The pain he had forgotten for the past 3 months was once more normal for him just as it had become for the past 8 thousand years.

The old man saw Alex prepare his Qi to block the lightning bolt and was surprised to see the new strength of his cultivation base.

"Oh, he broke through?" the old man thought. With this single change, the hope in his heart grew even more and without stopping for a single second, he moved.

Space seemed to contract on itself to the point where the old man and the door to Alex's room were merely a meter apart.

The old man then took a single step and arrived next to the door at which point the space expanded back to its original size.

To a normal eye, it would seem as if the old man had teleported, but all he had done was take a single step that would've been several steps instead.

The moment he arrived at the door, the lightning fell into the room and struck the pill that Alex was making.

The sound of the lightning bolt sent a resounding boom reverberating through the room, which only lost its loudness a few seconds later.

The old man frowned when he heard that and looked back inside. When he saw the intact cauldron, his eyes narrowed.

When he saw the intact pill, his eyes went wide.

Alex was preparing to cover the pill once again when the door burst open.

"Pull it out!" the old man said.

Alex jumped a little at the suddenness of the old man's arrival.

"Sorry?" he asked.

"Pull out the pill. Don't protect it," the old man said.

Alex hesitated for a split second before pulling the pills out of the cauldron. As soon as he did, the pill cloud in the sky dissipated as if the tribulation had ended.

Alex couldn't help but be internally thankful for the old man's arrival. He had no idea what he was supposed to do at this point and was going to protect the pill again.

However, this time around, he would have to use his true cultivation base strength to possibly protect the pill, and even then he wasn't certain if he could or not. He had yet to see the strength of the second lightning after all.

"Show me!" the old man came up to Alex in a hurry.

Alex nodded and slowly opened up his fingers to reveal the pills he had made.

He had made two pills, one of which was a plain pill that had reached 98% harmony. Normally, it would reach 99% or even 100%, but he had made a few mistakes which ended up lowering it by 2%.

However, no one cared about the pill. It was the second pill that both Alex and the old man cared about.

This pill was in every way the same as the other pill. The color, the texture, the smell, and the size, everything was the same as the one from the other pill.

However, there was one distinct feature in it that separated it from the normal pill.

Along one of the sides of the pill, there was a lightning scar on the pill, from surviving the lightning bolt from the pill cloud.

The lightning scar was bluish-black. It started on one side with a thick base that got thinner and thinner the more it went along, branching into various routes as if a lightning bolt in the sky.

There was enough space for 8 more such scars on the pill, which would be filled each time the pill survived one of the lightning bolts from the pill cloud, at which point the pill would have successfully survived the pill cloud.

Alex looked at the scar, and since the pill would always have 100% harmony, a new word came to his mind to classify the type of pill he had made.

Before he could say it out loud, the old man spoke the words.

"Pill Vein."