986 A Few Things to Try

Alex let Pearl do whatever he wanted. Pearl didn't really have anything to do in a confined room, so he cultivated all day long.

Whisker, however, was in his element. Alex gave him a cauldron and some ingredients and had him make pills.

He watched over his techniques and skills in making pills and was pleasantly happy when he saw the Whisker was very good now at making pills. He was still only making pills without around 40% harmony, but that was only because Alex was giving him the bad recipes, instead of the fixed ones.

He wanted Whisker to start from the bottom like everyone else would, and struggle the same way a normal alchemist would, something he never got to experience.

He didn't know if helping someone this early on with an easy way out with ingredients and recipes was even a good idea or not.

If it turned out that it only made Whisker more demotivated towards Alchemy, then he would certainly give better ingredients and recipes.

For now, Whisker was trying his hardest, so Alex didn't see the necessity to help him immediately.

While his two beasts were busy doing that, Alex went on to training on his own. He had a few things he had been wanting to try for quite some while now.

One of the things was that he wanted to try reaching the highest grade of pill veins, the 9 Pill veins with True rank ingredients.

However, if he called on the 9 lightning bolts while the old man was in closed cultivation and he forced him to leave only to find out that he was making True rank pills, he would certainly be madder than he already was.

He didn't want to lose his life just yet.

Other than that, Alex had something else he had been wanting to do for a very long time, and only now was he starting to find the motivation to.

And with 8 years to spare, Alex thought he had enough time to spare for it.

He wanted to make pills with everything being the same, but with one ingredient changed to something similar.

For example, he would follow the recipe of the Body Regeneration pill, but because Blood Spirit Lily was hard to acquire, he would replace it with something else that was neutral but had a blood aura in it.

Alex wanted to try similar stuff just in case he ever had to make pills where he had all ingredients but one. In those cases, he would know whether changing a single ingredient was a good idea or not.

Even if it was a good idea, and it did work, he would still have to make a pill that was somewhat as capable as the pill with the actual recipe.

If venturing down that route was a dead end, then he wanted to know about it now, rather than realize it when he was desperate. He could only imagine how unpleasant that feeling would be.

So, Alex started testing with the Body Regeneration pill and as for the ingredient that was to be exchanged in place of Blood Spirit Ginseng, he used an ingredient with its neutral energy structure as close to the Blood Spirit Ginseng as possible and then let it stay overnight in his blood.

Alex did this for a few months and came to a few conclusions.

The most important conclusion was that he did not understand how it worked. He could make it work very often, but almost always, he had no way of telling prior to making the pill whether the new pill would be better, worse, or the same.

It was simply impossible to guess it from the start. Or at least, it wasn't possible for the current Alex who didn't have much experience.

Still, after months of testing, he could now quite confidently say which ingredient would work, and which wouldn't.

He was not surprised when he found out that the clue was hidden in the ingredients themselves. Each ingredient had its unique energy composition.

All one had to do was look for a pill with a composition that was close enough to the original ingredient. As long as that was possible, he could swap the ingredients on any pill recipe without any worry of failure.

After a few months of testing this, Alex moved on to the other things he wanted to try.

He tried making new pills using the ingredients he had. The last time he had done it was when this world was still a game in the eyes of his clone that controlled him most of the time.

The memories were his, and thus he now remembered making the pills on nothing but simply at the fact that he couldn't let the energies go out of control.

He didn't know what energy the ingredients were before he began. Hell, he didn't even know what the ingredients did. He simply went along based on his tiny understanding of Alchemy at the time and couldn't help but be surprised at the fact that he came across 3 usable pills.

This time, it was a little easier than before as he didn't have to worry about making things he did not know about.

With the many knowledge about the ingredients he had, even if he didn't know what they would do together, he would have a general idea of whether it would be bad or not.

Depending on which would become the main ingredients, and which would become the side ingredients, he could cook up a pill that did a specific little thing that would be a combination or amplification of what the ingredients would do.

He would be happy if it was the latter one, as he wouldn't be very sure what the result of various ingredients combined would bring.

He could never know when two healing ingredients mixed together would suddenly become poison.

'I definitely need more information about these ingredients,' he thought. Luckily, he had such information in his head now and was only waiting to learn it before he could remember it easily too.

A few months more passed and before Alex knew it, he had been here for 2 years. In that time, he had made exactly 3 important pills.

One of those pills was a healing pill that he had made from entirely new ingredients that he had never interacted with but had found in the Beast realm.

Of the other two pills, one was supposed to be a poisonous pill, meant to kill saints that ate it. Alex couldn't tell how potent it was however as his body would destroy the poison the moment he digested it.

The last pill was one that numbed your mind, making you more susceptible to mental influence.

Alex had wondered if there was even merit to this pill with a positive aspect to it. The only thing he could think of was giving the pill to some enemy and having them eat it so you could control their mind.

However, when he thought about it, he realized that it could be used positively as well. One could eat the pill before trying to learn a dao on their own to get an effect that wasn't far off from what the Soul Elucidating tulips gave a person.

"I suppose it depends on how the pill is made," he thought in the end before proceeding with making the pill.

After being done with switching ingredients in recipes to straight up creating new recipes, Alex started feeling a lack of motivation to work on anything else.

In his free time, the reality of his situation would come upon him and he couldn't help but think about how worried his aunt might be. His mother wasn't in a different scenario either.

She had lost her son for over 7 years now. He wondered if she thought he was dead. He wouldn't be surprised if she did, but he didn't believe so.

His mother wasn't so feeble-minded to think her son wouldn't return to her soon enough.

He wanted to return back to them right now, but he was being kept hostage by the madman. That only made him angrier at the moment.

If only he wasn't cursed, he could have tried his all to leave, but he couldn't even do that.

"I definitely need to find some way to come out of this situation for sure."