Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex was a little surprised by the amount of time it took to learn a Dao. Back when he learned about explosions, he had taken about 2 days to understand them. While he had some understanding of the explosion at the time, the real understanding had come from witnessing the explosive technique of the Blueflame monkey.

In addition to that, he had eaten some Enlightening Mangoes which helped him understand further, not unlike what he was going through right now.

Right now, Alex was nowhere close to learning a Dao, but thanks to the help of the scent that made him fall into a trance, he had the time and necessary mental ability to possibly understand some concepts and learn some Dao.

This made Alex think back to the time when he learned the Heat dao. That had come out of nothing as he simply thought about heat and hadn't taken a lot of time either.

Which was to say, Alex was worried that learning Dao with this system would take too much time, and it was much better to learn it on his own.

Still, it wasn't like he was simply going to say no to an opportunity.

Alex fell into another trance and his mind started naturally thinking of the many things that he had learned over the course of his life.

Alex started thinking of the different elements. Water and Wood were his worst spiritual roots, so he didn't have any chance with them.

He tried to think of the various Dao that might be related to Earth but somehow came up empty. He simply wasn't too involved with earth, to begin with.

Next was Fire, which he was plenty involved with. Being an Alchemist, Fire was one of the most essential elements you always dealt with.

However, Alex had already learned what he could about Fire from there. At least in regards to how he used it. He already had the conduction and heat dao, so there wasn't anything that jumped out to give him some information.

Next up was Metal. Despite having Supreme Metal roots, Alex had for some reason not bothered to experiment more with them. He did learn all the techniques, but nothing that could be said to be about learning metal itself.

As for Yin and Yang, they were higher elements and didn't easily give away their secrets to Alex.

He knew they represented light and darkness, life and death, hot and cold, sun and moon, day and night, active and passive. However, even knowing this there was nothing he could do to further understand them, and thus could not gain a Dao.

So, Alex stopped thinking about the normal elements and moved on to the more nontraditional elements, such as blood.

Unfortunately, he hadn't trained in the techniques from the Blood God's Manual for over 10 months, so he wasn't very knowledgeable about that.

Another nontraditional element, or rather an aura that Alex had come to know about recently was Space.

Space and Time were more things that could be manipulated to a certain extent. He had seen this with formations and scripts that did it such as the various teleportation formations, or the time-dilating and constricting formations in the White Tiger's palace and the cultivation caves and the Timeless palace in the Demon realm.

Still, he was unable to get much out of either thought as he simply wasn't proficient with them. It would take a long time before he understood either of them.

Alex's mind next moved to weapons, and as a Sword user, there was nothing else for him to think about.

Alex tried thinking about the sword, learning its Dao, but for someone who hadn't even improved his intents or Sword Qi, it was simply impossible to understand swords as they were right now.

Alex's mind went through the many things he knew other than these. He thought of talismans and formations and finally ended up on Alchemy.

Alchemy was such a vast topic that Alex didn't even know where to start thinking about it.

Did he think about it with the fire? Or the cauldron? Or the ingredients that went into it? Or did he start somehow sooner and try and think about the recipes that went into making a pill?

Or maybe he should go to the end where the pill is formed. Could he learn a Dao regarding it?

Alex let his mind think what it could while he was under the effect of the scent. His open mind could think of many things at once and at a level that simply wasn't possible without the trance he was in.

As Alex thought of the various things, his mind caught onto something that he had more idea about than anything else when it came to alchemy.

He honed in on that knowledge and started thinking of it, and potentially even expanding on it from what he understood it.

Alex was thinking about the elements again. Only, this time he was thinking of how they interacted with each other.

Empowerment, Control, Weakening, Overwhelming, and Ruination. Each element that interacted with another element showed one of the 5 effects depending on what element they were and how strong the energy itself was.

This was something Alex had learned over 14 years ago and had been using in his alchemy. During this time, he had also come to learn more about how they interacted.

He not only learned how two energy reacted, but multiple ones, and how they all came to result in a single collective element. After all, that was the essence of alchemy.

As such, when Alex started thinking of it, he once again caused the world to stir and the worldly laws to descend.

The elders, none of whom had managed to show any signs of learning another Dao were beyond shocked when Alex brought down the laws again.

The month was coming to a close, so the elders were ready to leave at any moment, but seeing the worldly laws descend made them wait.

They kept watching for a whole day before the worldly laws ascended back to the skies and Alex learned the Dao of Five Elemental Interaction.

Alex opened his eyes, slightly happy, but slightly disappointed as well. He had learned a Dao, but it was for something he already had most of the knowledge about.

While the Dao did help him in some ways as he now knew that there was nothing more for him to understand about the elemental interaction.

At least amongst the five of them. The 2 higher elements, Yang and Yin barely ever had ingredients and thus Alex didn't know much about how they interacted mostly.

He was about to think more of what he had just learned when suddenly the elders around him sent their spiritual sense up to him.

"Young man, you learned two different Daos?" the green-robed elder asked.

"What did you learn, young man?" the red-robed elder asked.

"Not even a Saint and already knows two different Daos. So talented," the sect leader of the Blue Spring sect said.

"Makes me wonder…" the ancestor of the Heaven's Frost sect said. "Young man, are you one of these so-called players?"