Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Alex needed to wait for Pearl's return with a confirmation before he went back to the Central Continent. So he spent his waiting time cultivating.

He cultivated his Qi and his body. There wasn't much he could do to improve his Spiritual energy or his Blood aura, so he ignored those. And since he had only just broken through to the Saint Transformation 2nd realm, there wasn't much he could do to cultivate his Qi either.

So, Alex focused on cultivating his body instead.

He cultivated the Undying God's physique and the Demon Eyes while also cultivating his body.

Alex wasn't aware how long he had before the Demon Eyes reached the next stage, but he was certain his Undying God's Body was reaching the 3rd stage in the near future.

As for body cultivation itself, Alex didn't put up any excuses and cultivated it as much as he could.

With the Mountain Crushing artifact and the Immortal Spirit stones he had gained from Pearl's father, Alex could easily use the artifact to train for a long time.

Alex's body got stronger day by day, each day he trained in the artifact.

As he trained in the artifact every day, a few curious thoughts struck him.

First, because the artifact ran using a formation at the base of it, Alex tried using it with his Qi. Regular Qi wasn't strong enough to run the formation, and because of that, Alex had never been able to run the artifact.

However, now that he had Immortal Qi, he wondered if he could use it.

Alex used his Immortal Qi to see if he could activate the formation, and to his pleasant surprise, he could.

There were some problems, of course. He didn't have nearly enough Qi at the moment to keep the formation running for more than just a few minutes.

Also, he needed to continuously keep a stream of Qi going into the formation, which was very difficult when one was tumbling inside the artifact, being lacerated on all sides by sharp rocks.

While it wasn't useful right now, once Alex had a bit more Immortal Qi, and a lot more experience inside the formation, it was sufficed to say that he wouldn't be needing any more spirit stones to cultivate.

As such, Alex decided to slow down on his body cultivation so he could allow his father to use the spirit stones they had with them.

The other thing that got Alex curious was the small glowing sign on the roof of the lid on the inside of the formation.

The lid only covered the artifact when it activated, so it wasn't until one was using it that they saw the sign inside.

Alex had caught the sign after he had learned to focus inside the artifact despite the pain. He had noticed the sign for some time now, and for the longest time, he had wondered where he had seen the sign before.

The sign was a small hexagon, with something illegible written in the center. In fact, Alex wasn't even sure if that was a text at all. Best he knew, it could only be some scribbles.

For the longest time, Alex was not sure what it was or where he had seen it before. But recently, he had come to remember where exactly he had seen it.

So, he left the palace to confirm the matter.

He arrived in the Sundering Sanctum, disappearing into the artifact. The artifact spirit greeted him once again and started making small talk.

"I can already feel my connection with you, master." The spirit had a gleeful look on him as he talked with Alex. "Just a few tries more and you can take me away."

Alex nodded. "I will return in a bit. I need to check on something."

He disappeared from the first floor of the playground he was in and arrived at the floor underneath the first floor. This was the location with the many formations that worked in tandem with each other to keep the Playground running.

Alex looked around at the many formations and noticed the small elevated section of the floor that was always there. He quickly walked up to it without messing with any of the other formations and stood before it.

At the center of the elevated floor was a small indent on which was a hexagonal wooden plate that snugly fit into it.

At the center of the hexagonal plate was the same illegible writing Alex saw from the Mountain Crushing artifact.

'Finally,' he thought. After so long, he had finally managed to recall just where it was that he had seen the shape and the writing.

The memory of the item was always there in his mind, but he had seen it in passing and thus had a hard time remembering just where he had seen it.

After returning here quite a few times in the past years now, he had come to remember a lot more about it and thus recognized the hexagonal sign.

Now that he did recognize it, Alex wondered what exactly it meant. A few ideas came to his mind, but none was apparent enough to be the truth.

The best guess Alex had at the moment was that the symbol was a sort of mark that was given to artifacts of a certain rank.

Maybe it was similar to how pills gained pill veins. This could certainly be the same, but instead of the heavens doing it, it was some cultivator who judged the quality of the artifact.

Alex didn't know if that was the case or not, but that was where he had to stop with his assumption at the moment.

Alex asked the playground's spirit once he returned, but the spirit wasn't aware of anything in regard to the room below or the hexagonal symbol.

Alex spent some time with the spirit afterward before going back to refining the playground.

His Qi now passed through the entire artifact so smoothly that it almost felt as though there was nothing there at all. There was no blockage, no resistance. Just a steady flow of Qi throughout the body of the artifact.

Just a few more days of this and the playground was bound to be his.

Alex returned to the palace and found Scarlet, whom he asked about the symbol, but it seemed Scarlet wasn't aware of such a symbol. At the very least, she helped confirm that it wasn't some sort of mark that determined the quality of the artifact.

That left Alex with no real assumption of what the mark could be. There was only one way he had to find out about it now.

Pearl returned from the Western Continent some days later. Bai Jingshen had prepared the Western Continent's teleportation formation to be used as needed, and Pearl delivered that information to Alex.

"So we are all but done."

There wasn't much left for Alex to do except maybe help Hao Ya look through the formations and check them to see if they were properly set to teleport people to the appropriate location.

"I should learn how the formation works too," Alex thought. It was about time he returned to the Central Continent once again.