Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

"Improve the Earth Spiritual root?" Alex asked, not sure if he heard her correctly.

"Yes," Liang Qiu said. "It will improve the Earth spiritual root of a person."

"Can it turn a lesser spiritual root into a superior one?" Alex asked with a curious look on his face.

Han Daiyu chuckled a little when she heard that, while Liang Qiu simply sighed.

"It seems alchemist Yu does not know about spiritual roots then. Given your capabilities, I would have expected you to know a lot about it," Liang Qiu said.

"I'm sorry?" Alex looked confused. What was he wrong about?

"Don't be," Liang Qiu said. "It's not just you. Most of the world is also unaware of this fact. We only came to learn it about a thousand years ago from the meteor shower."

"You see, people think there are two types of people. Those who have bad spiritual roots, and those who have good spiritual roots."

"But that is wrong," Liang Qiu said. "It is instead a spectrum and you fall somewhere in between."

"Of course, someone will have perfectly amazing spiritual roots. Some will have embarrassingly bad spiritual roots. But that is not all. Some had good, but not great. Some had bad, but still usable."

"Even if two people are said to have Superior or Lesser spiritual roots, they will still have some differences in which is better or worse," Liang Qiu said.

"What we have come to learn is that, even if you were to be born with a so-called Lesser spiritual roots, there are ways to improve upon it and make it better."

"Until now, this had just been a theory for us. A piece of knowledge no one could verify. But now, we've finally found a piece of the puzzle that will prove it all."

"This recipe," she said.

Alex looked stunned. "This did not come with the meteors?" he asked.

"No," Han Daiyu shook her head. "We found it 3 years ago in the demon realm when one of the major locations inside opened up. You might have heard about it."

"House of the Undying?" Alex asked with a surprised expression.

"Yes, us two came upon the same room where this recipe was kept. I got the recipe, while she got the explanation of what it was."

"It wasn't until nearly a year later when we talked about our treasures from the demon realm that we found out we had the other half of each other's treasure."

"Since that day, we've been going around searching for the ingredients. Unfortunately, while most of the ingredients were easy to find, the Corrosive Willow's bark was impossible to find."

"That was where you came in," Liang Qiu finished.

"Do you have the talisman with the information, sister Daiyu?" Alex asked.

"Yes," Han Daiyu quickly gave it to Alex which he read. Once again, it looked like a diary of some sort.

[I have translated the words written on those papers and have come up with the recipe for their pills.]

[This pill is ingenious. It will improve a person's Earth spiritual root by a decent amount, but it has to be used while they are still under the True Emperor realm.]

[Unfortunately, I am unable to create these pills that humans make.]

Alex felt shocked, even though he felt he shouldn't have. 'This is another diary of the Undying God, isn't it?' he thought.

'This man was able to translate the Human language?' Alex thought.

He reread the talisman all over again and got a little confused.

"Sister Liang, do you practice any Earth-aligned cultivation method?" he asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said. "I do have some techniques that require earth Qi, but they're not my most important skills. My most important skills all have to do with the spear after all."

"Then why all the hassle?" Alex asked. "It doesn't say that the roots will improve significantly, just by a decent amount."

"Then why are you going so far for this?" Alex asked. "I understand that this will improve your Earth roots by a bit, but for a person that doesn't use Earth-related techniques much, this doesn't seem to demand as much effort as you're putting into it."

Liang Qiu frowned for a bit and sighed. "I know. Daiyu will benefit from it a lot more than I will," she said. "However, I'm not thinking about right now. I'm thinking about the future."

"The future?" Alex gave a confused look. "Are you planning to practice Earth techniques in the future? If so then I can see it being useful a bit. But, If your spiritual root was bad from the beginning, it could be improved only so much, right?"

"No, it's not for techniques," Liang Qiu said. "It's for something else that I'm not sure Alchemist Yu can understand at the moment."

"Please say it anyway," Alex said.

"There's this thing that Saint realm experts will sometimes learn. When you're really in tune with something fundamental of this world and understand it fully, the world will—"

"Are you talking about Dao?" Alex cut her off.

Liang Qiu gave a surprised look. "You know about Dao?" she asked.

"Yes, I have… heard of it," Alex said. He nearly fumbled away that he had learned one already.

"I see," Liang Qiu said with a sigh of relief. "That will make it much easier to explain then."

"You see, one of the ways to learn a Dao is to have a better spiritual root. The better the spiritual root, the easier the understanding of the Dao comes to you," she said.

"Is that true?" Alex asked with wide eyes. He had never heard about it, but they were in a hurry when they left for the demon realm, so Shen Jing must not have had the time to explain it all.

"So spiritual roots improve your chances of learning a Dao huh? I wasn't expecting to have such a revelation for myself when I left the sect this morning," Alex chuckled to himself a little.

"Hmm… so is it difficult for people without spiritual roots of a certain element to learn Dao relating to that element?" Alex asked.

"No," Liang Qiu said with a serious face. "It is impossible for someone without a spiritual root of an element to learn Dao relating to said element."

"That is why even if someone had lesser spiritual roots of all 5 elements, they are still considered to have a future so long as they persevere until they reach the Saint realm where they have more Dao to learn from instead of focusing on simply a few like most of the others do," she said.

"I see," Alex said as he thought about it all. "Thank you for explaining that all to me. I feel enlightened at the moment," he said.

Ignoring what other things the girls said afterward in courtesy, Alex began thinking about something.

'Why did I learn a law relating to fire before everything?' he wondered. 'I have Metal and Yang spiritual roots that have been tempered with the blood blessed by the god, and a fruit that may itself be a sun.'

'Instead of those two, I learned about fire,' he thought. While it was true that he was inspired by the explosion before he began comprehending his law, given how bad his fire root was, he was surprised he even succeeded.

'Wait,' Alex thought to himself. 'Is my Fire Spiritual root even bad?'

As far as Alex could remember, Fire had been one of the better elements that he could control. Flame Mastery Scripture was something that he learned pretty easily, and controlling fire was very easy as well.

'Does that mean I had a good Fire Spiritual root to begin with?' he thought. 'That's right, it could have always been good without ever being great. It was good enough.'

Alex thought that was correct and nothing else would make any sense for him with not just how easily, but also how early he learned the Dao of explosion.

'So, Yang and Metal first, followed by Fire, and finally the rest,' Alex thought when grading his spiritual roots.

'No, Yin at the end. My body is probably messing with that spiritual root already,' he thought to himself.

While deep in thought, Alex was immediately pulled out of it by the sudden stopping of the boat.

"We're here kids," Hongqi shouted from the back.

Alex stood up and walked to the front of the deck to look down below. Finally, he could see the Poison swamp with his own eyes.