Chapter 3929: Return to Grind

Alex assumed the reason why the Staff God had decided to join the tournament had likely been for her to test the limits of her body cultivation. She needed to test it against other people with a similar understanding as well, so she had taken that route.

That led him to the question of how she had gained such body cultivation in the first place.

Body cultivation wasn’t such an easy thing that one could just gain by doing nothing. One had to actively destroy their body and then mend it quickly to slowly improve their body’s physical strength. And the process was not easy to come by.

Without the sap or the fruit from the Tree of Life, one had to find materials that could harm them to begin with. That got difficult the more they cultivated since the effectiveness of those materials continued to drop. Not only that, most of those materials needed some form of energy to be used to deal the damage, whether that energy came from someone standing right next to the cultivator or from a formation run by spirit stones.

That led one to require something more.

Over time, the amount of resources a Body Cultivator used ended up being much higher than that of a regular cultivator in many ways. Not to mention, it also took much longer without any special physiques, as talent was not applicable to body cultivation.

As such, it simply wasn’t worth it in most cases to cultivate the body after a certain point. That was why it was so difficult to find cultivators in the Divine realm with body cultivation, as the ones who did were few and far between.

The difficulty of it all was what made Alex question how the Staff God had cultivated in the first place.

However, since speculation alone wouldn’t answer his question in any way, he decided not to think about it for too long and left the arena. As the three of them walked out of the arena, Sunflare appeared from somewhere else as well, accompanying them.

Blazelight was still close by, keeping an eye on them, but at this point, Alex didn’t even bother looking toward her. He would deal with her during the duel in some other way he would think about at that time.

"Is there something else on the agenda, or are we returning now?" Long Huan asked.

"I was going to see if I could buy some cultivation resources," Alex said. "I need some to last me for some time."

"Oh, if I remember correctly, the city center is that way near the lakebed. Let’s go see what they have," Long Huan said.

Alex nodded, and the four of them went over.

The group visited a few different stores, searching for any resources he could find. In situations where he couldn’t find the right type of resources, he chose to buy some ingredients to make pills he could use for Qi instead. He was done eating beast cores.

Buying these ingredients needed a much more technical mind that understood what could be used and how, so he hadn’t been able to get Hannah to do that back when she had done this for him. Now that he could leave the palace, he was going to buy exactly what he wanted to.

There were still not enough resources for everything. He even visited a few other cities on the way back, but there were simply not enough resources anywhere at all, and they wouldn’t be restocked for another decade or so at most.

However, while every store claimed that things would return to normal in just a decade’s time, it would be long since over for Alex, so he just had to make do with what he had.

’All of this, including the pills, should give me about 40 years of time to cultivate. That should be about 3 years in total,’ Alex thought.

That meant, for the remaining 10 years, he had to somehow learn a Dao Sword, try and form his Spirits, learn a few more Daos, and hopefully cultivate enough to reach the Immortal Spirit realm.

With that decided, Alex and the rest returned to the palace.

Graham was more than happy to spread the news of his son’s victory over his own performance. Long Huan was thankfully present to brag about the achievements that Graham had made. When everyone heard that he had only lost in the finals to a God in the Divine Domain realm, that too in a very close match, almost all of them were surprised.

"Her physical strength was obviously much weaker than her cultivation base. She was weaker than me, enough so that the gap mattered. But she was more skilled at fighting than I was," Graham said with a sigh. "I have so much more to learn."

"Don’t worry, Uncle. You are still young," Hannah said. "These Gods are all close to hundreds of thousands of years old. Did you know the last time a new God was made was 40 thousand years ago? Most were before that, including this Staff God. If you had as much time as them, you would be great too."

That did more for Graham’s self-esteem in that moment than anything else had. While the Staff God did look younger than him, she was older. Much, much older.

Being a cultivator, age tended to get muddled due to how incredibly young everyone looked in most instances, making it hard to discern whether someone was talented or simply had trained for a long, long time. Understanding the difference was incredibly important in many cases.

Alex spent some time with his family before explaining what he was planning on doing. Since the duel was in 13 years, he planned on getting back to everything more seriously, so during that time, they could cultivate in his Soul Space as well to take as much advantage of it as they could.

Everyone, except for Hannah and Ronron, accepted the offer. Hannah, because her cultivating would be far too big a burden. And Ronron, because she needed to be out here.

Once that was settled, Alex entered closed cultivation and began.