Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

"Oh right," Alex said and quickly brought out the pink pills. 

"Wait, don't we need to bring them out somewhere else? What if the pill turns out to be something like a poison that travels through the air or is contagious?" Alex asked.

"Don't worry. There is a formation carved inside each of these cages that will activate the moment they sense something enters these swine," Zhou Mei replied. 

"Ah, I see," Alex said as he sent his spiritual sense behind the pill swine in the cage. There was in fact a formation etched on the metal behind the swine. 

Alex looked at the formation carefully and realized that it was a True rank formation based on the number of strokes in it. Unfortunately, he couldn't really understand what base formations the True rank formation had in it. 

It was not just the one as well. There were multiple formations etched on either wall of the swine as well. Alex couldn't help but wonder what each of the ingredients would be used for. 

"Alright, before we feed it the pill, do you have any idea or expectations based on what it would do?" Zhou Mei asked. 

"Uhh… sorry. I don't know what the ingredients I used to do at all. I was planning on asking Fanfan for help since she knows so much about the ingredients. Alas, I just hoped you would know it as well. I promise I will immediately go learn about the ingredients once I finish with this," Alex said with a dumb smile on his face. 

He knew he was skipping many steps in terms of making pills, all because he had spiritual sense. But he also wanted to take the normal route sometimes so he experience what the normal alchemists experienced and hoped it would help him somehow. 

"Uh… I'm not that great at knowing about ingredients either," Zhou Mei said. 

"Oh, don't worry about that. I used the most basic of ingredients that any alchemist would know about. I am just skipping steps, which is why I don't know about them," Alex said and immediately started rummaging through his storage bag. 

He found the talisman and handed it to her. "Here, this is the recipe," he said. 

"What?! Why are you handing your recipe to me?" she suddenly shouted out loud. 

"Huh? What's wrong with that?" Alex asked. 

"You— You— Don't you know that Alchemists don't easily spread around their recipes. You can earn so much money if you end up making a pill that does something no other pill has done before," Zhou Mei said. 

"Oh right, I did read about that, but the pill I have right now is honestly made up of very low-grade materials. So, I'm not sure it can even do anything well," Alex said. 

"Besides, you are helping me with the testing, so letting you see the recipe is the least I can do," Alex said. This made Zhou Mei appreciate his honesty a little. 

"Also, this variation of the recipe can only go up to 36% at best. I still need to fix the composition and structure of the pill," Alex said. 

"Huh?" Zhou Mei asked with a confused face. "What's composition and structure?" she asked. 

Alex made a weird face as he looked towards her. "Don't you know?" he asked. 

Zhou Mei tried to think for a while and said, "I do believe I have heard my masters mention it once in a while, but I don't think they know what it means either."

Alex's face turned serious for a second. He was reminded of the Spicy_Gourd who messaged him to ask how he even knew about it. 'Is this really that bizarre of a concept?" he thought. 

He decided to quickly explain what it was to Zhou Mei whose eyes widened to the point where it nearly fell out of her face. 

"Th-There is such a thing like that in Alchemy? How come we never found out about that?" she asked in utter disbelief. 

"I'm more surprised you didn't know. You should have noticed by now that moving the ingredients different from how it's mentioned in the recipe always changes the harmony of the pill for the worst," Alex said. 

"Y-yeah, I have noticed that… but I just assumed it was just something that was obvious like how the formations just exist without anyone making them," she said. 

'Just exist…' Alex repeated what she said in his head. He thought he was going somewhere with this, but soon realized he didn't understand it enough. 

"Anyway, composition and structure help with the amount of harmony a pill can attain. The only problem is I can't understand what does what for the life of me," Alex said. 

"Let's not focus on that right now though. I still need your help with the pill," he said as put the recipe on her hand. 

"Ah, right. Let me see.." She said and started focusing on the pill recipe. 

"Hmm… so you start with Black Vine Water I see. That contains the Water element if I remember correctly. Then you add a red leaf of a mulberry tree… hmm… the red leaf, so… Wood element?" she questioned herself. 

"Water and Wood… I see your movement with the leaf is quite fast so the Water can only empower the newly released Wood, instead of the Wood weakening the water," Zhou Mei started figuring out the information just from reading the recipe. 

Alex was quite surprised and honestly amazed by how good she was. He couldn't imagine how much labor it was required to learn all of that without using a spiritual sense like he did to witness it firsthand. 

She had to go off of others' words to understand what everything did, then try on her own once more to make sure it was correct. 

Not only her, the entirety of the alchemists in the crimson empire, or probably all 4 continents had to go through this labor. They needed years of practice to understand it all. 

He sighed as he once again remembered how lucky he was.

Around the fourth ingredient, Zhou Mei started slowing down. There were just so many ways the energy release could go that she didn't know which one took place for the next one, and then the one after that. 

By the 6th ingredient, she had already given up on understanding what the result of the recipe would be. 

"Yeah, I can't really tell what goes on after that," she said with a sigh. 

"It's alright," Alex said. "I know what happens." He went on to explain every little change in the elemental constitution that is resulted from each ingredient he added. 

He had made the pills just too many to not know what would happen by heart by now. Zhou Mei was quite impressed with how casually Alex was explaining everything. 

"You seem to know quite a lot about it," she said with a smile.

"I did make it myself after all. The pill took so many iterations to make that it would be weirder if I didn't know it," Alex said. 

"Ah, of course." 

"Right, now we need to find out what the main ingredient of the pill is," Zhou Mei said. 

"Mist Essence grass and Tail Hair from a Mudhorse are always supporting ingredients so we can let it go. Black Vine Water… can't be it either. Fire Rat's bones are Fire aligned ingredients, while the resulting energy is Wood, so that can't be it either," Zhou Mei read through the list of ingredients once again. 

"Twelve eyes of the Twelve Eyed Spiders were a possibility too, but I don't think that's it given it's a neutral item. Red Snake fang… that's Metal energy. So not that either." 

"So, it's either between the Red leaf from a Mulberry tree, or the pit of a Highberry. Both of them are Wood aligned, so either could be it honestly. It's hard to tell," she said. 

"Is it possible for the pill to be poisonous?" Alex asked. 

"Hmm… I don't think so. The poison pills usually have Water or Fire energy as the final energy of the pill, so it's unlikely that the pill with wood energy could turn out to be a poison," Zhou Mei said. 

"Then… can we just feed the swine and see what happens," Alex asked. 

"I don't think we have any other choice. Wood energy usually affects the physical body, so we should keep an eye on the physical feature of the swine amongst other things," Zhou Mei said. 

Alex nodded and took out a middle-of-the-pack pill in terms of Harmony before putting it in front of the swine. The moment the pill dropped to the floor of the pill swine's cage, it immediately ate it up. 

Suddenly, lights shined from all around the cage as the formations activated. They had sensed that the pill swine had in fact eaten a pill. The formations weren't very advanced, but they did show the temperature, heart rate, and other information about the swine. 

Alex looked at the numbers that came up. Aside from a few changes that took place here and there, Alex couldn't really see any concrete difference as time went on. 

The pill wasn't actually doing anything to the pig internally. Alex sighed in relief as he realized the pill wasn't doing anything bad either. 

He then tried to look at the uncanny face of the pig to see if there were any changes, then he moved to the shoulders and the other parts of the body. 

"There! Look," Zhou Mei shouted 

Alex followed her fingers and his vision was directed towards the pig's feet. More accurately, it's hooves. As Alex watched, the front hooves of the pig got longer and longer and only stopped after it was twice as long. 

"So… my pill makes its hooves longer?" Alex asked. 

"Seems so…" Zhou Mei trailed off as she checked the pig's vitality once more. "Okay, it seems all is fine with the pig," she said as she did something on the cage. 

As Alex watched, yellow lighting appeared on the interior of the cage. "What's that for?" Alex asked. 

"Oh, it's to tell the elders and other disciples working here that we've just fed this swine a pill. Green light for nothing changed, Yellow for some outer change, Orange for some inner change, and Red for dead," she explained. 

"So, now the elders can come back and see that only the outer physical aspect of the swine changed and can either fix it themselves or leave it to fix itself in a few days," Zhou Mei said and got up to leave. 

"Wait, that's it?" Alex asked. 

"Yeah, we got everything we came here to find," Zhou Mei said. 

"Um… what about the other aspects of the pill? Like how long it lasts, or how strong the nails are?" Alex asked. He didn't want to leave without learning it.

"Oh, that. We already found that the pill only changes the swine physically and that it wasn't dangerous at all. So, you can now test it on yourself." 

"Eat 2 different harmony pills at least a day apart and see how much it affects the changes in the pills. Check the duration of the effect, check the strength of the nail, and even check if the pill works on just humans or beasts as well."

"Finally, once you've realized that the pill is good enough to be wanted by the other people, you can sell it in auctions. Or just ditch that and start making a new one if that doesn't work," Zhou Mei said with a chuckle. 

"Ah," Alex felt like he had a revelation about something that was always there. "Right, now that I know what it is, I can test this out on myself. Thank you for the help." 

Zhou Mei simply shook her arm saying thank you wasn't necessary. 

They both returned back to the Core mountain where Alex spent his time until it was dark and went back to his house to test the pill on himself.