Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Even the shallow end of the sea had heated up, the beach a pool of lukewarm water. Alex felt the waves hit along his shins and hated how it wasn’t cold at all.

“It’s colder further up,” Tara said, and Alex nodded.

He expected as much.

The only clothes he wore at the moment were a simple undergarment, unlike Tara, who had tight-fitting leather armor. Alex hadn’t realized that he needed to fight these beasts until then.

True beasts were supposed to be less intelligent.

Alex held the harpoon in his hand, ready to go. He looked toward Tara and saw a weird look in his eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

Tara flinched a little. “Me? Oh yeah, I’m fine,” he quickly said. “It’s… it’s just the first time I’m going back after the last time.”

“Oh, there’s a lot of expectations, huh? People must be waiting for you to bring back a large fish.”

That seemed to have been the wrong thing to say.

“You’ll do fine. You have a strong body cultivation anyway,” Alex said.

The young man looked confused, but he didn’t voice it.

Alex looked back at the sea. One moment he was looking forward to finding a beast core, and the next moment he was nervous too.

“Are you okay?” Tara asked. “You don’t have to go through this if you’re scared. It’s okay to turn around.”

Alex grimaced a little. “That’s not it,” he said. “I just… I just remembered that I don’t actually know how to swim.”

Tara’s face held no emotion other than disbelief. “You… don’t know how to swim?”

Alex gave an awkward laugh and shook his head. Truth was, he had never needed to swim. Every time he went into the ocean, he had his Qi to help him move around easily. Never did he need to actually use his body to aid him in his swims.

So, this was the first time he was actually going to swim for real.

“It should be fine, right?” Alex asked. “Yeah, it should be fine.”

Without waiting for Tara to say anything else, he ran forward and dove into the ocean.

Tara watched Alex go and realized that he was going to have to do more than just hunt today. He needed to make sure that a dumbass didn’t kill himself in the ocean.

But he didn’t doubt that Alex would be in much trouble. He believed he would be more or less fine. So, following behind him, Tara jumped in too.

Alex sank at first, trying to get the hang of how to move his body to stay afloat. After a few tries, he knew what he had to do to stay up in the water.

Tara arrived by his side. “Are you good now?” he asked.

“Yes, great!” Alex said. “Where are the fish?”

“Further up ahead. The sea god sends them to the places where we make the wish.”

Alex was a little taken aback. ‘Where the wish is made?’ he wondered. A look of surprise came upon him when he realized what that meant.

These people made their wishes on beast cores and threw them into the ocean. Fish would come to that location to feed on the beast cores, since that was the best thing any of them would ever want to eat.

‘That’s probably why they have that as a tradition,’ Alex thought. Whether knowingly or unknowingly, they had begun using the beast cores of the fish they killed to draw in other beasts, and over the course of many hundred years, it had changed to become a tradition that they now believed had something to do with a god.

Alex kept swimming and went under from time to time to see if there were any fish around. He saw a few pass by along the way, but they were quite small, the size of a regular person.

Alex wanted the big beasts, the ones that were the size of the fish that Tara had killed the other day. The one he likely wanted to kill today.

From what he remembered hearing, the further one went up the sea, the stronger the fish got, so he continued on. Tara was still further behind him at this time, so he would have to catch up on his own.

At some point, Alex ended up leaving Tara so far behind that he could not see the man at all. In fact, he was so far ahead that even the beach was more or less out of his sight.

Alex finally dove into the sea again and looked down to see what he could find. His eyes widened in glee as he saw a plethora of fish, freely swimming all around below him.

Of them, he found one that caught his eye immediately. It was a fish that was easily larger than even the one Tara had found.

Without hesitation, Alex dove down into the sea, making his way toward the fish like an arrow toward its target. The fish seemed to notice his arrival and moved toward him as well.

It opened its mouth, its sharp teeth opening up to swallow him entirely.

Alex had no fear at all. He dove straight into the fish’s mouth and stabbed it where its brain would be from inside the mouth. The wooden handle of the harpoon snapped in half at that moment, unable to bear the force of the attack.

It didn’t stab the brain at all.

Alex let go of the harpoon and instead balled his hand into a fist and punched upward. The punch was enough to break the fish’s skull and kill it right at that moment.

As the fish stopped struggling, Alex pushed open the mouth and swam out of the fish. He swam around to the back, grabbing the fish by the tail before swimming back to the surface.

Once he was at the surface, he took the fish back with him toward the beach. It would be good food for the family.

As he made his way back, he saw something in the distance.

Tara was drowning.