Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Whisker was quite fascinated at the place he had arrived.

The aquifer was water collected in large cavernous bedrocks where the beasts settled in. The porcupine was inside one of these massive caverns, settling in like a fetus settled in its mother’s womb.

Whisker couldn’t see anything, so he could only work based on what he could sense. The water around him wasn’t clear at all. It was more of a muddy sludge as it would be this deep underground.

It was quite cold, with this region having collected Yin for the majority of the previous night. He reckoned that as the sun rose high in the sky throughout the day, the Yin throughout this region would lower by the second as well.

There were many questions that flooded his mind, the strongest one of which was what the beast was doing there exactly. Why had it come down only to stay in one of these muddy water pockets?

In the first place, where had the water come from?

Whisker had learned a lot about Hell from Alex, and one of the most important things he had been told was the fact that Alex had never seen rain at all.

The desert was scorching hot, both day and night, devoid of all clouds. It was hard to find moisture in the air, let alone rain at all. However, the people around the desert definitely drew up water from underground. There was plenty of water here for them to consume.

Whisker wondered how that could be. Where did the water come from?

Whisker left the porcupine and traveled around while remaining as hidden as he could. He searched for where the water had come from and made his way to the other region.

He found more beasts, all in a nearly asleep state, doing the exact same thing as the porcupine. There were all sorts of beasts here, from mammals to reptiles to birds. It was just incredible how much variety there was to these beasts.

And there were so many of them as well.

In just 15 minutes of roaming around, Whisker noticed hundreds of these beasts. Some remained so close that it was surprising they didn’t start fighting each other.

The more Whisker traveled, the more he realized just how large the aquifer was. He had traveled for an hour, during which point he had to stop. There was no end to the aquifer as far as he could tell.

And all the beasts had come to this exact region in order to seemingly sleep as well.

Whisker took a moment to think about the beasts, remembering what Alex had told him. Aside from locations with a lot of Sunhearts such as cities and large human colonies, the beasts could be found in all other locations of the desert.

There were easily more beasts in the desert than there were humans. And from what Alex had learned about them, all beasts went underground at the end of the night.

‘Does that mean all the other beasts come down to a location like these too?’ Whisker thought. ‘Are there large aquifers around the desert that the beasts like to go to after they’re done?’

For some reason, the similarity in the beasts’ actions made Whisker believe they did. If not aquifers, then they at least went down to a region where there would be a subtle leftover Yin such as this place.

He figured this would be how the beasts survived against the Yang imbalance during the day.

‘But why are all the beasts down in the aquifer?’ Whisker thought. If they just wanted Yin Qi, they could’ve hidden higher above. They didn’t have to come down all this way, and they did.

‘Do all beasts go down to an aquifer or not?’ he thought. As he thought that, another possibility came to his mind.

What if there were aquifers all throughout the desert?

‘Do these porous rocks cover a major region of the desert instead of being isolated to this one location?’ Whisker thought. If that was the case, then he could see how the water would flow from one place of the desert to another, making an aquifer in a region where it didn’t rain.

Whisker quickly chose to go along with his hypothesis that there were aquifers all throughout the desert. At the very least, there was multiple evidence leading to this being true.

In that case, the other major question he needed answered was why the beasts had come down to the aquifer.

As he had thought earlier, they could have stayed in regions above here. But all these beasts had stopped only after reaching the aquifer. It could be that this was a better place for them to stay, or they felt safer here.

But Whisker believed there to be a bigger reason for that. As such, he quickly found a sleeping beast and went over to it to see exactly what it was doing.

The beast he found was a giant sheep-like beast with wings. He gently landed on the sheep’s back and settled there without the beast knowing.

Once he was certain he hadn’t been sensed by the sheep, Whisker closed his eyes and used just his senses to try and see what the beast was doing exactly.

It only took but a moment for him to realize the answer.

Whisker sensed simply Qi flowing from his surroundings to the beast and slowly back out.

‘It’s cultivating?’ he thought.

Whisker was surprised.

It didn’t make sense to him why these beasts would be cultivating at all. Not only did their cultivation base not matter in the face of their overwhelming body cultivation, but they were also already at the peak of what they could reach within this realm.

Whisker would have understood if they came down to cultivate in peace every few weeks or so to gather missing Qi in their body, but it had only been half a day, and the most Qi they had even used was while coming here.

‘Then why?’ Whisker thought.

The answer couldn’t be this simple at all.

There had to be more to this.