Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Whisker startled at the odor deep underground. The smell was quite subtle, but it was certainly that of meat, wasn’t it?

‘Why am I smelling meat in a place so full of Yin?’ Whisker thought. The facts didn’t correlate with each other, causing a dissonance in his understanding of what was going on.

Whisker was incredibly confused.

He stayed there for a while, wondering if the beasts had permeated their own scent onto the sludge, which had then traveled downward, but he didn’t feel that was the case.

Did he even smell the scent of meat from the beasts in the first place?

Whisker tried to go even further below, but the chill of Yin aura there was far too much for him. Sadly, he had to leave that place as night would soon fall and all beasts would make their way back up to the surface.

Whisker swam up through the sludge, making his way to the layer of sludge where the overall energy was at its lowest, with the yang barely filling the region.

There was a band of region within this place where neither the Yin nor the Yang was too heavy for any of the beasts to live in, and that was the perfect place for life to thrive.

‘Why the meat smell?’ Whisker continued to wonder as he went back up, his curiosity causing him to give more attention to everything else in his surroundings.

As his first thought had been that the scent had come from the beasts up above, he went close to the beasts to see if they permeated that smell.

To his surprise, they did have that smell, albeit not that strong at all. It was subtle enough that he had completely ignored it as natural in the presence of these beasts.

Now that he smelled it, it was clear that it was there.

However, what was also clear was that the scent down below did not come from the beasts at all. In fact, Whisker failed to find any evidence that the smell surrounding the beasts had come from them either.

It was a bizarre phenomenon that he couldn’t so easily explain.

As the beasts started shuffling around, Whisker figured out that it was time for him to leave as well. If he stayed here, the stronger beasts would come back down, which would be quite dangerous.

Not just that, this region would be filled with Yin too. While he wanted to check that, he needed to give himself a break and take some time to go through what he had learned today.

Whisker grabbed onto the tail feathers of a large peacock-like bird and rode it as the beast made its way back up top. The technique these beasts instinctively used to travel through the ground to the top was one that shed away any object that didn’t belong to them.

Whisker had to grab hard so as to not lose his grip on the tail feathers.

The peacock went as far up as it could, stopping mere moments before it surfaced. It hid there in order to find prey and hopefully eat it.

Whisker moved away from the beast, traveling through the ground for a while before he arrived at the surface. He was invisible when he appeared, and when he flew away, no beasts noticed at all.

Whisker quickly found a nearby rock and landed on top of it, looking at the darkening sky. The sun was well below the horizon by now, and beasts with Sunhearts had started making their way back down to the same layer.

Whisker wondered if they went back to the same region where all of these beasts went to, or if they went to another location.

‘Could they have gone further below?’ he wondered, thinking about all the smell of meat he got from the sludge at the lower level. Could that smell have come from the beasts with Sunhearts?

‘Can they survive that much of a cold?’ Whisker thought, but he very quickly realized that they most likely would have. Sunhearts drew in yang energy from all around the beast that had it.

In doing so, the Sunheart likely acted as a hearth for the beasts, keeping them warm in the cold.

‘That should allow them to go further down below,’ Whisker thought. ‘That should be where the Yin is being dragged to.’

He still had no clue where the Yin was being drawn to. All he could make was guesses, but with so much Yin being dragged away, there had to be a purpose to it all.

Another question that kept coming back to Whisker was the smell of the meat. Why did the water sludge smell like meat? He could not sense any dead beasts around there at all, so it felt incredibly weird for the smell to be there.

‘It was the smell of meat, right?’ Whisker thought, pulling out a piece of meat from his Soul Space. It was a decent chunk of flesh, devoid of blood, but still carrying the bloody smell.

Whisker smelled the meat. There was a very faint scent to it that he barely recognized, even with his heightened senses thanks to his race as a Seeking Mouse.

‘Did I remember it right?’ he thought for a moment. The smell down there was so much stronger than what he had just smelled. Something didn’t add up right then.

Whisker chewed off a piece of the meat in order to test something and was immediately rewarded with success. While the meat didn’t have as strong a smell, it did have the taste.

The sludgy water down there smelled of meat, while out here Whisker had to taste it in order to get as strong a scent in the first place.

“It’s definitely this scent,” Whisker said out loud. “But how can it be? How can water smell of the taste of meat if there were no corpses down there?”

As Whisker continued to think, a possibility came to his mind.

“What if what I’m smelling is not actually the smell of meat,” he thought, and considered another option that would be in most flesh in the desert.

“What if it’s Elixir?”