Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Whisker remained with the beast throughout the night, the warmth from its body never lowering in the slightest. Even so, the surroundings did get colder as the night deepened with more Yin being drawn in from the surface.

Thankfully, Whisker was able to handle it and didn’t succumb to it like he did previously.

Then at the end of the night, the tortoise rattled awake. It stopped cultivating and instead readied to leave.

Whisker grabbed tightly onto its shell, not wanting to be left behind.

The tortoise slowly moved up through the sludge, making its way up toward the warmer regions. Whisker could tell it was just around the time when the other beasts were going to make their way back down to absorb more Elixir.

No beast came in the way of the tortoise as it was the only beast with a Sunheart in this territory.

As it made its way up, Whisker suddenly felt the warmth from around its body disappear. At the same time, he felt Yang from the surroundings being drawn into the tortoise’s body.

“Its Sunheart reversed again,’ he thought, now understanding that the beast was likely capable of doing so with just a thought.

Once the tortoise arrived at an upper region within the sand, it stopped moving and stayed there, slowly sucking in Yang from all directions, and possibly waiting to fight any territorial battles it might have to get into.

Whisker waited for a while on the tortoise to see if he could find any other info, but he failed to get any more. The beast did not give any answer as to why it came up every single day.

‘It could have stayed in there for days on end before its Sunheart was close to running out,’ Whisker thought. ‘None of these beasts have any reason to come out every day.’

And yet it did, and Whisker could not figure out why.

Whisker had decided to find out the answer if he could, but before that, he needed to refine some more Elixir.

The sludge he had gathered this time was from the deepest region he could reach, so the Elixir he was going to create was going to be much stronger as well. He looked forward to drinking all of that Elixir.

He went back to the riverbank where he refined a decent amount of Elixir in a few weeks and consumed it all. His body cultivation improved significantly again, and he returned back to the desert, this time going back to find the tortoise he had left behind.

Even though Whisker returned to the same place just a few weeks later, the tortoise had moved some distance away. Whisker found it about half a kilometer away from the original location.

The mere lack of Yang in the surroundings made it rather easy for Whisker to find beasts with Sunhearts. Whisker quickly sneaked his way to the tortoise and stayed on its back.

He had decided to find some answers and he was intent on finding them.

On the upside, the tortoise also took him to the deepest regions of Hell where he could get slightly better sludge than the other locations. It was a win-win as far as he was concerned.

Whisker had nothing much to do after that. He spent a day or two on the tortoise, trying to judge what it could do. Then, he would leave for the river to refine his Elixir before returning again and spending another few days.

Each time, the tortoise would have moved some distance away, so Whisker had to go search for it again. Thankfully, after the second time, he realized that the tortoise was moving in a straight line, so finding it the next time would be easy.

Whisker returned to Alex once in a while, checking on his status. Once he was certain he wasn’t needed, he returned to the tortoise again.

Whisker left the tortoise once in a while to go check on other beasts with Sunhearts in the vicinity. There was a furry deer a few kilometers away, and he spent some days with it to see if its actions were the same as the tortoise.

They were.

A few months passed in the same way, and by now Whisker had some answers to his previous questions while there were some more questions that had begun forming in his mind.

He still did not know what Yin had to do with the formation of Elixir. He still did not know why the beasts did not stay underground or aboveground for longer than half a day.

What he did know now was that these beasts could reverse their Sunheart to go deeper than any other beasts, to the region where the Elixir was thicker, thus always making them stronger than any other beasts in the region.

He had also noticed something strange. While these beasts traveled up and down every day, they slowly moved sideways as well, at a pace of about a kilometer a month.

From day to day, it was unnoticeable, but with how frequently Whisker went away for many days, he couldn’t help but notice this.

He had thought these beasts were territorial, but they constantly kept moving around. Whisker couldn’t figure out why that was. He had thought they were territorial, but it seemed they didn’t care that much about their territory as much as they did about others being around them.

Normally, this sort of behavior might have gone past Whisker, but there was something common between a few other beasts he had tracked.

All of these beasts were moving in the same direction.

Whisker wanted to test the same with regular beasts as well, but those died far too quickly and didn’t have a reason to stick around in one place after coming above ground for Whisker to get a factual result.

For now, he only had the beasts with Sunhearts to go with, and as far as he could tell, they were all headed in the same direction.

As for the reason, Whisker feared he would not find out even if he stayed with these beasts for the next few years.