Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Memory recounted the events from her perspective.

As it turned out, over the past few years, she had noticed the changes in the Soul Space and that something was out there attempting to destroy certain things.

Whatever it was, it had come for her as well. She had fought it off easily by herself, but she soon realized that the other things weren’t like her. They couldn’t protect themselves so easily.

The thing was strong enough that everything that could be destroyed would be destroyed, so she decided to protect everything that belonged to her master. She had roamed around the Soul Space for years, gathering everything she could find into her and around her.

After that, she stayed in one location, protecting those items.

“You simply knew to protect it?” Alex asked, slightly stunned. He knew artifact spirits were intelligent, but he still didn’t have a measure of just how intelligent his artifact spirit was.

Perhaps because it had only just formed mere hours before he was sent to hell, he saw the cauldron spirit as a newly born child who had to be told what was wrong and what was right.

Alex felt weirdly proud at the cauldron being able to do things all on its own.

“Brother, is everything alright?” Pearl’s voice came through the bond. “Have you figured out what is going on in here?”

“Not yet,” Alex answered. He had been too worried about his items and forgotten what he was really trying to do.

He decided he could test out the storage bags once Memory was free to drop the barrier around her. For that, he needed to fix whatever was going on in here.

Alex had no idea where to even begin from. The presence of Yang was obvious, but the thing that hid in its shadows was not. It was nothing Alex had ever sensed before.

In truth, he couldn’t begin to figure out just what was going on there at all. ‘I need to clear away the Yang. I can only know things when I test the thing by itself.’

It took but a thought for Alex to clear out the Yang from the surroundings, all of it being collected in a single location next to him. He sent the Yang flying in the direction of the Demon realm, where he would feed it to the Nine Yang Divine Tree to help it grow even further.

With the Yang gone, only the mysterious energy remained.

Alex finally quieted all of his thoughts and focused just on this energy. The energy was quite vigorous in nature, powerful certainly, and perhaps even a little corrosive.

He thought it was a sort of toxin or poison at first, but he quickly realized that was not the case. This thing was far too destructive to be just regular toxins or poison.

And somehow, in that same moment, Alex also felt something else. It was something he had felt many times before, but this time it was hidden within this destructive energy.

Like a shadow within a shadow.

It was life.

‘Life aura?’ Alex thought in surprise. He hadn’t expected something so opposite to destruction to be present there, and yet somehow it was.

Life aura wasn’t just hiding within the destructive aura, but rather it was a part of it. The aura had both properties of destructiveness and life, only one was far superior to the other one.

Alex wished Whisker could enter at this point as he would help him much more in discerning these auras. Even without the seal on his Spiritual Sea, Whisker would still be the better candidate to sense auras.

Alas, Whisker couldn’t enter on account of having a Soul Space, so Alex was stuck with his own.

Alex focused on the aura, observing it more and more. As he progressed, he noticed something about the aura that he hadn’t noticed until now.

He had been so focused on what it was that he completely ignored what it looked like. The energy wasn’t completely equal in all places. There were locations where it was denser, and other locations where it was sparse. The shape it formed thus was also not at all like regular aura, but rather as if it was something physical.

Like a moving mass of wind, or a cloud, or… a fog.

A destructive fog.

Alex froze all of a sudden as the words triggered something in his mind. There was only one fog he knew to be destructive, which made him wonder… if he could see this fog, would its color be yellow?

‘This can’t be the yellow fog, can it?’ Alex thought.

The Yellow Fog was something that should be within his mind. It was something that destroyed anything and everything that entered his Spiritual Sea. It was what helped him defeat so many opponents in his past, helping him survive every single time they directly attacked his mind.

Alex was completely certain that the Yellow Fog was restricted to just his Spiritual Sea. Had it found its way into his Soul Space somehow?

‘How can it be?’ Alex thought. ‘Why now? Was it the Sunhearts?’

Alex tried to understand how the Sunhearts could possibly be the reason why the Yellow Fog had made its way into his Soul Space. That was when he remembered that each time he had consumed them, the walls of his Soul Space glowed with yellow light.

And then, perhaps the more important reason, his body constitution was slowly evolving. The Sunhearts were doing their thing, sending his body to a higher grade.

The presence of the Yellow Fog within his Soul Space was likely the result of that.

Alex didn’t know if the conclusion he had come to was correct or not, but he need only do a single thing to find that out.

Knowing that it was his body, and that the fog was his domain, Alex simply gave the command.

“Disappear!”

As soon as the command came, the Yellow Fog that permeated each and every part of his Soul Space receded away to nowhere, leaving behind only the subtle Life aura that had always filled his Soul Space.