Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Death’s pause gave Alex a pause as well. He waited for her, ready to take the hit with the nigh-indestructible sword, but Death didn’t give him the opportunity to test it out.

She didn’t attack.

Alex approached her empty-handed, showing to her that he was not a threat. Death remained stationary, no motion to her body, barely even blinking.

Immediately, Alex noticed something in her body that he was both surprised to see and yet also not really surprised.

Her body was teeming to the brim with Elixir. This was so much Elixir, denser than any he had ever seen, packed into her tiny body.

Up close, Death looked quite beautiful, with her long straight hair and smooth skin that looked like polished marble. There were no blemishes to her face, not a single scar despite fighting for thousands and thousands of years.

Some sort of opportunity had shown itself to him, and he didn’t want to ruin it just yet. In the list of things he wanted to do while Death was inactive, fighting her was the last one.

The amount she had inside her now was the result of over 60 thousand years of non-stop fighting beasts across the desert and absorbing through her skin every Elixir that came her way.

Alex stood in one place for a long time before slowly lowering his sword. No attack was coming, it seemed. In that moment, he wondered if he should start attacking her. But he quickly gave up on the idea.

Alex pulled back his arm in shock. There was so much Elixir inside of her that he even foolishly wondered if that was the reason behind her absurd strength. But he quickly threw that thought away.

She still looked at him with her dull eyes that seemed to hold the faintest sliver of intelligence.

He was finally close to Death and not fighting. This was a wonderful opportunity for him.

Alex took a deep breath and sent his spiritual sense into her body. Until now, he had been entering directly into her Divine Sea, but this time he wanted to look around her body. Only her body would hopefully tell him what he was looking for.

And Death, who regularly bathed in the blood of every creature she fought, would constantly be absorbing Elixir left and right. And since she couldn’t cultivate, the Elixir went nowhere at all.

Alex gave up on finding anything wrong with her body and wondered if he should start attacking her. He also wanted some of her blood to see if she had some sort of physique that the Playground could recognize.

Had she been hit for the first time in such a long time that the sensation had brought her back to her senses?

He looked through her, trying to see if he could get a sense of what was wrong with her. Was there an artifact working on her? A talisman or a formation? Was she poisoned? Was her physique acting up?

And the amount was more than what Alex had absorbed until now. If he wasn’t mistaken, the amount was enough to give her the physical strength of a Divinity.

He didn’t know what to do.

He feared the moment, as he hadn’t yet touched her, so he wasn’t sure what sort of reaction she was going to show. He placed his palm on her face, and to his relief, she didn’t react.

Alex stared into Death’s eyes, seeing almost a sense of sanity in them. It was almost like there were thoughts racing through her mind behind those eyes. And somehow, they seemed vacant at the same time. Confused, but vacant.

Alex checked her once more, this time searching for anything other than Elixir. But there was nothing out of the ordinary. She was just a regular woman, albeit insanely strong.

Her left palm was loose and open, but her right palm firmly held the black sword in her grip. The sword too was fully crusted in dried blood, almost making Alex wonder if it was black to begin with. If the sword was any other color, he wouldn’t know.

It was more likely that the Elixir was the reason why she could spend the past 60 thousand years roaming the desert with not a single break in between.

Alex had to find out.

Every step Alex took came with a feeling that the next one was going to be his last, but the more he stepped forward, the lesser the feeling became. Right up until he stood right before Death, and then the feeling went away.

’That sort of thing should take a toll on someone mentally, if not also physically,’ Alex thought. But Death defied all common sense in that moment.

Alex was stunned and wondered how she could have drunk this much Elixir when she was only mindless. But drinking was not the only way to consume Elixir. In fact, almost all of the beasts consumed Elixir by remaining in a sludge that contained it.

He turned his attention back toward her, questioning why she had stopped right now. Was it because he had hit her?

’Can you even call this coming back to your senses?’ Alex thought. He ignored all questions for now and slowly reached for her face.

He waited for a long time; with Death, even seconds felt like minutes. And yet as the wait continued, so did they. Neither moved an inch.

He looked at her clothes, but he could barely tell what she was wearing. They were encrusted with dried blood after dried blood after years of fighting. He looked down her sleeve and at her hand.

Not to mention, she had also never taken a single hit in her life on the Desert on account of her being quick enough to block most attacks. So she had never lost any Elixir either.

But before that, he needed to finish everything else that didn’t require fighting her. He needed more ideas, so Alex decided to turn to the old man for help.