Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

The sight of the lifeless young man aroused a sense of urgency in Han Mengli that he had never felt before. In nearly 300 years of being enslaved, he had not once tried to escape, but now that he saw this, he knew he had to.

This place had no fairness or justice. Death could come for him simply for looking at the demons the wrong way. He could not wait for someone else to save him now.

He had to start working toward his own escape.

That night, he was either lost in the memories of the dead he had seen before or planning what he was to do next.

The next day, he immediately went to the depths of the mine and started preparing. He mined for a short time, gathering all the ores he needed, and even a little more.

He took the extra to the side and began looking at it with curious eyes. He needed the slaves to come together and fight back against all of these demons. But to make that happen, he needed to give them hope. A level of certainty of their success was needed before they would act on anything.

For that, they would need weapons they could fight with. There were no weapons to be stolen, but there were plenty to be made. With half his days spent in a metal mine, he had what he needed.

Having worked at the forge, Han Mengli understood enough about the forging process to know what he needed to do. Sadly, he didn’t have the equipment to work as well as he hoped.

Skysteel, thankfully, didn’t contain many impurities, as it formed in segmented cubic chunks to begin with. So he could at least ignore one of the important aspects of forging.

But other issues were prominent—most importantly, the heat.

How was he supposed to gather heat? He knew of techniques to generate heat, but they couldn’t reach the temperature required to melt Skysteel.

‘I don’t need to melt it, really,’ he thought. ‘They’re already chunks of metal. So long as they’re softened enough, I can reshape them.’

That still needed a source of heat.

After some thought, Han Mengli realized what he needed.

A formation.

But how was he going to get a formation here?

He looked at how the chunk of metal appeared and knew he could draw formations directly onto it. With the spirit stones around, he could use them too.

But he didn’t know anything about formations to begin with. He needed help.

That night, he talked with a few people in the room, attempting to learn if they had any knowledge of formations. The most important thing was not to make them suspicious of what he was doing, so he asked as few people as possible.

But when that didn’t work, he moved on to others.

Over the next few weeks, he asked a few people each night until he met one person who was willing to teach him the basics in exchange for a share of his meal the next day.

Han Mengli was happy to agree.

That night, Han Mengli paid full attention to what he was taught and learned the basic formations required to create heat. Then, the next day, he went down to the end of the mine and drew the formation on any decently sized chunk of metal he could find.

Formations had so many small requirements that he couldn’t make a working one on the first day. There was the consistency of the width of the strokes, the angles, the straight lines, the depth of the carving, and more.

His pickaxe was a little too thick and hard to control for such a delicate task. However, there was no pen he could borrow in this place, so he would have to work with it.

Each time he failed, he broke that piece of ore into smaller pieces before mixing it in with the rest of the pile and trying again.

It took him a few weeks of trial and error before he formed a working formation for the first time. Then a few more weeks until the formation was good enough to produce heat capable of melting Skysteel.

Han Mengli was ready to move to the next stage, but something was wrong. Even though the formation worked, the heat it produced began deforming the Skysteel the formation was built on.

So he spent a few days trying to learn a way to cool the formation at the same time. He didn’t know anything beyond basic formations, so he made two instead—one that cooled anything above it, and another that heated anything above it.

Stacking them atop each other, he finally created formations that could work for him.

The first thing he did was try to melt a decent chunk of metal. He watched as it softened enough to be molded. The formation couldn’t provide more heat than that, so Han Mengli used a technique on his hand to reject heat and grabbed the metal.

He slowly molded it, flattening it into the shape of a blade while forming a handle on the other side.

He lost track of time working on it. When he was finally done, he used a technique to quickly cool it down so that it was tempered. A proper quenching would’ve worked better, but this would have to do.

Han Mengli looked at the dagger before him. It had no edge yet, but the shape was exactly what he used to make in the forge. He spun the dagger around his finger, throwing it to the side where it stuck into the wall.

With a pull, the dagger flew back to his fist, ready to be thrown again.

Despite lacking the talent for cultivating, Han Mengli wasn’t that bad when it came to fighting. And any child born in Darkwater was taught the basic dagger techniques used by the Lord of Daggers, the Dark God.

‘Alright, so I can start making things,’ he thought. ‘What should I make first?’