Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

Han Mengli hurriedly burned the corpse, not wanting to leave any hints of the dead demon behind. With the temperature his formation reached, reducing even the bones to ashes was no issue.

He made sure to take all of the demon’s possessions beforehand, leaving him with a storage bag full of a few items. There were several healing pastes, a few talismans, some different clothes, and a handful of spirit stones.

The clothes weren’t of much use to Han Mengli, and he had plenty of spirit stones around him. The healing pastes, however, would be quite helpful should he get hurt sometime in the future.

As soon as the corpse was burned, he buried the ashes and began mining for ores. He hoped no one else would come looking this way, and even if they did, he prayed they wouldn’t find him involved in any of it.

He took the sacks up the mine a few times to see if anything had changed that allowed the demon to go to the end. Seeing as things were the same, he could only imagine the demon had just ended up there by mistake.

Mistake as it may have been, it was yet another push for Han Mengli to act quickly. He knew the next encounter with a demon might not go as smoothly as this one had.

That day, he didn’t just escape the mine with a spirit stone. This time, he walked out with a storage bag hidden within the folds of his dead arm. Even his current Saint Realm cultivation hadn’t done much to heal the wound in his arm, mostly because he hadn’t given it a chance to.

In the slave quarters, Han Mengli pulled out the talismans in the storage bag and read through them. A few were communication talismans, carrying leftover messages.

He read through some of them, trying his best not to see the demon he had killed as a person. He ignored any familial or friendly talismans and found one meant to receive only orders from higher-ups.

He read through it and learned that there were six more groups of slave camps—three with women and three with men.

Another camp of men was working at a different mountain range mining a different metal ore. The other two camps of men were working in forges, making whatever the demons required.

The women worked with plants and beasts, helping raise them for whatever the demons needed. They weren’t allowed to work on the important ones, but plants used for talisman ink or paper, and beasts raised for food or materials, were left to the female slaves.

The message didn’t detail much more than where this demon was supposed to report next.

Han Mengli had hoped to learn more about the number of demons, their strength, and other important details, but that had been wishful thinking.

The last two talismans included two techniques. One was a defensive technique that allowed the user to absorb incoming attacks into their body and slowly dissipate them over time.

Han Mengli realized the demon he fought might have been using this technique to survive the daggers since he hadn’t found any armor on his body.

The other was a skill that allowed someone to read the flow of air in the surroundings.

It was a simple skill but one that could be applied in various ways. Han Mengli paused for a moment, wondering if that was how the demon had found him.

The heat from his forge had started a convection current inside the mine, and the demon must have grown curious about where the air was coming from. He likely hadn’t expected to find someone as the source of the moving wind.

Han Mengli sighed. He didn’t have a Wood Spirit Vein, so that technique would be useless for him. But he could learn the defensive one.

Once he was done checking everything, he decided to cultivate, but before he did, he knew he had to get the other slaves to start cultivating sooner or later.

Pausing for a moment, his fingers wriggled out of his sheet, and with a single flick, he threw three spirit stones at three random men in the giant room.

The spirit stones lodged underneath their pillows, causing the men to grab at them curiously. When they did, their eyes widened in shock.

Han Mengli had mined a decent portion of the spirit stone mine, so he had hundreds of thousands of spirit stones with him. He could have given one to everyone in the room, but he wasn’t sure if that was wise.

There were bound to be snitches in the camp who would be willing to give away that knowledge for a small reward. He had to be careful. He would start with a few and slowly increase the number.

Over the next few months, spirit stones began appearing underneath people’s pillows as if they had teleported there. No one questioned how they got there; they simply focused on cultivating.

It hadn’t taken long after that for Han Mengli to be followed to the end of the cave by someone.

The man who followed him was one of the stronger men in the camp who had arrived a few years ago. As soon as they were away from the guards, the man caught up to Han Mengli, lowering his head slightly, growing respectful.

“Are you an Immortal?” the man asked.

“Not in the slightest,” Han Mengli said. “I only reached Saint a few dozen years ago.”

The man narrowed his eyes. “Then where are you getting the stones from?” he asked. “I thought it was your Soul Space.”

“Does it matter?” Han Mengli replied. “It should be fine so long as I get them, right?”

“No, I suppose it doesn’t,” the man said. “But it would be great if I could get some more than a few a day.”

Han Mengli gave him a weird look. “Why is that?” he asked.

The man paused for a moment. “Alright, I’m choosing to trust you with this,” he said, his next words becoming barely more than a whisper.

“I’m very close to becoming an Immortal.”