Eternal Cultivation Of Alchemy

“Is something wrong?” the Reverend asked Alex upon seeing the way he reacted.

“He must be excited,” the woman said. “That’s a pill-making technique after all.”

“Must be an incredible one for them to place it this late in the auction,” the prince said, turning toward Alex. “My apologies, young brother, but I will be bidding on this too. I had no reason to tell you this earlier, but I am a bit of an alchemist myself. Besides the wines and elixirs, I sometimes make pills as well. If this technique is worth it, I will be purchasing it.”

Alex gave a silent nod and sat back in his chair. He hardly cared what the others did at this point as he was solely curious about the circumstances that had led to the technique being here.

He had an idea at this point. If the sword wasn’t enough, this was.

’Let’s hope my request is accepted so I can meet with them,’ Alex thought with a grim look.

He barely focused on the explanation regarding the technique that was being given on the stage. The auction house had tested enough to figure out how good a technique it was.

It did have the ability to make no waste at the end of a pill-making process and completely form the pill while filling it with all the energy it could get. In the right hands, it could continuously allow the alchemist to make a perfect pill, one after the other.

Alex narrowed his eyes slightly, realizing it was the base form of the technique that was on sale here. This one allowed for the technique to make a single pill. That was the first thing he had done when he reverse-engineered the Pill-splitting technique.

Since then, he had continuously added the ability to make more and more pills at the same time with the same perfection rate, and by now he had improved the technique enough to make 10 pills at once.

If the base technique was already considered so good, how much would the current version pull if it too were to be sold in auction?

At the very least, it couldn’t be such a simple auction as this one, but some important ones in the other realms such as the Sky God’s realm.

Not that Alex had any intention of selling said technique.

The bidding started right away at 30 thousand Divine spirit stones, with each increment needing to be at least 100 spirit stones.

Even with that, the bids quickly climbed.

The prince watched from the side with a gleeful look on his face, ready to bid as soon as things calmed down a little.

“Such an incredible pill-making technique,” he said. “You must be really disappointed not to have enough funds, aren’t you, young brother Dawnblade?”

Alex gave a hint of a smile. “I can’t imagine any alchemist that wouldn’t consider themselves lucky to have received such a technique.”

“Truly,” the prince said. “There are obviously many other pill-forming techniques that are incredible, but… something about this technique feels so simple and yet so powerful. You merely have to employ the technique and it does everything by itself. I wonder who it was that created such a technique.”

Alex would have said that it was the Alchemy God, but he wasn’t sure if the man had created this technique or not. If he had created this technique, it made no sense for him to not start with the base version and instead have it be the Pill-splitting Qi.

That told Alex that it was likely that the Alchemy God had received the technique from someone else, and that too incomplete. If not for Alex’s Dao of Techniques, it would’ve likely remained incomplete for a long time.

The bids quickly reached over 35 thousand, at which point the prince joined in as well, bidding every so often, announcing his intention to participate. It was considered bad auction etiquette if one were only to join at the very end.

As the bids increased, Alex couldn’t help but wonder why the technique was being sold. To anyone whom he didn’t trust, he had forced them to swear an oath so as to not pass along the technique.

To those whom he did trust, he had still made them swear an oath so as to only share the technique with those they trusted.

There were a very few people to whom he had given the technique with no criteria attached to how they used it. They could sell it if they wished, which someone clearly was.

That was another hint to the person’s identity.

’I wonder why though? What would have happened for them to have to sell both the sword and the technique?’ Alex thought. He worried they may have gotten into some debt. In the first place, he wondered why they were even in this place.

Shouldn’t they have left already?

As Alex was lost in his own thought, the prince tapped the glowing section of the table and spoke his next bid.

“39,500!”

Someone from another room far away spoke their bid.

“39,600!”

Someone elsewhere pushed it to 40 thousand.

The prince smiled, ready to push it again, but paused suddenly as something caught his attention. He reached into his Soul Space, pulling out a talisman. He closed his eyes, reading the message before slowly opening them. A pained expression surfaced just then, pushing back the smile that was there before.

Without a second of hesitation, he stood up and turned around.

“That was Father,” he said, looking toward the Reverend and the royal guard. “Something urgent has come up, and we need to leave right away.”

The Reverend stood up. “Is his drunkenness all right?” he asked, worried. The woman seemed equally worried.

“Father is fine. The matter doesn’t concern his safety or his well-being,” he said. “I don’t know what exactly is happening, but I’m being asked to return right away.”

The man then turned to Alex.

“You should leave with us as well, younger brother.”