Alex found himself unable to come up with any other topics to talk about at the moment so he decided to stay quiet. The rest of the journey was filled with nothing but the sound of wind hitting their ears.
Alex just took in the feeling of flying, something that was impossible to do in real life, and got happy. It took them about 2 hours just to fly to their destination.
Not only was the destination deep into the southern forest, but it was also far away from the scarlet city, so they had to take a much longer path than what others would have.
"Here we are," said Wen Cheng as he looked ahead.
Alex stuck out his neck to the side to see what was in front. To his shock, in the middle of the unending forest, there was a massive area filled with fog that was very unusual for the forest.
'Why is there fog in the middle? Is there a body of water nearby?' he wondered.
As he got near, however, his body shook. 'This!!' he was truly shocked this time. The fog he was seeing in front of him, wasn't actually a fog made out of water vapor. It was actually a fog made up of purely Qi.
'How much Qi will I be able to gather if I cultivate here?' he wondered. Just before they reached the fog, however, the group of 7 dropped to the ground.
"This is the place I talked about, Yu Ming. Ahead is a land filled with Qi, so the vegetation that grows here should be mostly alchemy ingredients. I as well as a few other elders come here once in a while to gather some ingredients, but we don't have a lot of knowledge about the ingredients, so we only take what we know is an ingredient and leave the rest to grow. "
"Thankfully, people don't visit the southern forest a lot, and this location is very unknown." Wen Cheng said. He took out a handful of empty storage bags and handed it to Alex.
"Take these bags. You will go inside to collect the ingredients. This area is safe, so you don't have to worry about monsters here at all. I don't know how long it will take you, but just go at your own pace. Us elders will go around the fog to protect you from monsters just in case they come from the outside."
"Still, if there are some inside, your escape technique should be enough for you."
"Alright, go now and gather everything you can. At least fill all of these storage bags, you should be able to do that, right?" Wen Cheng answered.
"If there are indeed ingredients inside, then that should be no problem," Alex said.
"Alright, go and do your task. We will do ours."
Wen Cheng said as he gestured for Alex to leave. The other elders also started to walk around the fog to the other side of the special place.
Alex walked just a little bit into the fog and he felt like he was getting cleaned with all the Qi. As they touched his body, he realized that it wasn't just normal Qi.
The Qi was a mixture of different elemental Qi. He could feel all of the different elements in the air. He really wanted to cultivate right now, but he didn't. He needed to get to work right now.
He made sure he had enough storage bags to fill up all of these ingredients. Other than the 5 his master had given him, he also had a few storage bags himself. Due to always having to store so many ingredients and monster corpses, he had gotten quite a few when he had the time.
"Oh, what's this?" he thought curiously when he found a talisman inside one of his storage bags. "hmm... oh, this is the paper slip master gave me yesterday. I can't believe I completely forgot to read it," he thought.
-There are spirit cleansing lilies inside. If you do pick them up, do not let the elders know about it. Tell them you weren't confident about it and left it behind. They shouldn't be able to tell the difference between the ones left behind. -
"Oh!" Alex's eyes started shining when he realized spirit cleansing lilies inside. "So, they aren't as rare as I thought… or this place is something special."
"Did master make himself and the elders purposefully stay outside so that they don't see me pick up the lilies? I don't see another reason why." Alex thought as he looked in the surrounding.
He sent out his spiritual sense to the max without overstraining himself. The limit for that was still 20 meters. He then activated his Immortal Concealing technique and used the Veiled light technique to completely hide his body and aura.
After that, he got to work. He didn't even care what any of the ingredients were. As long as he knew them, he picked them up. Leaves, fruit, flower, root, vine, bark, thorns, stalks, stem, branch. Whatever he could find, he would pick it up.
He felt the energies the ingredients gave off and wondered, "That's quite a bit of energy. Are these about 100 years old?"
While he still wasn't experienced enough to tell the age accurately, he could vaguely guess how old an ingredient was based on their concentration of energy. And he was sure these were some of the oldest ingredients he had come into contact with. Even the alchemy gardens in Hong Wu sects which were about 70-80 years old didn't have ingredients with energies this thick.
He kept gathering many ingredients and came across many that he could even use himself. However, the best part about this was that most of the ingredients here were for pills that used True Qi. He knew about 40 different types of True rank pill recipes, and out of them, he had found about 25 main ingredients and a lot of other secondary and tertiary recipes.
This place was a treasure trove of ingredients and he was enjoying every single minute he was in here.