"Has master never been to the alchemy gardens of Hong Wu Sect?" Alex wondered as he looked at the time on the clock. It had been 3 pm already. He had been working for the last hour and he wasn't even close to clearing a fourth of this garden.
This was after having continuously used his spiritual sense and Qi manipulation at Bone tempering the 8th realm. By now he had made enough pills and also worked at the alchemy garden long enough, where even diverting his attention into 10 different things at once was considerably easy for him.
"Can I log out here? I hope there is no problem with that." Alex needed to log out to get some food but was worried at the consequences of leaving in such an open area.
He knew that his body didn't disappear when he logged out, so it was imperative he was in a safe spot when he logged out.
"Urghh… Whatever. Master and the elders are looking after me. All I can do now is hope that I don't end up losing my concealment techniques when I log out. If I can keep them active, that would be great." Saying that he logged out.
After a few minutes, he logged back in. He looked at himself and was surprised.
"Oh, wow. It's still active. So, we can log out and still have our techniques running? Wait, what about normal cultivation? Can I do that too?" Alex got unusually excited when he found that out. Only for it to excruciatingly disappear when he realized.
"I fall asleep when I cultivate, So I can't log out." He facepalmed when he remembered such a simple fact. "I can't believe I forgot about that."
After a few more seconds of self embarrassment, he got back to work. There were a lot more ingredients to gather and the time was short.
He walked around the place with his spiritual sense noticing all the ingredients and his Qi picking them all up.
"Man, there are so many ingredients here. It's like the alchemy gardens if it were left alone for a hundred years." He thought. Although one thing was confusing him still.
"Where is all of this Qi coming from though. Is the valley special? Does it have something that makes it special?" this was all he could think of as he collected the different ingredients.
About 2 hours later, he finally found a big group of Spirit Cleansing lilies. There were at least 10 flower beds in there, ready to be picked. Alex was both nervous and overjoyed at the view.
He didn't dare let himself pick them up using Qi manipulation. He went where they were and hand-picked them. After he was done picking them, he kept them in his own storage bag.
Once he was done, he was about to continue when he noticed something.
"What is that?" the thing he noticed wasn't with his vision, but with his spiritual sense. And the place he noticed wasn't around him, but rather below him.
A few meters ahead of him, there was a giant hole in the underground. It was probably more appropriate to call it a tunnel. The tunnel was about 5 meters in width and went on as far as he could sense.
He decided not to worry about what that was for now and continued with the ingredients.
It was 7 pm by the time he was done with 3 fourths of the place. 4 of the 5 storage bags his master gave him were already full and the 5 one was on its way to get full as well.
"I guess I will just keep the rest in mine," he thought. After that, he logged out. Coming back about half an hour later, he was truly surprised to see his concealment techniques still active.
"Well, even if I can't cultivate, I can at least hide in open areas and won't have to look for a safe space when I log out now."
He went on to collect the last portions of the ingredients that were still remaining. After completely collecting them all within the next 2 hours, he decided to go back to his master.
As he was walking back, however, he once more came across those tunnels in the ground.
"These are in a different location from the previous one. Did someone dig them out? Or is this something like a plot hole that occurred on its own?"
The mystery was now too much for him to ignore. "Let me go and check," he said as he disappeared right where he was standing. He reappeared in the tunnel underground.
"I love teleporting like that," he said to himself. He started walking around the tunnel trying to learn how it was made.
"Everything is so circular. Doesn't look like it's something natural. Has to be something made by someone right?" he wondered. As he was walking, he came across something weird stuck on the ground.
It was a metal rod with some sort of weird markings on them. At the end of the rod was a triangular piece of… something that looked like a mixture of paper and cloth was attached.
"That's definitely man-made," he thought and picked it up. He kept on walking through the tunnel and found other metal rods just like this. These thin metal rods were numerous in numbers and were all over the place.
After gathering exactly 24 of these metal rods, he felt something change in the surrounding. It was almost like… the Qi that was gathered in the area was leaving.
"Was this what was causing the Qi to gather here?" he wondered as he looked at the metal rod. He tried recalling anything he had heard about these metal rods and finally realized. "Wait, these are formation flags, aren't they? That means the Qi gathering here was a result of formations as well."
He felt like he had discovered something really mysterious. As he walked, he decided to leave but kept walking just a little further.
It was then that he noticed something in the distance.