Alex stepped backward from the force of that punch. The strike was so strong that it caused a rather loud noise as well. Tara fell backward, grunting in pain as he shook his hand. He was hurt too.
Alex took a moment and slowly nodded. The young man’s body cultivation was somewhere around the True Emperor realm or the start of the Saint realm. It was a little difficult to tell the precise strength, but the approximation was good enough.
“Not bad,” Alex said and sat to the side. “I think I can help you get stronger even.”
The young man raised his eyebrows. “Really?” he asked.
Alex nodded. “But you’ll have to wait. There’s something I must do for myself first, and I’m getting too impatient to wait.”
As Tara watched, Alex went to the corner of the room and sat down. He brought out one of the gems from the fish, cleaned it as well as he could, and ate it.
To Tara’s surprise, the man swallowed the entire thing whole.
“What… what did you do?” Tara quickly asked, unable to make sense of the situation.
“It’s alright,” Alex said. “I know what I’m doing.”
Once he swallowed the beast core, he took a deep breath and waited as his body converted the beast core into pure Qi. The Qi was strong and plentiful. In fact, nothing he had absorbed from the food and the herbs since coming to Hell compared to what he absorbed just then.
The True Qi that came from the beast core was quite plentiful. And that had just been the octopus. From what he could tell, the other fish was much better than the octopus, so he hoped it had more Qi.
Alex ate the other core too and was immediately satisfied with the results. The energy in that core was nearly three times as much as the energy in the previous core.
Alex gathered that energy in the dantian too and felt it fill him up entirely. His dantian felt as though it was bulging at the seams. However, because it was only at True Qi quality, it felt similar to being stuffed after eating a rather tasteless meal.
Alex needed to rectify that.
Before leaving his original world and ascending to Immortality, Alex had been taught a technique by Senior Yang. It was a technique that could be used to convert spirit stones of lower quality into a higher quality one by combining them together.
It was how the man did what he did as a Divinity, despite living in a world where even Immortal Qi was hard to come by.
Similarly, Silvermist had later taught him a very similar technique that was similar by coincidence. It was the Pill Compounding technique, where multiple same pills could be combined into one while condensing everything.
One of those techniques involved compressing the massive energy into something stronger. If enough energy was compressed, it changed its grade, becoming better.
That was what Alex attempted to do.
While the two separate techniques he had learned were different from each other, used in different circumstances, the base logic was the same for each of the two.
When Qi was forced to combine, it upgraded in quality.
So, Alex compressed the Qi in his dantian.
With his current level of Intent, any True Qi was easily forced to do as he wished. It was compressed into Saint Qi almost immediately, and from there on, even that was compressed.
Alex continued compressing the Qi more and more as the Saint Qi improved in quality. As it compressed, the amount became less and less as well, right up until there was barely anything left.
When Alex gave it one last push, the Saint Qi turned to Immortal Qi. That last bit of Immortal Qi was all that Alex had gained from the two beast cores and everything else he had gathered up until now.
He found it depressingly funny just how useless everything felt in the end. Still, Qi was Qi, and that was all he lacked right now.
He wondered if he should let his body absorb that Qi and use it up, but he decided to gather more for the moment. He didn’t want to go hungry again, and that Qi would sustain him somewhat.
‘I’ll need to gather more Qi. The more I gather, the faster I can start searching for ways to leave this world.’
Not that it was certain he could leave this place so easily.
Alex opened his eyes and looked at Tara, who stood by his side, watching him carefully. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Oh… I wanted to see what you were doing.”
“I was cultivating,” Alex said. “You have never cultivated, have you?”
Tara shook his head.
“As I expected,” Alex said. “What about other things? I wanted to ask you about any training you do that you think is irrelevant to my question. Anything you can tell me.”
“There is no training, as I said before. I’m not hiding anything. The only training that happens is for learning how to use a harpoon underwater.”
Alex nodded. “That does confuse me, though. How is your body so strong?”
“Are we really strong, though? I have heard of others in the desert that could shatter mountains with a punch. Compared to them, we are weaklings.”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “In the desert? Are there many strong people in the desert?”
The young man nodded. “Not just strong people, but strong monsters too. We’re told to never go there at all because of how dangerous it is. That’s why our tribe stays here, far away from the desert.”
Alex got very curious about the desert now. “I should go visit the desert soon. See how things are,” he said.
“You’re leaving?” Tara asked.
Alex thought for a moment and shook his head. “Not immediately. I need to kill some more fish and gather some more of their gems. Once I’m done with that, I should finally be able to leave.”