Alex realized after some time that he didn’t know where he was. Judging by the strength of the beasts he had to constantly fight throughout the night, there was no way he was anywhere close to where he had left from.
The Prison Walls had thrown him somewhere else on the continent after dragging him around for hours on end.
Since it was still nighttime, Alex decided to wait until it was day before deciding where he wanted to go. He didn’t want to walk too far in the wrong direction.
He had long since left behind the fighting pit of beasts, but even so, beasts seemed to be constantly crawling out around him, even multiple ones at once trying to get to him.
Alex was surprised at first at how often it was happening, but then he realized that it might have been the result of the Sunhearts he carried.
‘Aren’t most beasts averse to Sunhearts since it represents danger for them?’ he thought. That had been what he had been taught. But then, he also remembered the other teaching, which was that stronger beasts tend to want to get that Sunheart for themselves, even though it would only kill them in the end.
‘But for so many to come after mine… Ah! I see.’ Alex quickly came to the realization. ‘My Sunheart is much weaker than what these beasts must be used to. So they must think I’m an easy target.’
That could have been the only answer.
After thinking through that, Alex decided to deal with it right away.
He brought out the beasts he had killed and began pulling out their beast cores. He placed the beast cores into the storage bag where he had Sunhearts, so that they could infect it and lose their aura. The beasts wouldn’t come after him so much after that.
He only needed enough free time until he could gain back his Qi after all.
Alex didn’t have time to collect the blood, so he put the corpses back into the storage bag to extract it later when he was in a much safer spot.
After the 20th beast core, Alex didn’t bring out any more corpses. There weren’t enough Sunhearts to need any more beast cores anyway.
Alex hoped that the rate at which the beast cores were infected would vary so that he could cultivate Qi through them at a different rate, but even if they didn’t, he could always try and study them to learn about Sun aura, or how the Sun Wraiths formed with such a strong ‘body’ despite having such a weak beast core.
Alex killed perhaps another 50 beasts in the time it took for the sun to rise again. By that point, he was far too tired and wanted to fight as little as he possibly could.
After the sun rose, the number naturally died down. That was partly due to the beasts burrowing back into the sand or leaving far away so the real masters of these lands, the beasts with Sunhearts, could surface once again.
Alex hoped he didn’t have to fight too many of them, and thankfully he didn’t.
As the sun rose, Alex finally saw where east was. He had been walking south the entire time, it appeared. He tried to correct his course to the west, but as he was about to, he wondered if that was the right direction he was supposed to go.
Where was the center of the desert now that he had been teleported to a random spot? How was he supposed to find where he was to go?
Alex was stumped.
He thought for a moment, trying to see if he could come up with an idea, but he failed to come up with anything he could do at the moment.
‘If only I had Qi, I could probably fly up in the sky and go search for a nearby city to find direction.’
That was the best idea he had at the moment, so he decided to do just that. For Qi, all Alex really needed to do was either eat the infected beast cores or absorb Blood Aura and convert it into Qi.
Absorbing so much blood would take time, so he decided to eat the beast core.
The ones he had just placed into the storage bag with Sunhearts would take time to get infected, but the one he had prepared yesterday should have been infected already. The speed was expedited when it was just one core and one Sunheart.
Alex checked into the storage bag where he had placed the two and found that they had become one. So, he brought it out and ate it right there.
Alex sat in the middle of the desert, with dunes of yellow and orange sand spreading out into the horizon. As his body converted the beast core into Qi, he absorbed it and immediately began cultivating it.
His dantian accepted the Qi, sending it to all parts of his body that had been parched for Qi. His body also converted the Qi into Blood Aura, filling that emptiness too.
The amount of energy in a single one of these infected beast cores was so much that Alex could cultivate for hours on end and improve his Origin at the same time. He had been doing it for the past month after all, and the improvement had been steady.
Alex spent a few good hours cultivating, getting his body back to its normal level of strength. Once the Qi from the beast core had completely been absorbed, he finally stood up and felt his cultivation base.
He knew he wasn’t going to break through anytime soon, but he still liked noticing the improvement.
Once he was done with it all, he flew back into the sky and searched for where he could go. It wasn’t noon just yet, but the haze and mirage of the desert still made it hard to see anything too far away.
In the end, Alex chose a random direction to fly in. If he had any luck, he would come across a human settlement very soon.