After dinner, Alex logged back into the game. He walked out of his home filled with the light of the lanterns. He slowly walked down the mountain and to the sect valley.
The sect valley was ever the same. Lit with lantern and festival-like atmosphere. The moon was hidden in the clouds today, but it didn't look like it would rain.
He walked to the right alchemy garden and saw an elder waiting in front of the path to the garden.
"Greetings elder," he said as he reached the place.
"Hmm… " he looked at the outer disciple clothing of Alex, and said, " If you are here to request for alchemy ingredients, then you better have contribution points, otherwise you will just be wasting our time."
Alex chuckled a little and said nothing. Instead, he just handed the elder his nameplate. When the elder read the nameplate, his eyes were wide with shock.
"Oh, so you are the sect leader's disciple huh. If you are here for work then you are half an hour too early. The disciples get to request alchemy ingredients until 8 am, and it takes a bit more totally everything." He said.
"I will be honest. I can't tell if the sect leader likes you or hates you. She gave you free access to everything, yet she is tasking you to this job that usually takes over 10 elders overnight." The elder said.
"Oh wow, really?" he said. Alex didn't worry a lot, however. He had the [Alchemy God's Knowledge] and spiritual sense, so he was sure he would be just fine.
Many disciples came to the elder and requested different ingredients. At exactly 8, they stopped accepting any more requests for the day. An elder arrived about 5 minutes later from the other alchemy garden gate.
Together, the two elders combined their list and tallied the ingredients. Once everything was set, they handed the list to Alex.
"Here is the list, disciple Yu. You can start looking for the ingredients now. Please take care not to make any unnecessary damage while you are completing your punishment," the elders gave their sincere intentions towards him.
Alex bade them farewell and walked into the garden. He took a look at the talisman on which the list was written in. He used his spiritual sense to look at the paper and easily remembered all the ingredients in there. It was amazing.
He immediately started matching the ingredients in the list to some of the ingredients he found while walking around the garden this morning.
He expanded his spiritual sense to its maximum 20 meters radius and started scanning everything for a potential match. He immediately started using his Qi to pick up the ingredients and bring them to him.
"One down." He saw a few others as well and started gathering them too. He walked around the mountain looking at the different ingredients. The mountain was quite vast, and it took him a lot of time to just travel through it.
With his spiritual sense and Qi manipulation, he was easily collecting all the ingredients in the alchemy garden that was on the list. After about, 2 hours, he was done collecting everything on the list that was available in this mountain.
He had managed to find about 60% of the total ingredients on the list in this mountain. Before getting out, however, he sat down and just waited.
He didn't cultivate, but rather just took some time to restore his spiritual sea that had dried up quite a bit. After he was ready, he walked out.
The two elders were still outside. When they saw him come, they frowned.
"Is something wrong, Disciple Yu?" one of the elders asked.
"No," Alex gave a single one-word answer and started walking away from them. The elders were confused. They looked at each other and immediately stopped Alex.
"Disciple Yu, Stop!! Where are you going? You can't leave your job." The elder said.
"Hmm… I'm going to the other garden. There is nothing in here that is in the list anymore." He said and started walking once more."
"What?" they were surprised. "Disciple Yu, can you please show us your collection until now?" one of the elders asked.
Alex simply tossed him a bag. When the elders saw that he had really collected all the ingredients, they were shocked.
Alex took back the bag and walked straight to the other garden. This garden was the same as the first one as well. The elders had let the plant life grow however it felt right.
Alex once more got to collecting the ingredients. With his spiritual sense and robust Qi, he was very quick at collecting the rest of the ingredients.
Something that Alex found fascinating while collecting these ingredients was the method with how they had to be collected. Most of the ingredients could be just plucked straight out of the plant like it were a normal flower or fruit.
But for some ingredients, his instinct didn't allow him to simply pluck them. He had to perform some weird operation to obtain the ingredients.
For example, one of the fruit growing required him to twist the fruit's branch 5 times before it plucked by itself. Otherwise, it was near impossible to rip it off.
Once he was done collecting the ingredients, he handed the bag back to the elder and walked off. The elders looked at the ingredients in the bag. Over 90% of the ingredients had been collected.
The remaining less than 10% ingredients were rare ingredients that even the elders knew couldn't be found in the garden. They looked at the time and were shocked.
Alex walked back to his residence by himself too. He looked at the time and realized he had collected the ingredients before 12 am. If it had been 2 days ago, it would've probably taken him all night to collect them all.
But with his new spiritual sense, and a better understanding of manipulating objects with Qi, the task of collecting the ingredients had been way too quick.