Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Chapter 3528 Testing with a Pillbug

The Dragon-blooded Pillbugs had finally fastened.

Alex could hardly believe the time had come. He had been hoping for this moment to come for nearly two years now, and finally it had happened.

He quickly brought the pillbugs out, looking over them. They seemed quite lively this time around, mindlessly crawling around his palm. Had it been before, they would have rolled up into tiny pill-sized balls and started hibernating right away when they were done eating.

But now, they were fully awake, although perhaps not as alert.

The others had mentioned that they fed these pillbugs for over two years and still failed to fasten them completely. Alex thus wondered if his blood having the bloodline of the Dragon Emperor had something to do with the speed of their awakening.

'What exactly am I supposed to do now?' Alex thought. 'I have to learn how to control them, right?'

Fastening an insect did not mean that it could be fully controlled. It merely meant that the insect had latched onto the person's aura. It was through the manipulation of this aura that they could be controlled.

That was what Alex would have to practice next.

'I can barely feel their presence at all, he thought. Their quantity was so low that the burden they brought to one's soul, as something similar to a bond, just wasn't there yet.

There would have to be thousands, if not tens of thousands of them, before Alex felt anything at all.

Learning to control the insects would likely not take that long for him either. He had seen Blueflake work with her cicadas, and she had done it in practically no time. She had experience with controlling

insects before, so that might have been why she was fast. But even with that, Alex doubted it would take him much time.

Alex began manipulating his aura to make them do things he wanted them to do. He started with simple movements such as making them go left or right, before moving on to harder commands.

As he practiced, he thought about things for after he had them fully trained. What was he to do then?

The pillbugs were apparently capable of emulating aura. So at the very least, one of them would have to be set aside for the sake of experimentation. Of the remaining nine, the only thing Alex could think of was to expand their numbers.

Among the ten pillbugs, four of them were female, so he would have to get them to lay eggs so he could have more of them. Once he had more, he could finally use them for real.

There was still the decision to be made as to what he would be using them for, but that was something he could leave for later. There was no need to consider these things just yet.

In less than a month, Alex was able to fully train the pillbugs into obeying all of his commands, so he put away nine of them, keeping just a single one.

This was what he would use to check how they were able to emulate

aura.

Alex wondered for a bit as to what that even meant in the first place. 'Can it emulate just about any aura?' he thought curiously. If that was the case, what was the extent of it?

Trying not to get ahead of himself, Alex started with something small. He didn't know if he could un-train the pillbug once he did it, but in case he could not, it would still be a valuable lesson for him.

The aura Alex settled on in the end was a simple Metal aura. His reason for selecting that was the lack of complexity.

If he had selected something like the Sun Fire aura or his Sword Intent aura, then it might have been too complex for the pillbug to learn and emulate right away.

So, he wanted to start with the very basic aura of the Metal Dao.

Alex hadn't the faintest clue how he was supposed to teach it to the pillbug, so he only did what he thought was right. He filled the pillbug's surroundings with Metal aura and gave it a very simple command.

Learn.

Almost instantly, the pillbug rolled up into a ball.

At first, Alex thought he had failed. He had either given it the wrong command, or the pillbug had decided that it needed more blood. However, before either of those thoughts could settle, the pillbug began to pulse slightly.

Alex could feel something strange within the pulse, something he had never sensed before. When the pulse came again, it was still the same and yet slightly different.

The third time around, Alex found some familiarity with it. By the fifth pulse, Alex could feel a faint Metal aura within those pulses.

'It's learning,' Alex thought in surprise. He would have never guessed that the pillbug was going to brute-force its way into learning an aura.

And more surprisingly, it was definitely working.

In just a few dozen pulses, it had ended up perfectly replicating the Metal Dao.

That was an incredible feat for a creature as tiny as a fingernail. Even after Alex stopped, it kept emulating the Metal aura.

"Stop!" Alex commanded the tiny creature, and it immediately obeyed

his words, stopping in a single moment.

The pillbug rolled open, seemingly waiting for another command. "Alright, do it again."

Alex commanded not just with words, but also with his aura. The pillbug rolled back into a ball and started producing a faint Metal aura.

"So, it can stop and reuse it too, huh?" Alex thought.

How long did it remember this aura? Could it learn more than one aura? Was there a way to make it forget an aura? What else could it

learn?

Many questions came to Alex in that moment, all equally important. And sadly, he only had a single pillbug he could afford to experiment

on.

So it was going to take a while.