Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

Chapter 3529 More Tests

Alex put away the pillbug for a week and cultivated before getting back to it. He wanted to check what would happen if he left the pillbug alone for a while. Would it retain the information about the aura it had produced before, or would it completely forget it?

That was the very first test he wanted to do. If the little critter couldn't remember the aura even after just a week, then there was no way it could be considered a Grade 10 insect.

So, when the pillbug did successfully recreate the Metal aura, Alex wasn't surprised in the slightest.

The information he received during his purchase of the insects said as much, but he had to test it anyway. There was no way he could place blind faith in information that had never been successfully replicated by anyone in hundreds of thousands of years.

After completing the first test, Alex moved on to the next one. He had many of them planned, so he got right to it.

The next test was to see if the pillbug could learn a different aura after having learned the first one. Basically, he wished to test both the possibility of training it in a new aura and how quickly it would learn

it.

He had a general idea of the speed with which it learned the Metal aura, so this time around, he tested its ability using Wood aura. There was no particular reason for choosing this aura, beyond the fact that it was not Fire aura.

With his understanding of Sun Fire, the Fire aura had become a little complex, so he didn't want to complicate the test with something so dissimilar to everything else.

It took nearly twice as long to teach the pillbug the new aura, but it did successfully manage to learn it. It emulated the Wood aura quite perfectly, in fact, just as well as it had the Metal aura.

Alex was happy with that, but the next test would tell him just how good these pillbugs were. He had the pillbug emulate the Metal aura again in order to test its capacity for learning different auras and being able to use them alternately.

Unfortunately, the pillbug failed in this instance. Having learned the Wood aura, it had completely forgotten the Metal aura and needed to be retrained in it. It could not natively retain multiple auras, it

seemed.

Alex sighed a little. "I suppose they would be a little too strong if they could remember every single aura I taught them. Still, I had hoped they could remember a few. What a shame."

While dejected, Alex understood why it was likely not possible. The pillbugs weren't intelligent by any means. They simply changed their state to a point where they could produce one type of aura. Upon reaching that state, they could not freely change to another.

"So it's going to be a single aura per pillbug. Given its strength, I'm going to need multiple pillbugs for anything to be effective at the very least," Alex thought to himself. As a result, he needed to breed many more pillbugs for them to be usable in any scenario.

Alex then moved on to attempting to teach the pillbug some more complex aura. Starting with Metal aura, he moved on to combinations of different Dao auras to see how much the insect struggled as the aura grew more complicated.

The pillbug did well at first, although it took longer to learn the aura. However, after Alex combined four Daos together to form the aura, it struggled quite a bit to learn it all.

Alex waited for it to fully learn, but as time went on, he realized that the pillbug could only partially learn the aura. Instead of learning the entire combination, it only learned a subset.

The combination Alex had tried was an aura that was a mixture of Metal aura, Malleability aura, Ductility aura, and Sharpness aura. These were the most important Daos for his Endless Severing Strike,

so he wanted to see if he could somehow teach the pillbug the technique.

However, forgetting the sword technique itself, the pillbug struggled to learn all four auras at once. It missed the Ductility aura and learned only the other three. No matter how hard Alex tried to teach it more, it simply couldn't.

He stopped trying after a while with a sigh, now fully realizing that there was only so much he could teach the bug. 'If it can only learn so much, how useful can it be?' he thought.

The pillbugs were said to be able to use actual techniques by emulating their aura, but if they had a limit on how much they could learn, it wasn't as helpful as he had thought.

Alex scratched the back of his head for a bit, considering the predicament he had fallen into. With the insect's grade, it surely could not be limited to weaker techniques. There had to be

something he was missing.

He did have an idea of sorts, but to test that, he would need another pillbug, and he didn't want to interfere with any of the others for now. Until the four female pillbugs produced their first brood, he wouldn't touch any of them.

So, the test he wished to conduct had to be put off until later.

With that out of the way, Alex decided to continue the other tests for now. The next test involved examining how far away the pillbug could project the aura it emulated. If they could somehow learn different techniques but be unable to hit someone because they had no way of targeting the enemy, that would be a disaster.

So, Alex had to make sure it could do that.

For the sake of simplicity, he taught the pillbug the Wood aura once

again and had it reproduce it. It did so easily, the Wood aura coming

off its entire body.

That was, of course, not enough. Its actual task was to create the aura

and move it a certain distance away.