Alex got into the artifact after filling it with as many Spirit stones as he could. He had placed enough so that the artifact would run for over 2 days easily.

That was how long he wanted to cultivate.

Inside, he was surrounded by the pieces of rocks that he was using himself today. He could’ve used any sort of materials he wanted. It didn’t just have to be rocks, but it could also be glasses, metals, wood, ceramics, anything.

As long as it was hard and somewhat sharp, it could work. However, no matter what materials it was that the book told him would be useful, Alex didn’t believe it would be any more useful than what he had used already.

He had currently access to exactly 3 things. The first were normal rocks that Whisker had been using, there was no way he was going to use them, so they were out of the picture.

The second material was the nuggets of gold that he had mined from the Golden Mountain. While Gold was relatively strong, Alex didn’t find it strong enough for his body.

Weak may he be, his body was still in the Saint Core realm. It was nearly realm below his normal cultivation base, sure, but it was still stronger than most people had.

So, Alex had to go for the final material he had.

Starforged Tungsten.

Starforged Tungsten was not just heavy, they were significantly difficult to manipulate normally as well because of their toughness. They were what Midnight, Memory, and the rest of his swords were made up of, so there was no doubt about its quality.

And what Alex was using today were nuggets of this very tungsten that he had yet to refine properly. These were somewhere between ore and raw metal due to the process he used to acquire them.

They were nearly fist-sized and were stacked up around him inside the artifact, ready to hurt him. Alex had smaller-sized pieces too, but this metal was so strong that he didn’t want to take the chances at all.

He was going to start with just the large ones.

He took a deep breath and remembered how much he was spending on this artifact right now. Running the artifact with something this heavy for 2 days cost him over 10,000 Saint Spirit stones at once. That was enough to run him dry in just a few weeks if he used it continuously.

“I’ll go poor if I have to spend this much each time,” he thought to himself. If only he could use some other method of activation.

Curiously, he reached for the base of the artifact and touched it with his palm. He tried to feel the formation that was hidden underneath this and slowly added Qi into it.

His Yang Qi could activate normal formations, so he hoped this one would work as well. However, after just trying it once, he knew that wasn’t going to work at all. 𝓫𝓭𝓸𝓋𝓁．𝓬𝓸𝓂

“Well, at least I tried,” he thought. “I will have to wait until I have Immortal Qi too.” He was going to have to wait until he was in the Saint Transformation realm before he tried it again.

“Screw it, let’s just start,” he thought and activated the artifact.

The top of the artifact closed up all of a sudden, making the inside dark. Alex tipped down the artifact as a whole horizontally and let the spin take him.

At first, the speed at which he spun wasn’t that fast. However, as time went on, it started catching speed. A vortex seemed to form beneath his feet that dragged in all the metal nuggets from around Alex.

As it dragged it in, the pieces of the metal nuggets struck Alex. One after another they all started to hit him.

Alex was caught by the vortex as well and he spun along with it all. The nuggets and he spun around hitting each other. Alex felt the pain, but there wasn’t as much damage as he had expected from it.

However, that was just the start it seemed. The vortex got even faster and the stones started hitting him even harder.

And then the pain began.

Alex felt the pain flare up all over his body as the intensity got stronger and stronger. It was reaching the point that was normally what he felt when he was with Pearl.

And the intensity was only getting harder. As he tumbled inside the massive artifact, he could feel the wetness of his skin and the smell of blood around him.

He could feel the pain that he hadn’t in a very long time. It hurt so much, and it was only increasing.

Alex tumbled inside, getting dizzy from all the spinning. His body lost blood every second and every second his body regenerated, filling the blood back into his body.

Slowly, the blood from his body started wetting the outside so much that he could feel the droplets striking him.

Alex knew he needed to use them somehow, but all the pain and all the spinning caused him to be unable to do anything. He simply did nothing as he was pelleted continuously by the fist-sized rocks.

He suffered in silence for a long period of time. He knew how long he had set the artifact running for, but he couldn’t tell what time it was at the moment. How long had he been feeling this pain?

He was reminded of the first time he went through body cultivation. The pain he felt then, the torture that caused him to feel scared of body cultivation altogether. That was the sort of pain he was feeling once more.

Only this time, he knew he had to take it all.

He opened his eyes sometime later as the artifact slowly stopped. The vortex slowed down and he could finally rest a little.

As he did, he saw a symbol on the inside of the lid slowly dim down to the point where he couldn’t tell what it was.

Then, it all finally stopped.