Fu Qiong, according to the book, appeared out of nowhere and swiftly defeated the gang leader of a bandit group that was taking residence in the Cardinal Kingdom.

He then slowly defeated everyone and turned the Cardinal Kingdom into his own land. He then slowly started declaring wars against the rest of the kingdoms and one by one defeated them.

It took him 8 years to fully destroy all the 18 different kingdoms that were available at the time and took them all under his own rule.

Once the land was too large to keep calling it a kingdom, he took the chance to call his land an empire and named it the Crimson Empire. Then he named himself an Emperor as well.

Fu Qiong ruled as the first Emperor of the Crimson empire for nearly 6 decades before he retired and passed along his throne to his first son.

The son of the emperor was also talented as well as being very strong. He successfully took over his father's work and continued to keep the empire united.

Thus came the rule of the Fu family. All of that happened nearly 1200 years ago.

Alex was a little stunned as he read all of this. 'It's not different from when our real world was separated and people fought over land. I guess they really did take inspiration from real-life stories to make up this game world,' Alex thought.

He then read the final page of the book.

'It was later revealed that the first Emperor…was not a resident of the Shattered Kingdoms but someone that came from… beyond the Southern Forest.' Alex's eyes went wide when he read that.

'Another person from beyond the southern forest. How does one traverse the giant forest?' Alex wondered. Just as he was wondering that someone tapped on his shoulder.

He was jolted awake from his stupor and quickly turned around. Behind him was Ma Rong who had at some point appeared on the 6th floor.

He looked at the book he was holding and said nothing. Instead, she just gestured for him to follow her. He was curious as to what she had found, so he quickly closed the book and put it away before following her.

Ma Rong climbed the staircase and went up floors without stopping anywhere.

7th floor, 8th floor, finally 9th floor. Only after reaching the 9th floor did she stop climbing the stairs and walked towards the books.

Alex expected her to walk towards the Alchemy section, but instead, she walked towards the Cultivation section. She picked up a book as soon as she reached there as if she knew exactly which one to pick up and turned the page.

Once she reached a certain page, she handed the book to Alex.

Alex curiously looked at the page and was surprised to see the information about the Spirit Cleansing Lily that he had been looking for all this time.

'Finally. No wonder I couldn't find it on the lower floors. It's so high up,' Alex thought. He quickly read the chapter of the lily and learned the thing he had been so desperate to learn for the last 10 days.

'Spirit Cleansing Lily can help unlock the Spiritual Sea of a cultivator before they even reach Saint realm. Simply cultivating with a lily allows one to unlock a spiritual sea.'

'Spirit Cleansing Lily in its raw form is useless for Saint Realm cultivators.'

'Self Tempering or True realm cultivators with unlocked Spiritual sea can use Spirit Cleansing lily to expand their Spiritual sea.'

'A cultivator can only use 3 Spirit Cleansing Lilies in their lifetime... So that's what it was. I used up all of my available lily turns. So I guess I can no longer use the lilies huh. That would be quite a waste of these flowers,' Alex thought.

He looked through the book to look for more information, but that was it. There was no information about any pills or items that could be made using the lily as an ingredient.

He was disappointed that he couldn't learn any more information, but what he got was enough to satisfy his thirst for learning what was up with the lilies.

He turned towards Ma Rong who was looking at the book behind his back and thanked her.

Ma Rong nodded and left, basically leaving him to do what he wanted. He decided to look at the book about bodies that were right next to him.

The book recorded information about different bodies but it wasn't extensive enough to be of any use to Alex. In fact, it didn't even have any information about his body.

Alex had to reconcile with the fact that it was pretty much impossible for him to learn anything about his body through the books.

'Maybe there are NPCs out there that know about my body,' Alex hoped.

Once he was done with that section, he went to the Alchemy section but realized that it had information about True Pill making processes.

From what he could read, it wasn't any different from what he was doing, other than the fact that the book was teaching him to use something called Qi sense. He didn't really know what it was so he decided not to bother with it until he was in the True realms.

He tried to search about Yang Jades in the artifact section, but unfortunately, there was none. He could find 0 information about the yang jades.

Alex was a little disappointed regarding that and went to the formation section and started reading those books. He had directly jumped to the 9th floor, so he didn't even know what he was reading right now.

Thankfully, he could recall later on once he was freer and look over the different information he had gotten right now. Still, he didn't want the gaps to exist in his knowledge, so he went down the staircases to the 6th floor once more and started reading everything before going up.

He was going to grind for a little while more.