He wasn’t sure if going downhill was the best idea or not, since he didn’t know if stronger beats liked the peak or not.

However, he assumed they did, based on the fact that the density of Qi would always be higher on the peak than in the valley.

Which was why most sects’ hierarchy was based around who got to live higher on a mountain.

Other than that, he thought it was a good assumption to think that the cauldron of his, if it had fallen down on the mountain, would have likely rolled downhill.

So, he wanted to wrap around the mountain range and see if he could find it at all.

As he walked down the mountain, in the span of about 30 minutes, he saw about 3 different beasts fight and kill another one, eating their cores.

’How the hell are there still so many beasts here?’ he wondered. With day-to-day violence like that, most beasts should have died by now.

It was another hour and a half down the mountain later than he realized why that was.

There were too many beasts in the mountains. They liked to mate as much as they fought, giving birth to more beasts than was appropriate.

Them fighting themselves was simply their way of population control.

Finally, Alex managed to reach a patch of land that wasn’t sloped at all. He hadn’t walked down too quickly, but it had still been relatively fast, so he was surprised when he didn’t get her sooner.

’Finally, the valley,’ he thought. There were multiple beasts in his senses, someone ignorant of him, some eying him as food.

Alex ignored all of them. ‘Let’s go find the cauldron,’ he thought and started walking towards his left, hoping he was on the right path to wrap around the mountain.

Just then, a beast entered his vision, a lizard the size of a crocodile. Its body texture was rough with a dull brown color to it. However, when looking closely, one would see that it wasn’t a brown color, but rather a group of many, many vibrant colors, mixing together to become muddy.

’Colorful… venomous?’ Alex thought. That was something he had been taught in his home. If something out in the open was colorful, it was likely venomous and one should stay away from it.

Alex tried to go around it, but it looked like it was staring directly at him.

’True King realm, dammit I cannot fight it yet,’ he thought and tried to back away, instead of going the other way around the mountain.

However, the beast started following him. ‘Why the hell is it following me? I’m just a puny True Disciple 3rd realm,’ Alex thought.

It would make sense for other True Disciple and True Master, even True lords to see him as an easy target and attack. But this was a True King beast. No way in hell would his ‘monster core’ ever be useful to it.

Just then, he noticed two True Lord beasts slowly make their way towards him as well. They seemed to want to eat him right now, but they didn’t.

Alex wondered if there were actually more beasts in the valley than at the mountain top and started frowning at the fact that he might have guessed wrong.

Then 3 more beasts came from his backside, 3 vulture beasts. Then, a pack of wolves with cultivation in the True Master realm.

Now that this many beasts had gathered, Alex couldn’t help but wonder if there was something else going on here that he wasn’t aware of.

It surely wasn’t possible that all of these beasts had come to him just because of the aura of a True Disciple 3rd realm, right?

That was when a thought struck Alex. ‘What if they aren’t here for me?’ he thought and looked in his robes.

The 5 monster cores lay there hidden inside. But while the cores were hidden, their aura certainly was not. And with 5 of them together at once, it must have looked like a buffet to the beasts.

Alex frowned. He cursed himself for not eating the cores, but they were too high level at the time, and he didn’t want to risk fighting such strong beasts’ mental image in his mind when his mind was all he had for now to survive.

And now, it had come back to bite him. ‘I guess it was true when they said a treasure in a weak’s hands is a crime,’ he thought.

Now, the only way to escape this situation in his eyes was to get rid of the treasure.

He was willing to depart with it quite easily as the treasure weren’t very valuable ones, to begin with.

Now, the only thing to understand was who exactly to give the treasure to.

The lizard was clearly the strongest, but if he did send all the cores towards it, the others would like a hound of him to get something for the trouble they went through.

So, Alex brought out the cores and put all four of them into one hand. Then, with not much force to it at all, he threw the cores about 20 meters into the air.

Immediately, the beasts saw what was happening and jumped forward towards the four monster cores in the air.

At the same time, Alex tried to wrap around the lizard and run away.

The lizard saw that and even saw through the fact that Alex had hidden away one of the cores in his robes.

It raised its head up in the air, ready to shoot out its tongue. Just then, Alex threw at it Heaven’s Impact.

The lizard lost its consciousness and started falling down on him. At the same time, other beasts also started noticing him.

Using the lizard as a divide between them, Alex ran away from the group of beasts. However, just a bit further, he could see other beasts making their way toward him as well.

At the same time, he noticed the lizard behind him wake up from its unconsciousness.

’So fast? Does it have a defensive mental skill or what?’ Alex thought. Now there was nowhere to run.

So, he was forced to do something he really didn’t want to at all. That was to use the Earth Devour technique and run away.

As he employed the technique, the ground opened up beneath him. Just as Alex was falling through a crack. Something shot at him from behind.

He turned around in time to block with his sword, but something else sprayed afterward.

The lizard had shot out its tongue at Alex, and its saliva was now all over him.

Just as he fell inside the crack, pain flared all over him. Even as he moved through the ground, and he appeared somewhere else, he felt the pain burn right through him.

The venom of the lizard was getting to him. He could feel his body actively fighting it, but without his help, the body would take some time.

The pain lowered a bit when he reappeared, but suddenly he started drowning too. He had appeared in a body of water and it was washing away some of the acidic nature of the venom that was harming his skin.

Still, very quickly his body finished taking care of the venom that had gotten into him, while the outer one was washed away by water.

However, while the pain was gone, the danger was not. Even though he was in pain, Alex did not lose track of his surrounding.

And in this new surrounding, he felt many more beasts. The water had more beasts than the land. Snakes, fishes, crocodiles, and many other aquatic and amphibians beasts roamed the water.

Alex shot off in the direction he thought was up, towards the place where he could no longer feel the water.

As he shot up, he got closer and closer to the surface. However, just as he was about to go further up, he sensed something like a ceiling above him.

Still, there were no beasts there so he felt okay going there. Once he was out, he looked around with his senses and could see actual rocky ceilings above him, as if he were inside a cave.

’A cave above a pond?’ Alex thought. He flew a little further and noticed the walls surrounding the pond and also the dry land he could go down on.

There were surprisingly no beasts here at all. ‘What is this place?’ he thought and roamed around.

When he reached a wall in the cave, he started walking around the cave while remaining close to the wall to see if he missed something.

When he made a full round of the cave, he frowned. There was no way out. His spiritual sense reached far and wide, but it still couldn’t see the outside. Just a bunch of rock and dirt.

’I must be under a mountain,’ he thought. ‘I wonder how this pocket came to be formed then.’

The cave was about 200 or so meters wide in diameter, with more than half of it being taken over by the large pond in the center.

In total, there really was just about 40 or so meters of actual land to occupy for oneself.

Still, that was enough for Alex. ‘I will rest here for a few days and train,’ he thought. ‘This can also be the place where I go into closed cultivation from now on.’