In her mental space, Feng Xue spoke to Vesa.
"Do you not need to comfort her?"
Vesa chuckled.
"You think everyone can be chosen by the progenitor's blood?
We chose her as our Queen for a reason.
She would not fumble from something like this.
This is only a small pebble on her long and winding road."
While Mingyue struggled on her side, Alex was having the best day of his life.
He laughed loudly as his experiment finally showed results.
Faerith stood beside him, staring at the object in his hand with a dumbfounded expression.
After Alex exchanged objects with Mingyue, he started to experiment with qi, mana crystals, and the artifacts from her world.
From those experiments, he discovered that qi and mana were similar types of energy.
The difference was that qi was denser and wilder, while mana was milder and easier to control.
In theory, this meant that if they used a cultivation system based on mana, the physical requirements for the body would drop drastically.
He had not tried that part yet, since he still needed a test subject.
For now, he focused on switching energy sources and observing the results.
He tested weapons from his world, like the gun Mingyue used, and fueled them with qi.
When powered by qi, they inflicted more damage, but the increased strain damaged the weapon and limited how many times it could be used.
The only exception was when someone like Mingyue used them.
Since she was a cultivator, she could control her qi and make it milder before charging the weapon.
Next, Alex tried using a mana crystal to activate the storage ring.
At first, the progress was slow.
The ring's formation required the user to inject their own qi, so Alex had to create an interface that could inject mana from the crystal into the formation instead.
To do that, he needed to learn the formation from scratch.
For Alex, it did not take long.
With his own abilities and Vesa's help translating several functions he did not understand, the process went smoothly.
"This is just like how a circuit board works," he said.
"The difference is that they use qi, inject it into a specific material, and shape it to produce the result they want."
In Alex's world, a circuit board was an electrical circuit that produced only two outcomes, on or off.
By layering those simple circuits and combining them, people created complex logic, which allowed them to build computers and many other smart devices.
With formations like the storage ring, the possibilities were much larger.
Even the latest research on quantum computers in his world could only handle three different outcomes at once.
Cultivators' formations could handle an infinite number of outcomes, depending on how they were set up.
"No wonder every cultivator has their own array inheritance," Alex said.
"The way they create formations is fundamentally different.
It depends on what kind of pattern of outcomes they want to focus on."
After that, Alex called Faerith and asked her to create both software and hardware according to his ideas.
The result was the object in his hand.
It looked like a cube the size of a 3x3 Rubik's cube, with a small screen set into one of its faces.
Its use was simple.
They only needed to point it at an object and place that object into the storage space.
The screen then showed the contents inside, the storage capacity, and the current charge.
If the mana charge ran out, there was a limit.
The cube had 72 hours to recharge.
If it failed to recharge within that time, everything inside would be destroyed.
Compared to Mingyue's storage ring, this was a step down.
Even so, Alex felt satisfied with the result.
He understood the potential of a product like this.
He could dominate the market with it.
It was a dimensional storage tool that could be charged with mana crystals and sold at an affordable price.
The model he held also had a respectable storage size, a 10 by 10 by 10 meter cubic space.
"Based on the data I read, a real storage ring makes every item inside imperishable," Faerith said.
"I am sure we can add this feature to the storage cube too.
But how did you get this technology?"
Alex did not answer directly.
He tossed the cube toward Faerith instead.
She caught it in a hurry and almost stumbled.
He had his reasons for not including all the functions he could.
He did not want the cube to be able to hold living beings, only inanimate objects.
The only reason Mingyue's storage ring could not store living beings was because there was no oxygen inside; it was a vacuum.
No cultivator in her world understood what oxygen was.
Because of that, instead of solving the oxygen problem, they had created another, crazier invention.
They made small pocket worlds.
According to Mingyue, only immortals owned those.
For Alex, solving the oxygen problem was not difficult.
They could put an oxygen tank inside and fill the storage space with it.
They could add artificial gravity and control the internal pressure to make the space habitable.
Those features would increase the energy requirement for the cube.
However, that was not the main issue for Alex.
If he released a product like that, people would use it for illegal purposes.
They could kidnap people and hide them inside.
They could bring monsters out of dungeons into the real world.
He did not want to cause that kind of chaos.
"That is why I hired you," Alex said to Faerith.
"I do not want to deal with questions like that.
Your job now is to optimize this and make smaller versions people can use as smartwatches, phones, or accessories like jewelry.
Do not forget to add biometric security."
Even with the current cube, Alex knew he needed a careful plan before putting it on the market.
He still was not fully satisfied.
His mind kept working on something more ambitious.
"Vesa," he asked through their telepathic link, "since dungeons work the same way as secret realms, can you take over one too?
Like what you did for Mingyue?"
He waited for her answer.
[As I said before, based on the current King's knowledge, a dungeon is just another world.
So this is not possible, but I need you to enter the dungeon first to make sure.
As for secret realms, they are artificially created by cultivators using formations, and you should know they rarely put countermeasures in case someone tries to hack the array with sophisticated methods from your world since they do not have a concept like this.
The fundamentally different way of utilizing formations is already enough for them.]