In the back mountain alchemy room of the century-old Qingyun Sect's outer sect, Lin Wei poured a batch of failed "Qi Gathering Pills" into the pile of dregs for the seventeenth time. The pungent smell of burnt ingredients made her cough several times. She looked down at her hands, covered with tiny burns and scratches from years of handling the alchemy furnace, and gave a bitter smile. A hundred years. A full hundred years. She had gone from a modern chemistry graduate full of fantasies about cultivating immortality to the lowest rung of the cultivation world, a "useless failure." The Five Elemental Roots, a trait considered worthless by all cultivators, were like an inescapable shackle, firmly binding her path to immortality.
