The night her dantian shattered, Su Li was cast out of the Yunya Sect with nothing but half a hard, cold ration in her arms. On a desolate cliff, close to death, she rescued an abandoned cat with fur as black as night and golden patterns in its eyes. People called it the “Emotion-Devouring Cat,” and said anyone who touched it would go mad. No one knew that the cat could devour the emotions of all living things, or that she could use emotions as fuel to make pills: rage became a Blood-Burning Pill that helped her break through, grief became a Bone-Healing Pill that could save a life, and even the faintest emotions of plants and insects could go into the furnace. In an age of declining spiritual energy, when the art of alchemy had collapsed, she traveled the wastelands with her cat, taking in abandoned spirit beasts and binding all living things with contracts forged from emotion. The disciple once cast out stood amid the ruins with an alchemy furnace in hand. “Emotions are no illusion. Every one of them can lead to the Great Dao.” When her former sect begged her for life-saving pills, she tapped the cat's ear. “Today, you'll get a taste of despair.”
