A Promise That Leads to Immortality

A traditional cultivation story about an ordinary mortal: “Other people rely on talent to cultivate immortality. I rely on smithing.”

Lu Chen is a good-for-nothing with four spiritual roots, cultivating at just one-tenth the speed of a genius. With the usual path closed to him, he has the Furnace of Myriad Arts, the personal immortal artifact of an ancient Immortal Emperor skilled in a hundred crafts. It can refine spiritual energy, purify pills, forge magic treasures, and fuse cultivation arts.

While other alchemists lose everything when their furnaces explode, he uses his furnace to recycle failed pills and turn out batches of supreme-quality ones. While others gain in one day of meditation what takes him ten, he purifies spirit stones in his furnace and piles up resources until his cultivation catches up. Both the righteous and demonic paths look down on him, calling him nothing but a blacksmith.

Three hundred years later, the geniuses who once mocked him are still struggling at Foundation Establishment, while he has reached the pinnacle of Nascent Soul. When a remnant soul tries to possess him, he has already laid a web of traps in his sea of consciousness. His childhood sweetheart waits ten years for him, and he crawls back from a mountain of corpses to fulfill their promise. His sworn enemy challenges him to a duel to the death, and he shatters the genius's pride with a single sword strike.

The Furnace of Myriad Arts melts all arts into one. On the day he ascends, someone asks him, “So, are you an alchemist, a talisman maker, a smith, or a sword cultivator?” Lu Chen looks at the furnace in his hand and says calmly, “I'm a blacksmith. I forge this Heaven, this Earth, and every injustice under the sun.”