In the sixteenth year of the Guangxu reign, Western learning spread eastward. Western alchemical powers followed foreign merchants into China, seized control of mining and monopolized disaster relief. They spoke of rules and equivalence, but in truth they bullied their way through the markets and preyed on ordinary people.
Everyone believed alchemy required arrays and exact compensation, unaware that the Eastern alchemical arts had another tradition: the way of bearing the burden within oneself.
Chen Shabai, the last inheritor of the Chen clan’s alchemical arts in Lingnan, underwent forty-nine days of medicinal bathing from childhood to cultivate the Cinnabar Embracing the Origin Method. This forged a body in which mercury and blood energy coexisted, making him naturally immune to mercury poisoning and able to wield mercury as a weapon with his bare hands, without any array diagrams.
After stepping in to do justice in Fushan Town, he drove out foreign masters, broke through encirclements, and entered the national alchemists’ tournament. The name White Mercury Chen resounded across the north and south, and he was even officially appointed a Mercury Alchemist.
