The Pillfire Illuminates the Heavens, Book Five of the Myriad Dao Everbright series
Across the seas of medicine in the myriad heavens, spirit herbs can prolong life, and immortal fire can extend one's years. But once you entrust your life to someone else's furnace, immortality can become a shackle.
The young pill cultivator Du Heng begins by opening a furnace to save a loved one. He competes in medicinal tides, ventures into a sleeping palace, and crosses the Sea of Worlds, tempering his own life-flame through alchemy and combat. Even with his medicine pouch empty and his borrowed furnace shattered, he can still face powerful foes. From a humble medicinal hut to the immortal realms, he will become an immortal through his own path of alchemy and pass that path on to those who come after.
Records of exchanged flames from the ancient immortal sleeping palace resurface. An old rescue during a trial of transformation gradually reveals the price of the immortal realms' method of prolonging life. The Pill Marquis who monopolizes the medicine valleys, the Pill Envoys who seize inheritances by force, and the Immortal Lord of Longevity who sustains the immortal realms with living furnaces will all refuse to let a new path of alchemy take their medicine supply and authority.
Du Heng and Tao Zhu pursue the Dao together. They compete for medicine, protect their boat, and leave a door open for each other to return home. Their companions each have their own attachments, and their disciples dare to alter their master's pill recipes. Their journey is full of laughter and pranks, but also people who cannot be brought back, no matter how fine the pill.
When the Immortal Lord personally intervenes, seeking to fold the new school of alchemy into his great furnace, Du Heng must face him with an immortal fire that truly belongs to him.
He must win this battle among the immortals of the myriad heavens and leave behind an inheritance that lets people cultivate, fight, and become immortals on their own, so that longevity is no longer a flame others can kindle or extinguish at will.
