I Won't Be a Furnace, I'll Become the Ancestor of Alchemy

Lin Zhongyuan stood at the pinnacle of the Dao of Alchemy, 365 pill marks in his palm. The last was a freshly forged Nine-Turn Creation Pill. Using heaven and earth as his furnace and the stars as charcoal, he had spent 3,300 years refining it, until he had refined himself into it as well. On the day the pill was completed, pill rain fell across the Nine Heavens Immortal Realm for three days, while the cultivators in the thirty-six viewing stands fell silent for a single breath.

But at the moment the pill was completed, what he saw was not a pill, but the entrance to another world.

When he opened his eyes again, he had become the lowest-ranking servant of the Qingyun Sect. He lived in a leaky servants' quarters and tended other people's discarded pill furnaces. Liu Hanshuang, the female disciple he had once taught, was now the one dragging him out of the sect's gates. The alchemy genius he had once guided was now a messenger for the Hehuan Sect.

After reaching the summit of alchemy over three thousand years, he had fallen back to the stove in a single day. He did not argue, cry, or accept his fate. He swept the furnace, scraped away old ash, memorized the properties of herbs, and broke down every pill he had refined in his previous life into the parts he could use that very night. At the pill-making contest, he used the worst kind of fire to refine a living pill, leaving the whole hall in an uproar. On the day he was expelled from the sect, he did not look back, only swallowing his resentment into the furnace flames.

The old debts of the Hehuan Sect, the origins of the living-p pill technique, and the lamp that had burned dry in Zhao Yi's study all emerge, one by one, over these sixty chapters.

And that crushed butterfly-wing powder finally returned to his palm. A debt from three hundred years ago had come knocking on its own.

Theme: A furnace vessel? No, I'm here to refine you.