Mortal Martial Arts, Immortal Pills

Lin Chen, a boy from Qingniu Village, grew up lonely and destitute. His father was killed by a tiger demon when he was eleven, and his mother died of illness soon after, leaving him alone to struggle through the mire of the mortal world.

When he was seventeen, a local thug came to his door with a fake debt, intent on humiliating him. His childhood friend Su Wan took a pair of scissors and killed the villain to give him a chance to escape, then ended her own life before his eyes. As Lin Chen lay dying, his blood soaked through the half-piece of ancestral jade he carried, awakening a medicinal garden space: before he reaches the martial realm, it is forever limited to one mu of black soil and a single spirit spring. Only after he begins cultivating immortality will its true wonders unfold.

Everyone says mortals and immortals are worlds apart, an iron law unbroken since antiquity: no matter how powerful mortal martial arts become, even a peak-stage innate warrior cannot match someone at the fourth level of Qi Refining. And fire, earth, and metal are widely considered useless spiritual roots. Even if their owners enter an immortal sect, they are fit only to be the lowliest servants in a medicinal garden.

Lin Chen is determined to defy the rules. He hides his abilities in the outer sect's medicinal garden, secretly cultivating ordinary plants into spirit herbs. He uses a discarded pill furnace to practice alchemy in secret, cultivating both the pill path and martial arts. Outwardly submissive, he quietly puts down roots. From Qingfeng Mountain to the far northern ice fields, he travels across the four regions in pursuit of the Dao. Along the way, he meets an old herbalist from the streets, an aged cultivator guarding a mountain, a kindred spirit in alchemy, and an old monk in the Gobi. He forms bonds and says goodbye, time and again. Blades are hidden amid the everyday bustle, and regrets sink deep into the bones.

Only after he shatters the barrier between mortals and immortals with one punch and inherits an ancient legacy of alchemy does he uncover the truth of eighty thousand years ago: the ancient world of alchemy was not destroyed by civil war. The Alchemy Venerable sacrificed himself to seal away the demons from beyond the heavens. True immortality was never about ascending alone. It was about protecting the countless homes and hearths of the mortal world.

A mortal defies the immortals, and alchemy and martial arts stand as equals.