**Chapter 1: The Catalyst and the Crucible**
The last thing Li Wei remembered was the smell of burnt copper and the shrill scream of alarms.
His lab—a cramped maze of bubbling flasks, humming spectrometers, and scribbled equations—had been his sanctuary. That day, he'd been chasing the impossible: synthesizing a room-temperature superconductor using quantum lattice theory. But the alloy, unstable under pressure, had pulsed like a dying star before erupting. A flash of cobalt-blue light. A wave of heat that vaporized glass and flesh alike. Then—nothing.
---
He awoke to the scent of sandalwood and blood.
His body felt foreign, too light, too *young*. The air was thick with incense, and his vision swam as he struggled to sit up. Rough linen sheets clung to his skin. The room around him was austere: wooden walls carved with serpentine dragons, a single window framing a moonlit mountain peak, and a low table cluttered with jade vials and parchment scrolls.
"Awake at last, Young Master Wei?" A voice dripped with mockery.
Li Wei turned his head too quickly, pain lancing through his temples. A boy in silk robes stood in the doorway, arms crossed. His face was angular, framed by a topknot, and his eyes glinted with disdain. "Three days unconscious after a mere sparring match. Pathetic. The Patriarch was right to call you a waste of resources."
Memories that weren't his own surged into Li Wei's mind like a fractured film reel:
*—A disciple's life of mediocrity in the Azure Cloud Sect.
—Mockery from peers.
—A fist shrouded in emerald Qi slamming into his chest during a duel.
—The shame of collapsing in front of the entire sect.*
He stared at his hands—pale, unscarred, and trembling. *This isn't my body. This isn't my world.*
The boy snorted. "The healers said your dantian's cracked. You'll never cultivate again. Best to crawl back to your peasant village before the next purge."
The door slammed shut.
---
Alone, Li Wei staggered to the window. The mountain outside was impossibly tall, its peak piercing clouds that shimmered with auroras of energy. Below, disciples in flowing robes practiced sword forms, blades trailing streaks of light. In the distance, a colossal bell tolled, its sound reverberating through the air like a physical force.
*Qi.* The word echoed in his mind. This world's energy—the foundation of its power. But the memories told him cultivation here was slow, dogmatic, bound by rigid mantras and wasteful rituals.
A laugh escaped him, raw and disbelieving. *They're stuck in the dark ages.*
On the table, a jade vial glinted. He uncorked it, sniffing. The elixir inside reeked of sulfur and herbs. *An inferior redox reaction. They're destroying half the active compounds by overheating.*
His fingers twitched. In his past life, he'd optimized chemical processes for Fortune 500 companies. Here, they called it "alchemy."
He limped to a dusty shelf and grabbed a scroll. Diagrams of meridian pathways, annotated with poetic nonsense: *"The river of Qi must flow like the tears of heaven."*
*Flow rate. Pressure. Catalysts.* His mind raced. If Qi was energy, it could be quantified. *Modeled. Engineered.*
A plan crystallized.
He tore a blank parchment and began scribbling equations, translating spiritual terms into variables. The cracked dantian? A damaged reactor core. Meridians? Conduits with variable resistivity.
By dawn, he'd drafted a blueprint: a magnetic array to realign Qi particles, paired with a herbal compound to repair cellular damage. It was reckless, half-theoretical.
*But so was superconductivity.*
---
As sunlight bled into the room, Li Wei stumbled into the sect's herb garden. He ignored the sneers of passing disciples, plucking feverfew and starroot. Back in his room, he crushed the leaves with a mortar, adding drops of wine stolen from the Elders' cellar.
The mixture fizzed, releasing ozone-scented vapor. *Anaerobic fermentation. Perfect.*
He drank it in one gulp.
Fire exploded in his veins. His vision whited out.
When it cleared, his dantian hummed—not with the sect's sluggish energy, but with a crisp, electric current.
On the desk, his magnetic array glowed, bending the moonlight into a helix around him.
Li Wei grinned.
*Let them call me a heretic.*