Xianxia Alchemy in the 40th Millennium

“Let’s cut you open and see what’s useful, eh?”

I didn’t have much to work with. I’d only been here a week—or at least, my consciousness had only overridden the previous personality of this body for a week. So, instead of a scalpel, I had a combat knife. A really sharp one, but still, it was meant for stabbing and killing and some utility, not alien biology. Not the right tool for the job, but good enough for what I needed.

The thing lying on my table was a very rare alien specimen. Just looking at it gave me a strange, two-pronged headache. Lark Hudson, the previous owner of this body, had seen these before. His memories were casual about it, almost bored. I, the new occupant, had never seen an alien in my life. So one part of me was fascinated. The other part couldn’t be bothered.

It was technically native to the planet, not an off-worlder. Not sapient, but definitely sentient. A predator with six legs, its body covered in a mix of fur and chitin. Each leg ended in a six-toed paw, claws tucked neatly away. Nose to tail, it was about six feet long. The colonists called them Kuvaris Wolves—named after the planet itself, Kuvaris—because of the vague canine resemblance. Usually they roamed in packs of a dozen or more, but I’d found this one limping alone in the woods outside Keelana, the main Imperial colony.

Killing it had been… messy. But it was my first kill in this new life, so I decided it counted as an accomplishment. I dragged it back with me for “official study.” My militia badge meant I didn’t get many questions—our job was to protect the colonists from things like this, and sometimes that meant bringing back a corpse for examination. The only person who bothered to ask was Yoseh, a fellow patrolman.

“What—ugh—what are you doing with that, Lark?”

“Art project,” I told him.

“Cool.” And that was the end of it.

Now, I stood over the table, knife in hand, and cut into its abdomen—the one place not armored with chitin. Warm, dark blood welled up as the blade parted muscle. My “quest”—and I mean that literally—had told me to process its organs for a Pill of Awakening.

The requirements were floating in the corner of my vision, clear as day:

Active Quest/s:
Quest: Pill of Awakening
Objective: Create and consume a Pill of Awakening by processing the following ingredients: [Kuvaris Wolf Heart x1], [Kuvaris Wolf Liver x1], [Kuvaris Wolf Claw x3], and [Ethanol].
Reward: Access to [Alchemical Cultivation System], access to [Cultivation Market], 5000 Yai, and one free random item from the [Cultivation Market].

This had started happening the day I woke up here. Quite literally, this was the first thing I saw before I actually woke up—a neat little floating list of things I had to collect hovering in my vision like I was an RPG main character in a training tutorial. And it’d been there ever since. At some point, I decided to just go along with it and see where it’d take me. That was how I found myself elbow-deep in a Kuvaris Wolf.

Fortunately, their organs were pretty straightforward. Everything was roughly where you’d expect it to be if you were working on an oversized dog crossed with a crab. I had a xenobiology handbook open beside me, just in case something inside decided to spit acid or eject a spike into my face. The diagrams helped—bright, cross-section drawings with little labels in neat Imperial Gothic.

The heart was the first to go. Big, heavy thing, about the size and shape of a very large potato, warm in my hands and still slick with blood. The liver came next, then the rest, each one smaller than the last—apple-sized, plum-sized, some barely bigger than a walnut. They went into a glass bowl I’d pre-filled with ice, the chunks of frozen water clicking and shifting under the weight of each organ.

Ethanol wasn’t going to be a problem. Keelana might not have much in the way of manufacturing, but it had vodka—lots of vodka. The locals brewed it from whatever nut-flavored crop grew well in the soil here, then shipped it across the Imperium as a novelty drink for Pleasure Worlds. Fancy planets paid premium prices for it. Here, it was cheaper than bottled water. Lark Hudson apparently liked to drink, so there was already an entire cooler full of the stuff in the kitchen.

The quest hadn’t given me any actual instructions, which was inconvenient. The first and only idea that came to mind was simple: throw it all in the blender and hope for the best. I chopped the organs into smaller pieces with the kitchen knife, the blade sticking slightly each time it passed through muscle. The claws were another story. Too hard to cut. Too hard to break. I just left them whole and figured the blender could deal with them.

This was no regular blender, either. It was an industrial-grade, colony-issued machine built for processing food stock for long-haul transport. The manufacturer’s catalog had claimed it could grind bones into dust. That sounded promising.

I set it up on the counter, plugged the cable into the wall socket, and scraped the last of the bloody chunks into the pitcher. It was full to the brim—meat, ice, claws, and a generous splash of vodka for good measure. I pressed the lid down, made sure it was secure, and hit the power switch.

The blender roared to life, metal blades whining under the load. For about three seconds, it sounded like it might actually work. Then something inside gave a sharp, mechanical snap, followed by a muffled pop. The casing bulged slightly.

And then the whole thing exploded with enough force to send me hurling backwards. 

I landed on my back, luckily right on my bed. The impact rattled my teeth and bounced my head off the pillow. My ears rang like someone had shoved a beehive into them, and my vision spun in lazy circles. Something warm and wet trickled down my side. For a second, I figured it was just the liquefied wolf juice from the blender decorating me like a Jackson Pollock piece.

Then my brain caught up. Oh, shit—the cleanup. That was going to be a nightmare. I sighed, rubbed my face with a shaky hand, and muttered, “Son of a bitch.”

When my vision steadied, I sat up and looked around. That’s when I realized something was… off. My little apartment wasn’t painted red in meat slurry and vodka like I’d expected. The counters, walls, and ceiling were all clean. Not a drop anywhere. No chunks of chitin hanging from the light fixture. No puddles soaking into the carpet.

The wetness on me wasn’t from the wolf. It was from me.

I glanced down and found one of the blender’s jagged blades sticking out of my chest like a misplaced brooch. Not deep—thank the Emperor—but far enough in that every instinct I had screamed to leave it alone. Instead, I gritted my teeth and yanked it out in one sharp motion.

“Ffff—ah—okay,” I hissed, tossing the bloody piece of metal onto the floor. It clattered and spun once before lying still, a smear of red marking its arc. My shirt stuck to me, warm and damp, but I ignored it and stepped over to the remains of the industrial blender.

Most of it was in pieces—plastic casing blown apart, motor housing cracked, pitcher shattered into jagged shards. In the middle of the mess, resting neatly on the floor as if someone had placed it there, was a pill.

It glowed faintly, a deep ember red, like a coal pulled from a fire but shaped like a Vitamin C capsule.

“This has to be it,” I said to no one. The Pill of Awakening. My supposed reward for blender-related self-mutilation.

I crouched down and picked it up between my fingers. It was warm. Not hot enough to burn, but warm enough to notice. And despite its size, there was something about it—a weight that had nothing to do with mass. Not something I could put into words.

“Well… here goes nothing, I guess.”

It was small enough to swallow without water. I tilted my head back, dropped it in, and let it slide down my throat.

For about two seconds, nothing happened. Then my stomach clenched like I’d just swallowed a live grenade. I fell to my knees, choking, and spat blood onto the floor. It hit the tiles in thick, dark splatters.

The moment the pain spiked, something bright and translucent blinked into existence in my vision.

Congratulations! You have completed the Tutorial Quest! You now have unrestricted access to the [Alchemical Cultivation System] and the [Cultivation Market]. Five thousand Yai has been added to your currency. Additionally, you will be receiving random quests that will reward you with items or Yai, which you can spend in the [Cultivation Market] to purchase anything you can afford.

I spat another mouthful of blood onto the floor, coughed hard enough to make my chest throb, and stared at the glowing text.

“Fucking great,” I muttered, blood dripping from my lips and onto the floor. 

True Name: Alister Kent
Faux Name: Lark Hudson
Progression System: Alchemist
Progression Level: First Inner Gate of Awakening

STR – 12
DEX – 10
VIT – 8
QI – 20

Hint: Increase your QI stat to attain higher Progression Levels. Attaining a higher Progression Level confers permanent buffs to your physical stats. You can increase your QI stat through meditation, completing quests, certain skills, or creating QI-enhancing pills through Alchemy.

Hint: The [Alchemical Cultivation System] does not come with inherent passive or active skills. Skills have to be purchased in the [Cultivation Market]. Note that most high-level skills require a prerequisite skill before they can be made available for purchase. Others require a certain amount of Stat Points or a minimum Progression Level before they can be purchased.

Hint: Yai is the currency used for purchasing anything and everything in the [Cultivation Market]. You can accumulate Yai through the completion of quests or the attainment of achievements.

Would you like to browse the [Cultivation Market]?

No.

Information overload. I’d deal with all of that later, preferably when my brain wasn’t still replaying the blender explosion in slow motion. For now, I needed sleep. I had five hours before my shift started, and Yoseh and I were scheduled to patrol the eastern wilds with a bunch of fresh recruits. The eastern wilds were considered one of the safer patrol zones, which was why novices like us got lumped in with the greenhorns. Still, “safe” on Kuvaris just meant “less chance of being eaten before lunch.”

I crawled onto the bed and lay flat, staring at the ceiling. Sleep didn’t come. My body was tired, but my head was wired, thoughts pinging off each other like loose screws in a dryer. After a while, I gave up and sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, eyes closed.

That was when I felt it.

Somewhere deep in me, just under the ribcage but not quite in the chest—lower, in the gut—was… something. A core. A dense, warm knot of power, humming faintly. A wellspring of golden light in the dark. If I’d read more xianxia novels, I’d probably have recognized it instantly as my “dantian” or something equally dramatic. But I hadn’t, so my only point of reference was “weird glowing stomach thing.” It probably was my dantian, but I had no real way of actually confirming that.

Considering one of my stats was literally called Qi, I figured this was it. The source. The reservoir.

I focused on it, testing whether I could move it. Turns out, I could—about as easily as moving a limb that had fallen asleep, been frozen solid, and then stabbed with a thousand tiny needles. Still, it moved. Slowly. Like sludge through a straw.

I pushed it around inside me, trying to get a feel for how it worked. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then a little notification blinked into my vision:

+1 QI

“Huh?”

I flicked my mental view over to my stats.

STR – 12
DEX – 10
VIT – 8
QI – 21

I’d actually gone up a point. So that counted as meditating? Just… sitting here and poking at my stomach-light?

Before I could try it again, my alarm blared to life beside me, loud enough to make me flinch. I groaned, slapped it off, and sat there for a moment in silence. Five hours gone, zero hours slept.

Time for work.
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New Fic commissioned by the commissioner of Bone King (the continuation of which is something I'm still thinking about now that it doesn't have a commissioner). Anyway, the first chapter will be free for everyone here to read, but I think the other chapters of this will be on Fanfictioneer Too.