Kai, still reeling from the whiplash of Gin’s unexpected competence, finally found his voice. The words came out slow and thick with disbelief. “Gin. Hold on. How… how in the world do you know all this?”

  Gin blinked, his expression genuinely puzzled. “Know what?”

  “All of it!” Kai gestured wildly toward the now-silent pavilion. “The make of the cauldron, the emergency shut-off, the nine-fold distilled water, the properties of the herbs… that’s not common knowledge. That’s specialized alchemical expertise.”

  A look of understanding, followed by dismissive confusion, crossed Gin’s face. “Oh, that? That’s just… basic stuff.”

  “Basic?” Kai, Lulu, and the three disciples said in near-unison.

  “Yeah, basic,” Gin insisted, as if explaining that rain was wet. “It’s all the same principle of cultivation. You take a raw impure things and you refine it. You take unprocessed herbs and muddy water, apply some heat and energy, and you get a pure elixir. You take the wild, natural qi of the world, pull it into your body, and refine it in your dantian into usable energy. It’s all alchemy. The cauldron is just a bigger, fancier, dantian. See? Simple.”

  Kai could only stare, his mouth slightly agape. It was perhaps the most brilliantly wrong, yet somehow logically consistent, explanation he had ever heard. “Gin… that’s… that’s not alchemy. Cultivators liken the process of refinement in their core to alchemy. It’s a metaphor. They are two completely different disciplines with entirely separate processes, principles, and laws! One is an internal art of the spirit, the other is an external science of materials and reactive energies!”

  “Really?” Gin sounded genuinely surprised, his eyebrows raising so high they almost disappeared into his blue-dusted hairline. It was as if Kai had just told him the sky was actually green.

  In that moment, Kai remembered Gin’s background. His cultivation wasn't handed down by a master or learned in a orthodox sect; it was patched together from scavenged manuals and self-taught experimentation, learned in isolation with almost no one to correct his assumptions. Gin had built his entire understanding of the world on a foundation of profound—yet wildly inventive—misunderstandings.

  Seeking confirmation, Gin turned to the one person he knew whose knowledge was unimpeachable. “Lulu? He pullin’ my leg? It’s not the same thing?”

  Lulu adjusted her glasses. “Um, no. It is exactly as Kai said. The comparison is purely allegorical. Internal qi refinement and external pill alchemy are two completely distinct and separate fields of study. The principles do not directly translate. Even our three… ahem… disciples here know that.” She gestured toward the blue trio, who were currently living proof of what happens when you confuse the two.

  All three disciples, Chen Gong, Lu Bu, and Zhang Liao, nodded vigorously in agreement with Lulu. It was the one thing today they were unequivocally, undeniably right about.

  Gin stared at them all for a long moment, his face a comical mask of blue dust and dawning realization. He looked down at his gourd, then back at the pavilion, then at his hands, as if seeing them for the first time. “Huh,” he grunted, the sound laden with a world of reassessment. “All this time… I just thought I was really bad at the ‘internal’ part of cultivation.” He took another long drink, this one seeming more contemplative than celebratory.

  As the sheer depth of Gin's misconception settled over the group, another memory surfaced in Kai’s mind, clicking into place. He remembered Gin’s stories about his past, about the time he’d spent hiding in the mountains, under the dubious patronage of Su Pei, the son of an elder from the Blue Storm Crane Sect.

  Gin had spoken of Su Pei with a grudging sort of gratitude, mentioning how the young master would supply him with "manuals" to aid his solitary cultivation. Kai had always pictured standard cultivation texts: guides on qi circulation, martial techniques, meditation. But now, seeing this, a horrifyingly clear picture emerged. The "manuals" Su Pei had been supplying weren't for internal refinement at all. They were alchemy manuals. While Gin thought he was learning to refine his own qi, he was actually, meticulously, learning to purify herbs and minerals. He hadn't been building his foundation; he'd been building a world-class alchemical knowledge base, all while mistakenly applying its principles to his own cultivation. Gin had been training to become an alchemist without even knowing it.

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  This revelation then connected to another, more alarming memory. Gin’s magnum opus, the Five-Peak Mountain Dew wine. Gin had told Kai about some of the rare ingredients required. At the time, Kai had thought Su Pei’s had procured those expensive components. Now, he was having second thoughts.

  “Gin,” Kai began, his voice carefully neutral, though his heart was beginning to hammer against his ribs. “Those ingredients you mentioned for your Five-Peak Mountain Dew… How many of those did you actually… synthesize yourself, instead of just using what was given to you?”

  Gin scratched his blue-stained chin, thinking back. “Oh, that. Well, Su Pei couldn’t always get what I wanted. Instead, he’d always show up with the base materials, but never the perfected components. Said they were too hard to find. So I had to make ‘em. Wanna say… somewhere between eighty to ninety percent I had to whip up myself. Took awhile to get the processes right, I’ll tell ya that. Had to re-read the manuals a dozen times. Why?”

  Kai’s eyeballs nearly popped out of his skull. The air left his lungs in a soft whoosh. The ingredients Gin had just casually mentioned synthesizing were extremely rare, because they couldn’t be found in nature. They had to be synthesized, and the processes were secrets guarded jealously by the most elite alchemical sects. The liquefied core of a Millennium Spirit Carp alone was a mythical substance said to require a ninety-nine-day refinement in a star-iron cauldron under a specific lunar array.

  Kai had foolishly assumed Su Pei was a wealthy patron bankrolling a talented, if unorthodox, vintner. The truth was far more exploitative. Su Pei wasn't a patron; he was a parasite. He’d provided the raw, worthless weeds and a stack of mediocre manuals, and Gin—with his drunken, unknowing genius—had performed miracles, transforming dross into gold.

  Su Pei had then taken that gold, bottled it, and undoubtedly sold it for a fortune, all while letting Gin believe he was merely a failed cultivator living off charity.

  The sheer, audacious scale of the deception was breathtaking. The clarity of it all struck Kai with the force of a physical blow, and he looked at the blue-stained, confused man before him not as a fool, but as perhaps the greatest and most tragically exploited natural talent he had ever encountered.

  “I think… I just discovered something unbelievable about you, Gin,” Kai said, his words heavy with the weight of the revelation. He pinched the ridge of his nose, trying to stave off a headache born from wasted potential. “Your physique… it’s the greatest misdirection of all time. If you had been born with any other physique—or even with none at all—you wouldn’t have been just a cultivator. You could have been an alchemist. A true master. Maybe even a Grandmaster.”

  The clearing fell silent. The disciples watched, wide-eyed, understanding they were witnessing something far more significant than a simple scolding.

  Gin didn’t react with excitement or pride. Instead, he simply looked up, his bleary gaze fixing on a distant point in the sky as if searching for answers among the clouds. He took a long, slow pull from his gourd, not for celebration, but for fortification. His whole life, his entire identity, had been built around a single, crushing narrative: he was a failure. A cultivator who could only function as a parody of himself, a drunkard whose power was a joke. To have that narrative upended so completely was not liberating; it was disorienting.

  “Oh. Huh,” he grunted, the sound devoid of its usual boisterous energy.

  He was silent for a long time, processing a lifetime of missed opportunities and misdirected paths. When he finally spoke, his voice was quieter, softer, carrying a surprising and weary introspection Kai had never heard from him before.

  “You know,” Gin began, still not meeting anyone’s eyes, “if you’d told me that twenty years ago… I think I might’ve been happy. Maybe even over the moon. It’s finally something I was actually good at, instead of being a useless drunk.” He finally looked down, his expression a complex mix of wry amusement and deep sorrow. “But now? After a lifetime of being the punchline? After I’ve already made my peace, laid down that burden, and decided to just… be the drunk? Hearing it now just feels… hollow. It doesn’t inspire me to pick up the pieces. It just makes me tired. The knowledge doesn’t change much. It just makes it feel worse.”

  The raw, unexpected honesty of his words hung in the air, a sobering counterpoint to the earlier chaos. It wasn't a refusal born of laziness or spite, but the quiet, devastating acceptance of a man who had already mourned the person he might have been and had learned to find a strange, broken peace in the man he was forced to become. The tragedy wasn't that he was a failed cultivator; it was that he had been a master alchemist all along and had never gotten the chance to know it.

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