Chen Wei volunteered for the most humiliating position available: assistant to Alchemist Gu, a bitter old woman whose pills consistently ranked among the sect's worst. No one wanted to work with her, which made her lonely and desperate for company.
"You want to apprentice?" Gu squinted at him suspiciously. "Your meridians are trash. You can't even sense pill refinement properly."
"This disciple understands," Chen Wei replied humbly. "But I can still perform menial tasks—gathering ingredients, maintaining furnaces, organizing storage. And I'm willing to learn theory even if I cannot practice."
The loneliness won out over suspicion. "Fine. But I don't pay. You work for knowledge alone."
"This disciple is grateful."
Over the next month, Chen Wei performed his duties flawlessly while absorbing everything about alchemy. Not to become an alchemist—he genuinely couldn't with his crippled meridians. But to understand the systems, the ingredient interactions, the subtle ways pills could be contaminated.
More importantly, he gained access to the alchemist quarter's storage rooms, where ingredients for all sect pills were kept.
Including the materials for Foundation Establishment Pills.