The storm outside howled like a furious beast, rattling the windows of the lonely laboratory. Lightning lanced across the sky, illuminating shattered glass, broken instruments, and a man hunched over a trembling console.
Professor Lin Jinhai.
Once called a prodigy, once revered in the halls of academia—now nothing more than a ghost of his former self. His dark hair was streaked with gray, his lab coat was burned and patched, and his glasses had a permanent crack through one lens.
The monitors in front of him screamed red warnings: SYSTEM FAILURE. PRESSURE OVERLOAD. TERMINATE SEQUENCE.
But Jinhai's hands never stopped. His fingers danced over the controls with grim precision, feeding the reactor its final dose of stabilizer.
He remembered the betrayal clearly.
The smirks of colleagues who had stolen his research.
The polished handshake of government officials who stripped his name from his own patents.
The laughter of students he had once mentored—who called him "mad scientist" behind his back after they left for lucrative positions.
And his funding? Gone. His name? Buried.
What remained was only bitterness, and the relentless fire in his chest.
"Science isn't meant to be owned by parasites," Jinhai muttered, his voice hoarse from exhaustion. His eyes glowed faintly with the madness of obsession. "If the world rejects truth, then I'll burn myself proving it right."
The reactor groaned. Numbers spiked.
He knew it was unstable. He knew this experiment was reckless. But what did it matter? Either he succeeded, or he would take his cursed legacy with him into the grave.
---
The countdown reached zero.
BOOM!
The chamber erupted in an explosion of fire and steel. Flames clawed across the lab, eating through wires and glass, hurling shrapnel in every direction.
The heat seared his flesh instantly, yet Lin Jinhai laughed through blood and smoke.
For the first time in decades, he felt something real.
If I die here… let it be as proof that I refused to bow.
The world dissolved into fire.
---
Darkness.
Silence.
Weightless emptiness, like drifting in the abyss between stars.
For a moment, Jinhai thought this was death—eternal nothingness.
But then… voices.
---
When his eyes opened again, the first thing he saw was not the sterile white of a morgue, but the crumbling ceiling of a straw hut. Cracks let in cold wind. The air reeked of smoke and burned herbs. His head throbbed violently.
He tried to rise, but his body felt strange—smaller, weaker, younger. He looked at his hands and froze. They were thin, calloused, blistered as though from countless burns. Not the hands of a weary professor in his fifties.
Before he could think further—mocking laughter exploded around him.
"Hahaha! Look at him! He blew up the cauldron again!"
"Trash! Even a basic healing pill is too much for him!"
"Brother Shen, I told you—this furnace idiot isn't worth keeping in the sect!"
Jinhai's gaze darted around. A group of young men in rough gray robes encircled him, pointing and sneering. Behind them, a cracked bronze cauldron still smoked, charred herbs scattered across the dirt floor.
Fragments of memory stabbed into his skull—memories that weren't his.
This body belonged to a disciple of the Azure Flame Sect, a minor alchemy sect at the edge of the realm.
This boy had a reputation: talentless, incompetent, laughed at as "cauldron trash."
And just now, he had once again failed to refine the simplest Grade-1 Healing Pill.
The humiliation weighed heavy, like chains around Jinhai's throat.
So this was his second life?
A joke? A failure, reborn only to be ridiculed again?
---
One youth stepped forward—tall, smug, his robe cleaner than the rest. His name surfaced from the memories: Shen Rong, a senior disciple who delighted in tormenting this body's former owner.
He sneered down at Jinhai.
"Lin, oh Lin… How many times have you failed now? Fifty? A hundred? Tell me, trash—when will you learn to stop wasting our sect's herbs?"
Laughter erupted again.
Jinhai clenched his fists. The ridicule was sharp, but sharper still was the memory of his previous world—where scientists and so-called peers mocked him in the exact same way.
The sting was identical. The betrayal was identical.
Different world, same chains.
Shen Rong leaned closer, voice dripping with disdain.
"You're not even worthy to breathe the same air as us. If I were Elder Han, I'd throw you out right now."
Jinhai's lips curled into a faint smile—not of amusement, but of defiance.
This world didn't know him.
But they would.
---
That night, after the jeers faded and the others left, Jinhai sat alone in a dilapidated hut at the sect's edge. The cauldron lay cracked before him, useless. The smell of burnt herbs lingered, bitter in his nostrils.
He stared into the darkness, fists clenched so tight his nails drew blood.
"Both worlds…" he whispered, voice raw. "Both worlds spit on me. Am I truly destined to be nothing more than a failure, in every life?"
Tears burned in his eyes—not weakness, but fury. The fury of a man crushed one too many times.
And then—
[Ding! Furnace System initialized.]
[Welcome, Host: Lin Jinhai.]
[First Task: Refine a Grade-1 Healing Pill.]
The words weren't spoken. They thundered directly in his mind, cold and mechanical, yet sharper than any blade.
Jinhai froze. His heart hammered.
Then, slowly… a laugh escaped his throat. Bitter at first. Then rising, sharper, until it rang through the hut like crackling fire.
"Hah… hahahaha… finally. This world dares to mock me? Then I'll mock it in return."
His eyes blazed. The humiliation of two lives fused into one molten vow.
"If the world calls me trash, I'll build my throne from the ashes of their arrogance.
If heaven itself dares to suppress me…"
He laid his hand on the broken cauldron. Sparks seemed to flicker in his gaze.
"…then I will refine a pill to defy heaven itself."
Thunder split the sky outside.
Inside that ruined hut, a fire was born that would never die.