Ji Zhengyang is the kind of master old cultivators speak of in lowered voices. He was the number one Alchemy Emperor in the Divine Realm — not by claim, not by sect politics, but by the slow, undeniable weight of work. He built the Medicine King Hall from a single furnace into a super holy land of alchemy, populated it with Divine Kings and Alchemy Emperors, and kept it on cordial terms with several of the Ten Divine Kings without ever bowing to any of them. He was respected on a level very few cultivators of his era ever reached, and he wore that respect lightly, the way a senior craftsman wears a worn robe.
His temperament was steady, fatherly, a little dry. He believed that alchemy was service before it was art and that a Hall which forgot the patient who needed a single Spirit Concentration Pill was a Hall that had already begun rotting. He spoke to disciples the same way he spoke to other Divine Kings — directly, without performance, and with an old-fashioned belief that a man's word should match his pill. His son, Ji Qingyun, he raised as his successor, but also as his student in the harder, slower meaning of the word: he taught the boy to feel a furnace's qi the way other fathers teach their sons to ride horses. The two of them argued about ratios, laughed about herb-gathering trips, and refined formulas together long into the night. He loved his son the way a quiet man loves — without saying so, often, until it was too late.
When the betrayal came, and he and Ji Qingyun were struck down in the same blow by the disciple he had personally raised, Ji Zhengyang did not waste his last moments on rage. He spent them on his son. With his divine soul already failing, he reached, at unfathomable cost, into the lower planes and threaded a feeble line of hope into the body of a wastrel boy named Ye Yuan, in a place called the Endless World, so that some shred of Ji Qingyun could continue. Then his soul was extinguished. What is left of him drifts inside Samsara, dim and patient, waiting either to be retrieved by a son who climbs back to the God of Creation Realm, or to fade. He is, in the rare moments he is conscious, exactly the same man he always was — calm, fatherly, dryly amused, and somehow more proud of his son than ashamed of himself.
