Alchemy, Not Dual Cultivation

On the day his master ascended, Zhan Yang saw no celestial gate, only a silver hook piercing through his master, dragging the Pill King into a giant furnace behind the clouds. His master left only one message: What ascends is not an immortal, but a medicine. Three months later, the taciturn Zhan Yang was sent to the hospital by his family. On the twenty-first day of hospitalization, he left the ward in his hospital gown and ran into Zhao Yuehui, a prominent figure in the mystical world, begging for help to save his wife. Both the hospital and renowned fire cultivators were helpless, but Zhan Yang used a wisp of chaotic fire to burn out a silver thread from the patient's blood, identical to the one from the ascension platform. A single furnace of Returning Breath Pills saved the big shot's wife, and a piece of silver residue led him to the Feng family's medicinal garden, sealed for twelve years. From then on, aristocratic families sought his pills, sects vied for his medicine, and the powerful owed him favors. He began to leverage alchemy to shake the modern mystical world. But he soon discovered that ascenders were ingredients, sects were furnaces, and disciples' deaths could be exchanged for cultivation. The so-called master of the mystical world was merely a host harvesting the mortal realm for the upper realm. He used chaotic fire to devour strange flames and refine poisons, and used profound yin ice seeds to seal medicinal properties and sever silver hooks, rising from a Qi-refining alchemist to a dual cultivator of ice and fire. When the silver hooks rained down on the mortal world again, everyone wondered who could become an immortal. But Zhan Yang lit his furnace, determined to refine the path to immortality, the system, and the existence behind the hooks—all together. — Description from novelcodex.org