Glossary / Alchemy and Pills
Alchemy and Pills in Chinese: 80 Terms and Their English Renderings
The furnace trade: refining herbs into pills, the ranks those pills carry, and the cost of taking them.
80 terms
| Chinese | English | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 丹药 | Medicinal Pill | Anything refined into pill form that does something to a body: heal, boost, or force a breakthrough. |
| 丹方 | Pill Formula | The recipe. In practice the actual secret being protected, not the finished pills. |
| 炼丹 | Alchemy | Refining herbs and cores into pills. A profession with its own ranks, tools, and failure rate. |
| 炼丹师 | Alchemist | A cultivator who refines pills. Often valued higher than a fighter of the same realm. |
| 丹炉 | Pill Cauldron | The vessel pills are refined in. A better cauldron means fewer ruined batches. |
| 火候 | Heat Control | Timing and temperature. The part of alchemy that cannot be written down, only learned by ruining batches. |
| 药引 | Catalyst | The one ingredient that makes the rest of the formula work. First thing to go missing. |
| 丹毒 | Pill Toxicity | Residue left in the body by cheap or overused pills. Too much and you stop improving at all. |
| 废丹 | Failed Pill | A batch that came out wrong. Worthless, or actively poison. |
| 丹药品相 | Pill Quality | How clean a pill came out. Decides whether it heals you or quietly damages you. |
| 一炉 | A Batch | One cauldron's worth. Alchemists are judged by how many usable pills come out of one. |
| 筑基丹 | Foundation Establishment Pill | The pill that gets someone into Foundation Establishment. Bought, begged for, or killed over. |
| 破障丹 | Barrier-Breaking Pill | Forces a bottleneck open. Works once; after that the body ignores it. |
| 回气丹 | Qi Recovery Pill | Restores spiritual power mid-fight. The most consumed pill in the genre. |
| 疗伤丹 | Healing Pill | Closes wounds fast. Does not fix broken bones, poison, or damaged foundations. |
| 洗髓丹 | Marrow Cleansing Pill | Flushes impurities out of the body. Painful, and permanently improves the physique. |
| 聚气散 | Qi Gathering Powder | Cheap powder that speeds up early cultivation. What poor disciples can actually afford. |
| 毒丹 | Poison Pill | A pill meant to kill. Sometimes handed over with a smile. |
| 丹成 | Pill Formed | The moment the batch succeeds. Usually announced by scent or a flash of light. |
| 炸炉 | Cauldron Explosion | The batch fails violently. Injures the alchemist and destroys the materials. |
| 淬体液 | Tempering Liquid | The bath that hardens a body being refined. Smells terrible, and costs more than the cauldron it is boiled in. |
| 培元丹 | Origin-Nurturing Pill | The cheap pill everyone starts on. Slow, safe, and despised by anyone with talent. |
| 固元丹 | Origin-Solidifying Pill | Packs down what a breakthrough left loose. Tastes like chalk and prevents a hundred future problems. |
| 凝神丹 | Mind-Focusing Pill | Steadies the mind before a breakthrough. The one pill a cautious cultivator never runs out of. |
| 静心丹 | Calming Pill | Quiets the heart. Used before tribulation, before battle, and before bad decisions. |
| 化婴丹 | Nascent Soul Pill | The pill for forming an infant soul. One of them is worth roughly ten years. |
| 铸基丹 | Foundation-Casting Pill | Taken at the foundation stage to thicken what is already there. Expensive insurance. |
| 洗灵丹 | Spirit-Cleansing Pill | Flushes impurities out of the body. The first one hurts; the tenth is routine. |
| 淬骨丹 | Bone-Tempering Pill | Hardens bone from the inside. Body cultivators buy it by the jar. |
| 生骨丹 | Bone-Regrowing Pill | Regrows what was lost. Absurdly expensive, and the reason crippled characters recover. |
| 续命丹 | Life-Extending Pill | Buys years. Each one buys fewer than the last, and nobody says so up front. |
| 驻颜丹 | Youth-Preserving Pill | Keeps the face young. The single best-selling pill in any market. |
| 解毒丹 | Antidote Pill | Generic antidote. Works on everything common and nothing interesting. |
| 百毒丹 | Hundred-Poison Pill | Poison used as medicine, in doses that would kill a mortal. Effective, and not gentle. |
| 迷魂丹 | Soul-Bewildering Pill | Dulls the will and loosens the tongue. Banned in every righteous sect, sold in all of them. |
| 摄魂丹 | Soul-Capturing Pill | Takes a piece of the soul with it. Demonic path only, and everyone can tell afterwards. |
| 化血丹 | Blood-Melting Pill | Dissolves blood qi into raw power. A demonic shortcut with a short shelf life. |
| 凝血丹 | Blood-Clotting Pill | Stops the bleeding so the fight can continue. The battlefield standard. |
| 补天丹 | Sky-Mending Pill | Legendary pill that repairs a broken foundation. Exists mostly in rumours and dying masters. |
| 九转丹 | Nine-Turn Pill | Refined nine times over. Each turn removes impurity and adds a layer of danger to the process. |
| 三转丹 | Three-Turn Pill | Three rounds of refinement. The realistic ceiling for a good alchemist. |
| 一转丹 | One-Turn Pill | Single-pass pill. Ordinary quality, ordinary price, no shame in it. |
| 丹劫 | Pill Tribulation | Lightning called down by a pill of the highest grade. Proof the pill has touched the Dao. |
| 丹纹 | Pill Pattern | The lines on a finished pill. More lines, higher grade, higher price. |
| 丹霞 | Pill Radiance | The glow when the cauldron opens. The first thing a buyer looks at. |
| 丹香 | Pill Aroma | How far the smell travels. Also how far away people can tell you just succeeded. |
| 丹方残页 | Formula Fragment | One torn page of a pill formula. Enough to attempt, never enough to be sure. |
| 文火 | Gentle Heat | The slow flame of alchemy. Rushing here ruins the batch. |
| 武火 | Fierce Heat | The hard flame, used to seal a pill at the end. Too early and the whole thing cracks. |
| 药性 | Herb Nature | Whether a herb is cold, hot, warm or cool. Mix them wrong and the pill becomes poison. |
| 药理 | Herb Logic | The grammar of combining herbs. Learned from books, proven by explosions. |
| 药童 | Herb Boy | The disciple who tends the herb garden. Sees everything, is asked nothing. |
| 丹房 | Pill Chamber | Where pills are made. Always fireproofed, never quiet. |
| 地火 | Earth Fire | Fire drawn from the earth's veins. Steady, free, and the reason sects build where they build. |
| 兽火 | Beast Fire | Flame taken from a demon beast's core. Hotter than earth fire, and harder to control. |
| 异火 | Strange Fire | Fire that occurs naturally in the world and can be tamed. Owning one changes an alchemist's rank. |
| 丹会 | Alchemist Convention | A public contest of pill makers. Reputation is decided in an afternoon. |
| 丹王 | Pill King | The best alchemist in a region. A political position as much as a skill title. |
| 丹药铺 | Pill Shop | The market stall where pills are sold. Prices move with the war. |
| 试丹 | Test the Pill | Having someone else take it first. The someone else is usually a servant or a prisoner. |
| 炉火 | Furnace Fire | The fire inside the furnace, which has to be held at a specific temperature for hours. Most failure is not ingredients but inattention. |
| 丹炉品阶 | Furnace Grade | Furnaces are graded like everything else. A high-grade pill in a low-grade furnace fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the alchemist. |
| 丹方品阶 | Recipe Grade | Recipes are graded too. The gap between a grade two and a grade four pill is usually the difference between a chapter and an arc. |
| 三味真火 | Three-Flavour True Fire | A fire that burns without fuel and cannot be put out by water. Alchemy's premium heat source, and a common reward mid-book. |
| 丹药品级 | Pill Grade | The scale that decides who can take the pill without dying. Grades one through nine, with mistakes at the top of the list. |
| 一品丹 | First-Grade Pill | The lowest usable grade. Cheap, common, and the reason ordinary disciples can advance at all. |
| 九品丹 | Ninth-Grade Pill | The top of the scale. A single one can support an entire clan. |
| 散丹 | Powder Pill | A pill that failed to hold its shape. Strength remains, dosage becomes guesswork. |
| 丹衣 | Pill Coating | The glaze that keeps the contents from escaping. Cracked coating means the pill is losing potency by the hour. |
| 丹云 | Pill Cloud | The cloud that forms over a furnace when something exceptional is refined. Attracts visitors, which is not always welcome. |
| 丹药副作用 | Pill Side Effects | The cost after the benefit: dependence, impurity, or a body that resists further pills. |
| 药力 | Potency | The amount of usable effect inside a pill. Diminishes with age and with every opening of the container. |
| 丹药配伍 | Ingredient Pairing | What goes with what. Half of alchemy scenes are an argument about pairing. |
| 火候失控 | Loss of Heat Control | The furnace goes hot at the wrong moment. The results are loud. |
| 收丹 | Collect the Pill | Taking the finished product out without dropping it. Done with jade tools, because metal contaminates. |
| 炼丹师地位 | An Alchemist's Standing | High in every sect, and resented for it. Alchemist characters are usually written as arrogant to justify the resentment. |
| 灵液 | Spirit Liquid | Refined fluid used as a base for pills and for feeding formations. Sold by the drop. |
| 洗尘丹 | Cleansing Pill | Removes impurities pushed out by a breakthrough. Practical, and described in unflattering detail. |
| 散修丹方 | Wandering Cultivator's Recipe | A cheap, unofficial formula passed around because the sect version is unaffordable. Slightly dangerous. |
| 传承丹方 | Inherited Recipe | A formula held by one family or sect. Reproducing it is the plot of at least one arc per generation. |
Pill grades and pill poison are the two details that make an alchemy scene feel researched. Everything else is dressing. Lists here follow the free cultivation novels at cultivationnovel.com.
Source: cultivationnovel.com · Cultivation Glossary