Where can I watch Qi refining for 3000 years?

How to1240 words

The three doors, in order of how well they work

Start with bilibili.tv. It is the one that works in most countries, has English subtitles on the show, and does not require anything you do not already have. The media page is https://www.bilibili.tv/media/2067830. Search for the English title if the URL has moved, which it occasionally does.

Then try Netflix at https://www.netflix.com/title/81648397. If the page loads, use it, because the subtitles and the bitrate are better than anything else on offer.

Mainland bilibili, the parent service at bilibili.com, has the show as an exclusive with the page ID md28235410. It is the best version and the least available. Without a mainland phone number you will not get far, and the show itself is geo-locked outside China. This is not a workaround problem; it is the licensing model.

What the Netflix listing actually means

Qi Refining for 3000 Years is a Chinese animation about a man who cannot level up. It is a comedy. It has a harem tag. It has a man who has spent three millennia buying, refining and failing to need a medicinal pill. On paper, it is the least Netflix-shaped show imaginable, and yet there it is.

That matters for reasons beyond convenience. Most Chinese animation never leaves bilibili or the Tencent and iQIYI international apps, which means the average English-speaking viewer meets the medium through a low-bitrate mirror with burned-in subtitles of variable quality. Netflix carrying a title is a signal that someone at a licensing desk thought an English-speaking audience existed for it, and it puts the show in front of people who would never have opened bilibili.tv in their lives.

It also means the subtitles are someone's job, and in a show where a man spends three thousand years failing to earn a medicinal pill, the jokes die without them. Official donghua subs are often worse than fan translation, especially in the early episodes of a show, but a Netflix localization has a floor to it.

The bilibili.tv version and why it is not the same thing

Same show, different house. bilibili.tv was spun off as a separate international service, and it is not a VPN-free window into the mainland site. It licenses content separately, which is why some mainland exclusives are on it and some are not.

What you get on bilibili.tv is the standard sixteen episodes with English and other subtitle tracks, a player that is a bit heavier than Netflix's, and a catalogue built around donghua specifically. If you are going to watch more than one Chinese animation, this is the app to keep installed.

One practical note: episode numbering on the international feed matches the mainland order, which matters because Qi Refining for 3000 Years has a couple of episode-level recaps that fansub groups handled inconsistently. If a guide tells you episode 9 is a clip show, check whether they are counting from the mainland listing.

Sixteen episodes, nineteen minutes, one studio

The adaptation was produced by bilibili and animated by Foch Film, with Ma Ping directing and Ma Ping and Yan Zheng on the script. It aired from 7 October 2022 to 13 January 2023. Cast includes Xu Xiang as Bai Qiuran, Xiao Sibai as Tang Ruowei, and Su Ziwu as Su Xiangxue.

Foch Film is the house that gets the sword arcs right. The courtyard duels have weight in the wrists, which sounds like a strange thing to praise until you sit through a Chinese 2D series where the blades float. Nineteen minutes is also the right length for the joke. There is no episode where the show runs out of things to do with Bai Qiuran, because it is not trying to build a world. It is trying to land a punch.

Sixteen episodes at nineteen minutes is about five hours. That is a weekend, not a commitment, which is the other reason this show travels well. Someone can try it without rearranging their month.

The novel it is adapting is finished: 668 chapters, about 1.52 million characters, serialized on Ciweimao from 1 July 2018 to 23 February 2019. The anime covers a slice. If you finish the show and want the rest, the route is the text, not a second season, because no second season has been announced.

The places it is not

It is not on Crunchyroll, and people ask every month. Crunchyroll licenses a specific and growing list of Chinese animation, but this one is not on it. It is not on WeTV or iQIYI either, those being Tencent and Baidu properties with their own slates.

YouTube is the final question. There is no official full-series upload from bilibili for this title that I can point you at, and the unofficial ones get taken down. If a channel with a generic name offers you all sixteen episodes in 480p with a watermark, that is what it is. I am not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to send you there. Two legal doors, one regional long shot, and a weekend of your life: that is the whole map for this show.

The three questions that come up first

Yes, under title 81648397. That makes it one of a short list of Chinese xianxia animations Netflix has picked up, and the licensing is regional, so the page may simply not load where you are. If it does not, bilibili.tv is the fallback and it has the show with English subtitles in more territories.

Sixteen episodes, each about nineteen minutes, aired from 7 October 2022 to 13 January 2023. The season ends where it ends and there has been no second season announced, so what you see is the whole adaptation of the story so far. The novel, by contrast, is finished at 668 chapters, which means the anime covers a small slice of it.

No, and that is the difference that matters. Mainland bilibili requires a mainland number for most account features and the show itself is region-locked outside China. bilibili.tv is a separate service on its own domain, built for viewers outside the mainland, and it is where the English-subtitled version lives.

Before you press play

Two things will make the first episode land better.

The layer count is not a scale. When a character says Bai Qiuran is at Qi Refining layer 66664, nobody is impressed, because nobody measures anything past the ninth layer of that realm. The number is the joke. He is absurdly, uselessly overqualified for a stage he cannot leave.

Second, this is not the same story as One Hundred Thousand Years of Qi Refining, the 3D series on Tencent Video with a protagonist named Xu Yang. That one has hundreds of episodes and a sect full of disciples. This one has sixteen and a sword ancestor sleeping through the plot. Both are fine. They are not interchangeable, and half the watch-order guides online have them mixed.

The one thing that decides it

Watch episode one to the end of the first fight.

If the old man's first real exchange of blows makes you laugh instead of making you check the runtime, the show has you. If it does not, no amount of bilibili.tv versus Netflix comparison will save it, because this is a comedy with a sword problem, and the sword problem is the whole attraction.