I THAT NEVER WAS

I'm the same author: https://m.webnovel.com/profile/4505031739?activeTab=ORIGINAL_WORKS Knowledge is currency. Alchemy is knowledge. Most of the world doesn’t know alchemy exists. Those who do call it heresy. Those who practice it call it ascension. A man wakes in the lightless depths of Tauran City Prison with no records, no history—only a modern vocabulary that doesn’t belong to him. In a facility built to process human bodies, ignorance is a death sentence. To survive the lower floors, he bonds with a parasitic alchemical metal—an artifact that grows stronger through blood, memory, and use. It is a weapon, a tool, and a cost he does not yet understand. Guided by a man who knows too many and a girl who should not have lived this long, he descends through a system where alchemy is graded, identities fracture, and power is never free. You are not a prisoner. You are a specimen. And ascension has already begun.