Otherworldly Pill Chef

Otherworldly Pill Chef is a xuanhuan novel by Luo Baijiazi, serialized on Qidian from February 25, 2012, to November 30, 2012, totaling about 1.3978 million Chinese characters. The protagonist, Wu Xuan, was an all-around chef in his previous life who traveled everywhere and dared to taste anything. After an accidental fall, he arrives with his memories in an otherworld where martial prowess is supreme, becoming a lowly logistics disciple of the Wu family. Unlike ordinary transmigrators, he has no profound cultivation methods and cannot perform orthodox pill refinement; his only assets are his wondrous hands and the culinary skills honed in his previous life. He discovers that the world's spiritual herbs and fruits need not be refined into pills—prepared by stir-frying, roasting, stewing, soup-making, or sauce-making, they are often more effective than pills and can be shared by many. So he styles himself a "pill chef": while others set up pill furnaces, he first demands a proper set of cookware. With inventive dishes such as "Body-Advancing Noodles," "Strength-and-Bone Tonic Dew," and "Phantom Spirit Smoothie," he cooks and sells food in exchange for cultivation resources, rising step by step through family affairs, tournaments, ruin explorations, and dealings with various factions, from a despised logistics disciple to the ranks of the continent's strong. Fast-paced and combining cultivation progression with culinary creativity, it is one of the early representatives of the "otherworld food" genre, and has a same-titled audiobook version.