He got thoroughly exploited down to every cell in his body for decades. His parents had died during that time period due to the strains the art had on their bodies, leaving their son to continue on the family's job.
That dark alchemy organization got attacked and destroyed at some point by another competitor and as luck would have it, that founder survived and became one of the spoils of war.
For the next twenty or so years, that founder bounced from organization to organization as those organizations either got attacked or a natural calamity befell them, leaving that founder as the only survivor.
Yang Qing, when he read that story, wondered to himself if that founder had good luck or was a harbinger of bad luck. From what he could deduce, the only reason that founder survived was the high regeneration afforded by his special physique, zero combat sense which made him overlooked most of the time, and the greed of cultivators who saw him as a walking source of wealth.
