Ch. 001| That Batch of Pills

The pill furnace in the back court of the Hundred Herbs Pill Shop had not yet gone cold when Shopkeeper Zhou tipped a whole tray of pills onto the bluestone slab in front of Lin Que.

Forty-odd pills of Qi Condensation Powder, every one of them gray and spent, their surfaces filmed with a death-black that would not lift.

Lin Que had been a medicine boy in this shop for three years. The medicine boy was the lowest rung a pill shop had—the fire-tending had its fire master, the blending had its blending hands, and his rung was for chopping wood, watching the charcoal, scrubbing the waste-pill vats, and being cursed at on top of that. This batch of Qi Condensation Powder had been fired the night before; he had fed the charcoal all night, kept his eyes on the heat, and not let his mind wander for a single moment.

Yet what came out of the furnace was death-black.

"This batch—you watched the fire?" Shopkeeper Zhou's voice was not loud. The shopkeepers of Qingqi Market never cursed by shouting; they cursed by the ledger in hand. "Twenty pills' worth of ingredients, and fewer than three came out usable. The rest—whose head does that fall on?"

Lin Que did not rush to speak. He crouched, as if to pick the pills back into the tray one by one, but the pads of his fingers ground slowly across every death-black surface.

The little heat beneath his left eye stirred.

This pair of eyes was something even he could not explain. He had had them as far back as he could remember—ordinary things looked no different to him than to anyone else, but the moment he fixed his gaze on something that was "wrong," a point of heat would rise beneath his left eye, and where that thing was lacking, where it had broken, would surface slowly, like a stone rising from the bottom of the water. As a small, foolish child, he had seen an invisible crack in a neighbor's newly built stove, and said one word too many; three days later the stove truly collapsed, and he was driven out as an ill-omen. After that he learned his lesson: seeing a thing did not mean it had to be said.

Only these eyes were delicate. They could see clearly only what was near, and dead; look a little farther and it blurred, look a little longer and his temple began to throb, and by the tenth or so pill the world before him was already going black. He could look this way only a few times a day; more than that, and it was as if someone were driving a needle into the eye socket.

Before the blackness came, he had already finished looking.

—It was not a matter of the fire. In every death-black pill, that flaw shone in the same place: the sovereign herb in the Root's position.

Qi Condensation Powder had five ingredients—Cinnabar, Leaf, Dust, Root, Sweet—and in the Root's position went the sovereign herb, fleeceflower root. It should have been raw fleeceflower root, three years grown; this batch had used a prepared, then long-aged inferior grade, its potency already off by half. However true the fire, with the base of the ingredients ruined, Qi Condensation Powder fired to the end was bound to backlash, and the surface would go death-black.

None of this had come to him by inborn sight. In three years he had cleaned out not thousands of waste-pill vats, but certainly several hundred—which batch lacked at Cinnabar, which spoiled at Sweet—he had crouched at the vat's edge looking at them one by one, recording them one by one in his mind. Having looked at so many, these eyes saw flaws this fast, this true—where another's eyes saw a heap of indistinguishable death-black, his saw an open ledger.

This batch of pills was not his to have ruined.

The ingredient had been swapped by someone.

He swallowed the words back. Prepared fleeceflower root was nearly three-tenths cheaper than the raw; the silver saved on a single batch was enough for a man to drink on for several meals. Who had swapped that ingredient, and into whose sleeve the saved silver had slipped—a medicine boy of three years knew better than anyone. And he knew one other thing: the moment those words left his mouth, the one carried into the Reverse-Ash Yard tomorrow would be him. The Reverse-Ash Yard was the lowest takeover yard in the market; the injured, the ruined rogue cultivators went in to do hard labor, and few came out alive.

He raised his eyes and looked at Shopkeeper Zhou.

The strange thing was just here—the flaws of dead things he saw clear as day, yet living people he could not see true. Shopkeeper Zhou stood there, and beneath Lin Que's left eye rose only a layer of something unnameably uneasy, like looking at a man through dirty water; where he was lacking, where he was hollow, none of it showed. These eyes, when it came to living people, reached their end.

"Shopkeeper, I missed something watching the fire." Lin Que lowered his eyes. "Dock whatever you say."

Shopkeeper Zhou stared at him for half a breath. This medicine boy was sullen as a rule, and owned his faults just as plainly, which left Zhou for a moment with nothing to seize on.

"Half a month's wages." Shopkeeper Zhou closed the ledger. "These spent ones—" he jutted his chin at the heap of death-black on the bluestone slab, "—throw them in the back vat. No sense leaving backlashed pills to take up room."

The little heat in Lin Que's chest stirred again.

Half a month's wages were thirty copper coins. In a month he could scrape together only a few dozen coppers, and with this docked, he was starting over again. Yet that heap of death-black pills, lying there, was no waste-dross in his eyes.

"Shopkeeper," he raised his head, "let me take the waste pills, count it against half the wages. They're to be thrown out anyway, and you save yourself a line of loss in the ledger."

Shopkeeper Zhou's brow arched. Death-black pills were acknowledged waste-dross; even the market's scrap-ingredient buyers wanted nothing to do with them. What this medicine boy meant to do with them—they were too toxic even to feed chickens. But to save a line of loss, and the labor of emptying the vat besides, he was glad enough to grant the easy favor.

"Take them." Shopkeeper Zhou turned toward the front hall. "Have the back three vats cleaned out before the hour of the Rabbit tomorrow."

Lin Que answered, crouched where he was, and gathered those forty-odd death-black pills one by one into the old cloth pouch at his chest. His fingertips swept across each one—the deep flaws, the shallow ones—and he kept the count in his mind.

When he had gathered the tenth or so, his fingertips paused.

This one was flawed the most shallowly.

---

At the end of the hour of the Dog, Lin Que returned to that rented room in the west of the city.

The room was small—a plank bed, a table with a chipped corner, a cracked clay jar in the corner, and nothing else. The rent was fifteen coppers a month, the cheapest he could find in the market.

He barred the window, then stuffed the seams dead with a damp cloth. All that was left in the room was a single bean-sized oil lamp.

He sat cross-legged a while first, drawing his qi through one lesser heavenly cycle.

The third layer of Qi Condensation. He had held at this number for close to two years—qi reaching the top of the third layer was like striking an invisible wall, and however he pushed, he could not pass. Nine in ten of the market's rogue cultivators practiced from that openly circulated Lesser Heavenly Cycle Breathing Art, and those who jammed dead at the third or fourth layer could be grabbed up by the handful; everyone said it was poor root-bone, and resigned themselves. Lin Que did not. He had long suspected the breathing art itself was flawed, that qi running to some point along the way was cut short by a notch. But where that flaw lay—when these eyes turned upon his own body, it was once again only a haze of unease, nothing seen true.

Looking at another's pills, clear; looking at his own fate, blurred.

He pressed the thought down. Jammed could stay jammed for now; what was before him mattered more—before him were the spirit stones he had saved over three years, now only five left, and a room he might at any moment be unable to afford. To walk out of this market that pulled tighter and tighter, he needed capital. The pill in his hand tonight might just be the first coin of it.

He opened his eyes, picked out the most shallowly flawed death-black pill, and set it under the lamp.

In another's eyes, this was a ruined waste pill. In Lin Que's eyes, this was a pill short by only half an ingredient.

The Root's position had gone off, and so the qi of the whole pill had scattered. But the qi had only scattered, not severed—the potency was still pressed inside, like a thin current dammed up. Mend back that half-ingredient, and the current could run again.

The hard part was the measure. Where the prepared fleeceflower root's potency leaned, and by how much—these past few nights he had dissected seven or eight death-black pills, scraping the dross, smelling the qi, tasting with the tip of his tongue, matching it out bit by bit: the Root's position was three-tenths short; he had to make back that three-tenths with raw fleeceflower root, one part more and the qi forked, one part less and the qi stalled.

The trouble was he could not mend a whole batch. He had not even a proper furnace; the moment the fire rose, the potency would all fly off.

But a single pill needed no furnace. The flaw of one pill was small enough to mend with a fingertip.

This was not the first attempt either. The two nights before, he had practiced his hand on the deeply flawed death-black pills: the first, he had laid the fleeceflower powder on too heavy, and the qi forked into dross; the second, too light, and the death-black did not fade. Both had wasted his capital for nothing. Tonight's pill was the most shallowly flawed, the best he had picked out of a single tray, and it was his third attempt—whether it would take, he was only seven parts sure in his heart.

From the cracked clay jar in the corner, Lin Que pinched out a small wisp of raw fleeceflower powder—three years grown, gathered coin by coin from the cheapest stall in the South Market, saved over the better part of a year, hoarded and never spent.

The heat rose beneath his left eye. He fixed his gaze on that flaw in the Root's position, and this time the looking was uncommonly hard—he had not closed his eyes the whole night before, watching the charcoal, and that round in the back court just now had burned off most of the rest; his eyes had long gone dry and raw. He gritted his teeth and held on, the fleeceflower powder pinched at his fingertips, and pressed it in, bit by bit, against that invisible flaw on the pill's surface.

It could not be too much. Half a part too much, and the qi forked, and this one would truly become dross, the very capital of half an ingredient lost with it.

He held his breath, counted his own heartbeats, and on the seventh set down the last bit.

On the surface of the death-black pill, that film of death-black that would not lift faded, very slowly, by a single thread.

Where it faded back, there showed through a faint, faint breath of life, like a thread of water-light at the very bottom of a deep well.

Lin Que cradled it in his palm and felt at it close—the qi was even, it could be taken. A Qi Condensation Powder pill that could let a first-layer Qi Condensation rogue cultivator steadily mend a single breath had, out of a waste pill everyone scorned as poison, come back.

Almost at the same moment, the world before him went black, and he caught the table's edge. The needle in his eye socket drove hard; there was no looking at a second pill this night.

He sat under the lamp easing himself a good while before he wrapped this one separately in oil-paper and pushed it into that seam beneath his pillow.

There were still a dozen or so in the pouch, flawed deep and shallow. One pill mended a night—that was all these eyes were good for. But a dozen or so saved up, each traded for two or three coppers, and then vat after vat of waste pills mended on—this was the first time in three years as a medicine boy that he held in his hand a thing from which he himself could conjure spirit stones.

Tomorrow at the hour of the Rabbit he still had to clean out those back three vats. He thought: while clearing them, he might as well keep a closer eye—what settled at the bottom of the vats might yet hold death-black pills not picked clean as waste.

Sell them he would, only not on Hundred Herbs' ground. The proper pills the shop put out all bore a mark; this mended death-black pill of his was of unclear origin, and the moment someone recognized it as mended from Hundred Herbs' waste, Shopkeeper Zhou would be the first to never forgive him. He had to pick a buyer who could not afford good pills and would not ask too much after origins—best, a rogue cultivator pressed for it, his life hanging on a single breath. Such a man cared only whether the pill worked, and did not ask where it came from.

That lame rogue cultivator on West Street, the one always crouched beneath the talisman stall, who could not afford a good pill and yet could not let his breath go—tomorrow he would want this one.

【Ch. 001 End · the back court of the Hundred Herbs Pill Shop → the rented room in the west of the city】