Ch. 005| The Stray Cultivators' Strange Deaths

That half-sheet of a broken formula took Lin Que three nights to mend.

The first night he only dared to look, not to lift a brush. The flaw wound around so cunningly that what had been wiped from the guiding herb was not just its measure but its very course; one wrong stroke and the whole formula would be ruined. The second night he tried to mend it, his hand trembled, the stroke went astray, and he nearly wrecked half the sheet—it frightened him into pulling back at once. Not until the third night did he set down his first true line. His left eye was worn red; after mending the last spot, he braced himself against the table and rested a long while before his breath came even.

At dusk on the fourth day, no sooner had he reached the mouth of Well-Bottom Lane with the mended sheet tucked in his robe than Han Bosheng rose from the foot of the wall, as though he had been waiting there all along.

The old man took the broken formula and studied it for a good while by the dim lamp, then scraped at the guiding-herb spot with a fingernail. For the first time, something real surfaced in those clouded eyes.

"A formula three pill shops shook their heads at, and you mended it back in three nights." Han Bosheng tucked the sheet into his robe and tossed him a small, heavy cloth pouch. "Two spirit stones. The one this formula belongs to can afford it."

Two spirit stones.

Lin Que gripped the pouch, his knuckles taut. A month's wages at the Hundred Herbs, converted to spirit stones, still came short of a single one. This one broken sheet was worth more than half a year of his back-breaking work.

He closed the two spirit stones in his palm—cool, heavy. Three years of saving, and for the first time the spirit stones in his hand held the promise of a double-digit count.

"From now on, I'll take your mended pills as before." Han Bosheng squatted back down at the foot of the wall. "Tattered scrolls, broken formulas—however many I have here, you mend that many. One sheet, one sheet's pay."

And so this door at Well-Bottom Lane opened for him.

At this rate, the stake for an outer-gate examination token might take less than a year to save. That wall at the edge of the market—for the first time, it had drawn a little nearer.

Then a man died.

---

The dead man was Old Wu.

Old Wu was a familiar face on West Street—third layer of Qi Condensation, stuck there seven or eight years, scraping a living hauling herbs for people at the South Market. Half a month before, he too had found his way to the back lane of the Hundred Herbs and bought two of Lin Que's revived pills.

Old Wu, Lin Que remembered him. He had been a talker when buying the pills, rambling on about how he too had once had a master and a lineage, how it was only after his sect scattered that he sank to hauling herbs for others on West Street. His qi had sunk badly, yet he had never been willing to accept his fate, saying that once he saved enough he meant to try his hand at the outer-gate examination. Selling him those pills, Lin Que had even thought to himself that this old man and he were, in a way, much alike. Now the man had died without rhyme or reason, and an unaccountable chill ran through Lin Que's heart.

The man was found in a half-collapsed ruin of a house at the far end of West Street. When they found him, he was sitting against the wall, his eyes opened wide, his mouth agape, as if he had seen something just before death—yet there was no fear on his face, only a kind of bewilderment that could not be put into words. There was no wound on his body, no trace of a meridian bursting from qi deviation.

Not like qi deviation, not like poison either. The market had seen no end of rogue cultivators dead from qi deviation, but no one had ever seen a death like this.

That ruined house, Lin Que later took a turn past it to have a look. The half-collapsed earthen wall, the corners hung with years-old cobwebs, a layer of loose dust settled over the ground. Old Wu had leaned against the innermost wall in life; though the body had been carried off, on the patch of ground at the foot of that wall the loose dust had been rubbed clean in one spot, the edges of the mark unnaturally even, as if something had wiped it flat in a single straight stroke. Lin Que could not say what was wrong, yet standing in that house his chest grew inexplicably tight; he could not stay, and after only a moment he backed out.

Word got around, and West Street fell into unease. Worse, someone recalled that before he died, Old Wu had bought a mended pill from that "cursed pill-boy."

The rumors grew uglier by the day. A few days back it had been that Lin Que could "curse pills" to send Hu Biao into qi deviation; now someone was saying his mended pills had been poisoned from the start—Hu Biao was proof, and so was Old Wu.

The afternoon of the second day, someone from the Xuanzhao Sect arrived.

---

The one who came was a woman.

She wore the dark-green close-fitting garb of a Xuanzhao Sect enforcement disciple, a plain, unmarked long sword at her waist. She looked no more than just past twenty, and she was strikingly beautiful—brows like distant hills, eyes like cold stars—only on that face, which ought to have been radiant, there was not the slightest hint of a smile; it was cold, as though glazed over with frost. It was a beauty that left one neither daring to profane nor daring to draw near, like a sword freshly drawn from its sheath. As she entered West Street, the local ruffians, so used to throwing their weight around, not one of them dared step up to speak to her.

Her name was Shen Ningshuang. An enforcer of the Xuanzhao Sect's outer gate, she handled the strange affairs of the market—the ones that could not be made clear, that the authorities could not press down either.

She did not go to the corpse first. First she lined up everyone Old Wu had seen before his death, one by one. And at the very end of the line came Lin Que of the Hundred Herbs back lane.

"You sold Old Wu a pill?" Shen Ningshuang stood in the back courtyard of the Hundred Herbs, her voice flat and without rise or fall.

Lin Que was clearing a vat; at the words he straightened up, eyes lowered. "Sold him two. Half a month ago."

"Mended pills."

"Mended." Lin Que did not hide it. There was no hiding it—since she had come to his door, whatever needed checking she had checked long since.

"Hu Biao took your pill and qi-deviated into a cripple. Old Wu took your pill and died." Shen Ningshuang's gaze was like two needles nailed to his face. "What do you have to say?"

Those clearing vats nearby, those passing by, all halted at a distance to watch. Lin Que knew that if he could not get past this, his life would be settled in this back courtyard today.

The authority of a Xuanzhao enforcer ran greater in the market than even the Black Wind Hall's. Let a pill-boy be condemned in the open street for "poisoning pills to kill," and there would be nowhere even to plead his case.

He was in no hurry to argue. Argue too hastily, and it would look like a guilty conscience.

"Since Enforcer Shen has looked into it, you should know Hu Biao did not qi-deviate from taking my pill." Lin Que spoke word by word. "He swallowed a rush pill himself, then forced his qi past the third turn in front of everyone. Dozens of pairs of eyes on West Street saw it at the time."

Shen Ningshuang's brow stirred a fraction. She did not deny it.

"As for Old Wu—" Lin Que paused. "If my mended pill were poisoned, what it harms when swallowed is the meridians, and death would take the form of meridians bursting from qi deviation. But you examined his body—the meridians had not burst, there was no trace of qi deviation. Am I right?"

Shen Ningshuang stared at him, stared for a long time.

The people she had cornered before either wept and cried injustice or knelt and begged for mercy. But this one before her—battered by rumor, cornered in a back courtyard—could lay out his words point by point, every one of them on the mark, without showing a trace of panic.

This was not like a pill-boy.

This time, it was her turn to be in no hurry to answer.

---

"How do you know his meridians hadn't burst?" she asked suddenly.

Lin Que's heart tightened.

He could not say that the moment he heard "no wound on the body, the meridians intact, yet the man dead," the heat beneath his left eye had stirred—it was the first time these eyes had ever grown hot over a matter of the dead. Across so great a distance he could make out nothing; he felt only that within that death was hidden a flaw, faint beyond measure, one he could not see through.

The matter of these eyes he had hidden for so many years. Before an enforcement disciple of the Xuanzhao Sect, he could let slip not the slightest hint—for a pill-boy to admit he had a pair of strange eyes that grew hot over the dead would send him into the Xuanzhao Sect faster than confessing to "poisoning pills to kill."

"A guess." Lin Que lowered his eyes. "If he'd died of qi deviation, West Street would have spread it long ago. No one spoke of bursting meridians, so I guessed the meridians were fine."

The words were half true, half false, yet there was no fault to pick in them.

Shen Ningshuang pressed no further. She turned to leave, took two steps, then stopped again.

"You, this pill-boy of yours," she said, turning her face aside, her gaze sweeping over him once—a gaze no longer that of one hunting a killer, but more like one looking at a thing that ought not to appear in the back courtyard of the Hundred Herbs, "are not quite right."

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered and did not reply.

"Old Wu's death has nothing to do with your pill." Shen Ningshuang left this one line. "But this matter isn't finished. These past six months, rogue cultivators in the market dying like this, without rhyme or reason—Old Wu is already the third I've traced—and the first two died just as cleanly."

She left.

Once Shen Ningshuang was gone, the crowd in the back courtyard come for the spectacle scattered too. Lin Que was about to crouch back down to clear the vats when Shopkeeper Zhou came out from the front hall, that ledger still in his hand.

He did not look at Lin Que first; first he looked over the few emptied waste-pill vats, then turned his head and sized Lin Que up from head to toe for a good while.

"The Xuanzhao Sect's people, come all the way to the back courtyard of my shop." Shopkeeper Zhou's voice gave away neither joy nor anger. "Over those few death-black waste pills you took to settle your debt."

Lin Que kept his eyes lowered and made no answer. The thing he had hidden for all these days—today, with Shen Ningshuang stirring it up, was laid bare beneath Shopkeeper Zhou's very eyes.

He thought Shopkeeper Zhou would erupt, would drive him out, would expose his pill-mending.

But Shopkeeper Zhou only closed the ledger and said, unhurried, "The death-black pills I gave you to settle the debt—what you took them off to do is your own business." He paused, those shrewd eyes resting an instant on Lin Que's face. "Only—a pill-boy who can mend death-black waste pills smoother than proper ones, in all the years I've run this Hundred Herbs, you're the first."

With that, he turned and went back to the front hall, asking not one word more.

Lin Que stood where he was, the sweat on his back colder than it had been even when he faced Shen Ningshuang a moment ago.

Shen Ningshuang was after a life; her case closed, she would leave. What Shopkeeper Zhou meant to weigh was how much these two hands of his were truly worth—a man like that would not leave. Getting past Shen Ningshuang had been escaping death by a hair, but Shopkeeper Zhou's gate had only just begun.

And the line Shen Ningshuang had dropped on her way out had also taken root in his heart.

Six months. The third one. Dead cleanly, the meridians not burst, no qi deviation.

The thing that had been stirred up in Lin Que could not be pressed back down.

For three years these eyes of his had looked at waste pills, and all they looked at were "flaws made by men's hands"—herbs swapped, the firing misjudged, the guiding herb wiped away; however cunning those flaws, they all carried the scent of a human hand. But the place where Old Wu died, that even mark, and the inexplicable tightness in his own chest—these were not like anything a human hand could make. That was another kind of flaw, one he had never seen, one even these eyes could not yet see through.

How exactly Old Wu had died, he wanted to know it more than Shen Ningshuang did. Not only to clear away the "poisoned pill" rumor—he wanted to know why these eyes of his would, over a dead man, give off heat like that.

That night, he mended no pills. He dug out Hu Biao's rush pill, the one he kept hidden against his body, and thought again of the ruined house where Old Wu had died. The two matters were like things separated by a layer of mist; he could not shake the feeling that behind the mist they joined to the same thing.

After daybreak, he would make another trip to that ruined house at the far end of West Street. By day there were many people about; he could find a pretext to stand a while longer beside that even mark.

【Ch. 005 End · Well-Bottom Lane / the Hundred Herbs Pill Shop】