Lin Que

A pharmacy boy at the Baicao Pharmacy of Qingqi Bazaar, a bottom-rung Rogue Cultivator at the third layer of the Qi-Condensation Realm. He is no prodigy, has no famous master, no backing—he survives on caution, endurance, and reckoning: he never makes a move without leaving himself a way out.

The greatest asset of his life is a pair of eyes that can see 'flaws': where another's cultivation art falters in its breathing, which pill formula has clashing properties, which talisman has lost its breath—he sees it all at a glance. But seeing the problem doesn't mean he can solve it; to mend a flaw takes trial and error, takes materials, takes hiding it so no one finds out.

He works as a pharmacy boy at the Baicao Pharmacy, his daily labor cleaning the spent-pill vats and sorting discarded pills. It was among these dregs of pills cast off by others that he came, bit by bit, to recognize the cruelty of the bazaar's lowest tier: the arts that Rogue Cultivators practice are mostly flawed, and as they cultivate they damage their meridians, deviate, and in the end become an uncollected corpse beside the spent-pill heap.

The 《Breathing Scroll》 he himself practices is flawed too—he knows it better than anyone.

6 months ago, an old Rogue Cultivator missing his ring finger sold him a fragment of a breathing art. He practiced it, and damaged his meridians; yet it was on this fragmentary art that he first set his hand to 'mending a flaw'—routing that one breath that wouldn't pass smoothly around the broken micro-meridian.

He called it 'looping.' The art was useless; in his hands, it turned a different direction.

He began to reckon. The backlash rate of a batch of Qi-Condensation Powder, how much a deviated Rogue Cultivator is worth on the market, how many spirit stones a mending formula can fetch—these ledgers that others don't keep, he keeps meticulously.

Spirit stones counted out one by one. The dull crimson knot beneath his left ribs, struck up by his cultivation, is a wound he hides in his heart, one he dares let no one know of.

One after another, Rogue Cultivators in the bazaar started suffering Cultivation Deviation. One on the West Street, one in the South Market, then another—he followed the trail and discovered that these fallen people weren't practicing the same art, yet they all struck a flaw in the same exact place.

One street, one falling every 3 days. A judgment he didn't dare speak aloud took shape in his mind: this was no coincidence—someone had left the same flaw inside all these arts.

An old Rogue Cultivator who had drifted through the bazaar for 30 years and survived 9 deviations without dying sought him out. The man told him two things he hadn't known: there were buyers for the Mending Art, and the buyers sat 'above the underground market'; and this month something in the bazaar was speeding up—those above were waiting for a move.

He didn't sell. He only accepted the carved talisman wood-tag the man pushed toward him—next time, he would go find the man himself.

What his left eye sees has no shape and no colour. If it must be described: as though something that ought to join up has a short stretch missing in the middle, and that stretch is the most conspicuous part of it.

At first it was only in dead things—a cracked bowl, a lock rusted through, a talisman whose breath has stopped. Later it appeared in the living as well, and it took him a long while to learn not to stare at other people's chests.

Looking too long makes the eye ache. Not the sourness of a late night; a dull pressure that bores from behind the eye toward the back of the skull, and when it comes he must rest half a day, seeing nothing clearly.

He has told no one. There is no shortage of people in the bazaar hiding some small ability. The ones who hide it well are the ones who last.

He has a habit: before he acts, he works out how to end it. Cleaning the vats, he stands where one step takes him to the door. Talking to a man, he keeps his back off the lane mouth. Taking anything from anyone, he settles that same day how and when it will be returned.

This is not timidity. The bottom of the bazaar offers no chance to rise, only the chance to keep living, and living depends on not walking yourself into a corner.

He also counts. The grade of a batch of pills, what a deviated cultivator leaves behind and what it fetches, whose ear a sentence will reach—sums other men find too much trouble. He does them, because he cannot afford the one he gets wrong.

The injury below his left ribs is the one thing he did not reckon right. It came of mending a method on himself. The mending held; so did the price. He does not touch that place, and does not let it be seen.