The Art of Mending Broken Methods

If all ten thousand methods are flawed, then a flaw has its mending. To see where the gap lies in an art, in a pill formula, in a talisman; then to go around it and close it at the smallest cost, so that a thing which would have hurt somebody becomes usable again — this is the art of mending broken methods.

The mending goes in 3 stages of work. The first is seeing: which ingredient, which turn of the brush, which segment of meridian the flaw sits in, how deep it runs and which way it splits. The second is gathering: gathering back the fraction of medicine that was drawn off, the stroke that carries the pull, the thread of living-qi pure enough and matched to that flaw. Only the third puts hands on it, and there the measure is a hair’s width. The flaw in a death-black pill is small enough to mend with a fingertip; half a fraction too much powder and the qi forks and goes to dross, half a fraction too little and the death-black will not lift. The one doing the mending holds his breath and counts his own heartbeat as he lets the last of it fall.

The going rates are clearly divided. Sold loose on West Street, a revived pill of Qi Condensation Powder fetches 2 copper coins. Bought in at Well-Bottom Lane, 5 copper coins each. A broken formula that 3 pill shops have shaken their heads at is worth 2 spirit stones once it has been mended back. What sets the price is how many people cannot mend that particular flaw.

The mending is never free. Go around one break and the meridian past it may already be injured. Mend one pill and you have to gather the original formula first, and take the risk of somebody tracing it back. What happens when the mending fails is in plain sight: at the light end a qi deviation, at the heavy end eyes drawn to you that should never have been drawn. When it works, there is a way through that nobody else can walk.

There is a further difficulty. A man who can mend pills may not be able to mend talismans, and a man who reads talismans may not be able to read meridians. Seeing a flaw does not mean the hands can work it — the seam in a ward can be perfectly clear to look at, and it still takes somebody who can draw the unbinding talisman before it will lift. So the mending, further along, mostly comes down to gathering people: an eye that sees the flaw, a hand that draws the talisman, a channel that can gather the stock. Short of any one of them, nothing moves.

Stock is a hurdle of its own. To fill a flaw you need living-qi pure enough and matched to that flaw. Put qi in that is too muddy and the flaw is not only unmended, it gets forced wider. The pills, talismans, and medicines a man can buy in the market town all run too muddy in the qi. The things that truly match the road are mostly not on the stalls.

For the first time, somebody at the bottom of the market town has found out that the broken methods thrown away as rubbish can, with a little mending, actually be trained onward.