Qi Condensation Powder

The pill beginning rogue cultivators swallow most, and the one the Hundred Herbs Pill Shop sells hardest. 3 copper coins a pill, 8 copper coins for a dose of 10. Rogue cultivators between the first and third layers of Qi Condensation swallow 1 to 2 a day.

The pill is compounded of five ingredients:

Qi Condensation Powder · the Five Ingredients
  Cinnabar    red powder      astringent   base
  Leaf        green fibre     pungent
  Dust        grey powder     bitter, cooling
  Root        brown fibre     neutral      sovereign herb · fleeceflower root
  Sweet       yellow lumps    sweet        finish

Compounded in full they warm and nourish the qi-channels and help the qi condense. A finished pill is round and even, its face carrying a faint moist sheen, and held under the nose it is a true medicinal smell. Scrape a little of the powder off with a fingernail and press it to the tip of the tongue and it is faintly bitter, turning sweet after. Old rogue cultivators smell first and scrape second when they buy: the smell tells them whether filler has been cut in, that stuffy note, and the scrape tells them whether that thread of returning sweetness is still there.

By rights it is a steady pill. Yet every so often somebody in the market town takes one that has gone backlash — the pill looks the part when it is just set, and two or three days later it has gone black and sour. At the light end it injures the qi, at the heavy end it chokes the meridians dead.

Backlash has rules of its own. Every batch a pill shop properly puts out carries a mark; take the mark back and they exchange it, one pill for one pill, the replacement coming out of the next batch. Where nobody was hurt, a made-up dose settles it. Where somebody was hurt, that is another matter, and by then the account being settled is not the account of one pill. What a middling pill shop takes back over 3 months is at least one in ten. That tenth lies out in the open; everyone in the market town knows about it, and everyone treats it as weather. People say: “Qi Condensation Powder is just like this. It’s down to luck.”

Compare years of waste-pill dross one piece at a time and the ingredient gone bad is always Root: three-year raw fleeceflower root is what the formula calls for, and what goes in is prepared root left to go stale, seconds, with the weight quietly raised from one tenth to three tenths — prepared fleeceflower root in the same dose as cinnabar turns poisonous after two days. Prepared root is nearly three tenths cheaper than raw, and what one batch saves buys a man several rounds of wine.

However exactly the firing is watched, if the stock underneath it is bad the batch goes backlash by the end and the pill faces turn death-black. And the one watching the fire is the pill-shop apprentice, and what gets docked is half a month of the apprentice’s wages. The hand that swapped the stock leaves not one word on the books.

This is not luck.