The Hundred Herbs Pill Shop

The pill shop on East Street in Qingqi Market. The man who runs it is named Zhou, with a dark-gold peony stitched at his cuff. The front room sells pills, and every batch that leaves is entered in the books and carries a mark. The back yard is another world altogether: 3 large waste-pill vats and 2 small ones, two small pill furnaces, a shed for odds and ends, one low wooden table.

What sells most is Qi Condensation Powder, 3 copper coins a pill and 8 copper coins for a dose of 10. The waste pills taken back are heaped by colour:

Waste pills by colour
  grey          bad firing · dross not rendered through      no poison, no potency
  green         ingredients clashing · green qi at setting   mild qi injury
  dark red      faded after going backlash                   moderate poison · meridians choked
  death-black   an ingredient tampered with afterward        injures the meridians on swallowing

Of that last colour, death-black, the back yard turns out a steady 2 to 3 a month. Clearing the vats is the pill-shop apprentice’s work, and it has to be finished before the hour of the Rabbit: first scoop off what floats on the surface and sort it by colour, then take a rake to the dross settled at the bottom and sieve it through again and again — there are often pills at the bottom that were never picked clean out, and a man who sieves fine can get two or three in one go. The Waste-Medicine Bureau comes once a month to collect the vats and hauls them off to render waste qi out of them. Where the waste qi is sold, who buys it, and what it is used for belong to the things a man working at the bottom of the market town does not ask about.

The pill-shop apprentice is the cheapest rank in the shop. The fire has a fire master, the mixing has a mixing hand, and the apprentice handles splitting firewood, watching the charcoal, clearing the waste-pill vats, and being shouted at on top of it. Wages are a few dozen copper coins a month, and missing one batch of fire docks half a month, which is 30 copper coins. For an apprentice the place is a window onto everything cruel in the market town: who has ruined his meridians, who could not pay his debt and was carried away, which vat of waste pills the shopkeeper goes out of his way to tell you not to clear.

Shopkeeper Zhou never scolds by shouting. He does it with the book in his hand: stock for 20 pills, fewer than 3 usable out of the firing, and whose head the rest comes down on. Shrewd, no fool, sparing with words, and every one he sets down has been weighed first.

The third vat in the back yard went from a hemp cloth over it, to a stone on the cloth, to a hardwood board in place of the cloth, to a brass lock the size of a palm — and what is being locked in, the shop understands without saying.