Calibration

A name given in private by a rogue cultivator at the bottom. The backlash rate of Qi Condensation Powder in the market town has sat steady on one line for years: just under the red line the market town could call to account, and just high enough to keep squeezing Spirit-Reviving Pills, care fees, and transfer fees out of rogue cultivators.

The name is borrowed from the pill shop’s scales. The scales get calibrated once every ten days, and the man who calibrates them will not shift the weight anywhere absurd — shift it too far and the buyer turns on him on the spot, too little and there is nothing in it for him. What he wants is that exact position that comes out right ten days after ten days. The backlash rate in the market town looks like something that has been calibrated the same way.

The measure at either end of that line, turned into copper coins, comes to this:

One qi deviation for a rogue cultivator · debt owed
  Spirit-Reviving Pill (double, urgent)       24
  pressing the points to channel qi           50
  temporary care fee                         100
  ——————————————
  total                                      174 copper coins

174 copper coins is more than two months’ wages for a regular hand at the West Street mine. A man who can pay nurses the injury and gets back onto the street. A man who cannot signs a cultivation indenture against it. A man who cannot even cover it with an indenture gets carried away.

Too exact at the high end, and too exact at the low. If it were heaven’s doing, one year should run looser and another tighter. This line has not stirred by a thread in years, exact as though somebody stood behind it adjusting the sight day after day.

What runs colder is this: the same flaw turns up in far more than one dose of pills. Change the art, change the street corner, change to rogue cultivators with nothing to do with one another, and the flaw sits in exactly the same place. The pills on East Street, the tattered scrolls on West Street, the monthly-allotment pills and the orthodox breathing art handed down by the sect outer gates up the mountain — the start of the break and the direction of the resumed stroke match up, the way of one hand. What has been calibrated is likely more than one shop and more than one street.

The market town has a whole set of ready-made lines for questions like this. It’s down to luck. Your aptitude has reached its limit. Uneven root-bone. What makes these lines so convenient is that they turn a thing somebody has tampered with into a thing that simply grew that way. Say them often enough and the one listening concedes before anybody has to argue.

Nobody in the market town uses this word. The man who has a use for it mostly will not say it out loud either, because saying it means explaining how he came to see it, and in Qingqi Market an explanation tends to cost a great deal more than silence.