Strange Tale｜A Torn Pill-Recipe Page, with an Annotation in the Margin No One Recognizes

(This is a transcript of an item provided by a rogue cultivator. The torn page is of unknown origin and damaged; its authenticity is unverified.)

The provider says he dug this torn pill-recipe page out of the discarded-pill heap in the back alley of Baicao Pharmacy, tucked among a stack of scrap recipes bound for the trash. The recipe is a common Qi-Condensation Powder; the portions and the firing are all by the book. Follow it, and at most you'll fire a batch of inferior product with slightly high backlash.

What's strange is the margin.

The recipe is in one hand, neat. The margin annotation is in another hand, fine and hurried, as if someone added it later. The annotation is a single line:

The third ingredient of this recipe should use two qian, not one. The one who altered the recipe knows.

'The one who altered the recipe knows'—the person who altered it knew full well. Those four characters send a chill down the spine of anyone who reads them.

It means this recipe isn't a copying error; it's that someone, knowing the correct portion full well, deliberately reduced an ingredient. The pill fired from it comes up a touch short, the one who takes it can't fully replenish his qi, and day by day, the meridians fall into trouble.

Stranger still, they say there's more than one such torn page in the bazaar. Different recipes, different recipe-houses, yet the margins all carry the same fine, hurried hand, annotating the same kind of words: which ingredient was altered, and what the original amount should have been.

As if someone, among the scrap recipes circulating in the bazaar, page by page, has quietly marked back the places that were tampered with.

Who this person is, no one knows. What he marks them for, no one knows either. If one day a line of fine, hurried script appears in the margin of a scrap recipe in your hands—don't raise your voice. Put it away first.