The dust-covered carriage that rattled through the outer gates of the Myriad Spirit Safe hall looked as though it had rolled straight through an inferno.
Its lacquered cedar wheels were caked with chalky yellow bitter salt silt, its draft horses lathered in white froth, their heads hanging low as their nostrils flared in wheezing tiredness. Two beastfolk guards—sturdy boar-kin guards in polished leather aprons—right away stepped forward with wooden buckets of cool springwater, gently sponging down the trembling beasts while loosening their harnesses.
The carriage door swung open with a dry groan.
Patriarch Lu Feng, master of the Hundred Treasures Pavilion and the safe hall’s chief commercial emissary to the mortal dynasties, tumbled rather than stepped onto the crushed gravel path. The portly merchant had lost at least twenty pounds since his last visit three weeks ago. His emerald silk robes, stitched with auspicious silver coins, were stained with sweat and yellow road grit. His lips were chapped and bleeding, his face flushed with the feverish heat of the central plains.
“Water...” Lu Feng croaked, clutching a velvet money pouch against his chest as his knees buckled. “By the Ancestors... Just half a cup...”
A gentle azure mist wrapped around him. Before the exhausted merchant could strike the gravel, a cool, jelly-like cushion formed beneath his chest, supporting his weight with elastic floating lift. Lin Xiao knelt beside him in his blue scholar robes. He held a wide clay pot bowl filled with chilled stone water infused with crushed mint…
