By late morning, the Tranquil Ripple drifted southward across the Jade River Basin. He dropped into the sun-drenched terraced foothills of the Southern Green Valleys.
A gentle breeze carried the sharp, refreshing scent of bitter pine-resin, dried star-anise, and crushed mint. Clustered along the valley floor was a thriving riverside settlement built from white river-limestone and pale pine timber. At its center stood a sprawling courtyard complex crowned by wide timber verandas and green-tiled gables: the Southern Valley Grand Healing Safe hall.
Lin Xiao remembered this valley well from his early travels during the southern beast tide.
Back then, the region had been gripped in an iron stranglehold by the Thousand Poison Sect. The sect’s elders had deliberately contaminated the irrigation waterways with slow-acting bile-slug toxins, forcing local mortal farmers and small training clans to sell their lands, their old family heirlooms, and their children into debt-servitude simply to purchase extortionately priced “purification pills.” Those pills had barely cleansed the poison, ensuring an unending cycle of agony and dependency.
“I still remember the smell of this swamp back then,” Gu Qingfeng muttered. He looked over the side of the skiff as it hovered ten feet above an open willow grove behind the clinic complex. “Rank green scum, bloated frogs, and people coughing their lungs out into ditch water. Old Han Gu’s students used to charge ten silver pieces just to look at an infected finger.”
