The pottery bowl rested on the unplaned pine workbench. A faint ring of dark, bitter moisture pooled beneath its chipped clay base, evaporating in the dry heat streaming from the fire chimney pipes.
Old Monster Gui didn’t take his eyes off Pei Jing. The old man’s pupils were tightened to needle points behind the yellow haze of his waterfalls. His right hand, stiff and misshapen with two missing digits, remained hovering two inches above the iron metal ring of his hickory walking staff.
In forty years of managing potion-made furnaces in the lower markets, Gui had seen three kinds of men drink his white arsenic tea. The ignorant, who gulped it down like spring water and began vomiting blood-laced mucus before the third breath. The arrogant, who tried to stop the metal stone with crude bursts of spiritual qi, only to force the heavy salts deeper into their liver spirit veins and collapse in convulsions. And the cunning, who used sleight of hand to spill the tea down their sleeves, leaving wet patches that smelled of garlic and bitter polygonum.
Pei Jing had done none of those things. He had swallowed every drop. He hadn’t channeled a single wisp of spiritual energy. His pulse, visible at the main neck blood vessel beneath the coarse linen collar of his daoist tunic, beat with the slow, heavy rhythm of a waterwheel turning in a placid millpond.
