The sixth day began with a choking fog that pierced every seam in the workshop’s heavy oak doors.
The humidity in the gorge was so dense that water condensed on the iron tools. It gathered in rust-colored droplets along the edges of the scrapers and tongs. In such damp air, the burning gasses inside the chimney pipe struggled to rise. That forced pockets of acrid sulfur smoke to back-draft into the central room.
Old Monster Gui had been coughing since midnight.
The old potion-maker lay sprawled on his bamboo recliner near the warm hearth, his thin blanket soaked with cold, greasy sweat. His breathing was a wet, ragged death-rattle. Every breath sounded like two coarse grinding stones turning against each other in dry sand. Fire-poison was an incurable turning to stone of the lung tissue. The piled up penalty of breathing lead vapors and red stone smoke for forty years without sect-grade purification arrays.
In the corner near the ash pit, twelve-year-old Wu Xiao was shoveling hot fire melted rock waste into a sheet-iron wheelbarrow.
The boy’s thin arms were trembling. He had been on his feet since the fourth watch. He hauled forty buckets of well water to fill the cooling water tanks and carried fifty pounds of dry coal from the cellar. His soot-streaked face was pale, his eyes ringed with purple tiredness.
