The morning after Yan Ba’s delivery, the workshop was colder than usual.
A pale, watery daylight filtered through the dark rock chimney cleft, lighting up the drifting coal dust in thin, grey shafts. On the pine workbench, the twelve low-grade spirit stones Pei Jing had divided for Old Monster Gui sat in their neat stack, untouched.
Gui sat in his bamboo chair, his hickory cane resting against his knees. In his left hand, the old potion-maker held a coarse, dark brown heavy clay tea bowl filled with hot mountain tea. In the palm of his scarred right hand lay a single fragment of a jade pearl.
It wasn’t one of the twelve pills delivered to Yan Ba. It was a test bead. A tiny, pea-sized sphere of green crystal Pei Jing had scraped from the southern water drops rib of the brass lid before the lugs were opened.
Gui had been staring at the bead for nearly an hour.
“In forty years,” Gui whispered, his voice cracking the silence of the room, “I have swallowed over four thousand pills. Blood-invigorating pills, bone-marrow salves, spirit-gathering powders, lung-clearing lozenges.”
Gui turned the green bead with the tip of his thumb.
“Every single one of them was bought from the stalls or refined in this pit. Every single one of them tasted of bitter bile, sulfur dust, and chalk. You swallow them, and for two hours your dantian burns with false vigor. Then the waste scum settles into your flesh. It turns your…
