The bone slip was four inches long and cold in Pei Jing’s hand. He held it above the lamp and ran a fingertip over the fine grooves. The bone came from a deep-sea serpent. Whoever made it had smoothed the rib with pumice and cut the letters with true fire.
Most cultivators would hold it to their forehead and read it with spiritual sense. That would put the whole thing into their minds at once. It would also let in a curse or a ward placed there by the man who wrote it. Pei Jing took out a brush.
He painted the grooves with a little oil and lampblack. Then he pressed wet mulberry paper to the bone and lifted it away. The seal script came up black and white. He put four small weights on the corners of the paper.
“The Heavenly Nine-Turn Foundation Pill,” he whispered.
The common pill Wu had tried to sell him would force a rush of qi into the Dantian. Lead and red flux helped the mist stick together long enough to pass for a foundation. The old manual called it a Puddle Foundation, a zhang of gray sludge. A man might live two hundred years on it. He would never reach Golden Core.
