A spirit beast began to lose qi as soon as it died. A man who dragged a whole carcass to market three days later would get a fraction of what he could have earned by cutting it up fresh.
Pei Jing laid his knives and saw on an oiled leather roll. He had two hours.
He started with the blood. The dragon had held about eighty gallons. Half of it lay at the bottom of the trench or had clotted in its lungs. Of what remained, he judged thirty gallons clean enough to keep. The dark blood shone faintly green.
He set a bamboo channel beneath the cut at the throat. Blood ran down it into six five-gallon carboys. It smelled of copper and ozone. He sealed each carboy as it filled. Alchemists used dragon blood to keep fire herbs steady when a pill came together. Fifteen stones a gallon made the six jars worth four hundred and fifty.
Next he climbed onto the fractured brow and took up a chisel and two-pound mallet. The bones were four inches thick, but the punch had already opened cracks. Ten minutes of steady work lifted the broken pieces.
The core lay inside. It was a black orb the size of a man’s skull and weighed eighteen pounds. Green and ochre veins pulsed faintly beneath the surface. Its bond to the dragon had died, but the core still held the qi it had stored. As Pei Jing lifted it, the air grew colder…
