A chorus of urgent whispers outside the alley gate woke Kaelen from his second nap of the morning.
He did not move his head.
He merely reached up with one lazy thumb, pushed his battered straw hat half an inch down over his nose, and took a slow breath of damp garden air.
By day eleven, the news had struck the markets of Red-River City like a lightning bolt.
Deacon Vane’s quiet midnight auction of Master Ash’s second batch of zero-poison Blood-Lotus Pills at the Black-Crow Ghost Market had delivered an undeniable miracle.
After three days of cautious fasting and meridian preparation, a prominent merchant elder from the South Wharf had finally swallowed one of those Cloud-Veined Supreme Blood-Lotus Pills at midnight.
By dawn, the elder’s clogged heart meridian had blown wide open, and he had broken through to the Iron Bone realm without a single trace of meridian sediment or an ounce of Pill-Poison fever.
Every high-ranking patriarch with money to burn and failing organs had lost their collective minds before breakfast.
