The scent of burning amber and crushed ginseng rolled through the speaking horn, carrying the sweet, sickening odor of dying longevity.
In the outer pillared hall of Entry hall 350, Zhu Heling had reached the end of his mortal math. His physical tools were ruined. His drills were cemented in magnetic iron concrete, his acid tanks were stopped into inert white chalk-stone, and his four hired blades. He shivered in freezing sickness and coated in grey mud, had collapsed against the base of the columns, refusing to lift another tool.
The scholar stood alone in the center of the flooded nave, lit up by the pale, dying light of his check lantern. His ivory silks were torn to shreds. His chest heaved with a dry, rattling cough that sprayed flecks of black blood onto the wet flags.
From his breast pocket, he drew a small, six-sided casket carved from purple spirit-jade. He unlatched the gold wire clasp with shaking fingers. Inside, nestled on yellow velvet, lay nine round pills—each the size of an acorn, glowing with an intense, sickly crimson light that pulsed like the heartbeat of an adder.
These were the Nine-Cycle Blood-Condensation Pills. The forbidden longevity pills forged in the secret furnaces of the Jade Court, compounded from the life-blood of thirty thousand mortal slaves and the powdered bone-ash of high-tier elders. To eat one was to purchase ten years of artificial life-force at the cost of burning to ash one’s natural spirit veins.
