The evening of the sixth day called for a meal of celebration. Even so, in the deep stone halls of the Drowned Dao, celebration was marked not by wine or roasted meats, but by the careful measurement of grain and salt.
Qiao Ming knelt before the cedar chest, retrieving a heavy clay pot jar whose rim was sealed with three layers of lead foil and beeswax.
On the lid, scratched into the dark clay thirty seasons ago, was the label:
First-Grade Mountain Barley. Harvested from the Terraces of the White Crane before the Seventh Flooding. Sealed Dry with Crushed Laurel and Dried Birch-Ash.
He cut through the beeswax seal with his small knife, peeling back the lead foil with a crisp, metal tearing sound.
The air in the nook was right away filled with the clean, golden fragrance of sun-dried grain. A sweet, nutty aroma of harvested fields that had never known the toxic fallout of void-furnaces or the rotten-egg stench of dying stars.
Yan Zhiqiu leaned forward from her stool, her eyes widening as she inhaled the scent.
“Barley from before the flooding?” she asked, her voice hushed with respect. “In the capital, a single bowl of pre-flood grain was worth thirty pieces of spirit-gold. The royal banquets served only a pinch of it scattered over steamed rice to show the Emperor’s favor.”
