Qiao Ming did not allow a single second to elapse between the pooling of the blood and the application of the carbon. His right hand, broad and scarred from a lifetime of handling maritime instruments, reached into the cypress box on Desk Twelve and lifted the eight-sided cake of royal pine soot. The cake was four inches long. It was stamped with the ancient seal of the Celestial Record Bureau, and smelled powerfully of scorched resin, dried wild plum blossoms, and distilled bitter pine-resin.
He lowered the flat, squared base of the soot cake into the concave basin of the Broken Slate. The tightly packed carbon met the pool of fresh crimson blood with an immediate, tiny blood vessel hiss. The porous microstructures of the carbon specks drank the hot star-fire. It pulled the living liquid upward into the block while the heavy hemoglobin settled against the gritty teeth of the black flaky rock.
The cake of pine soot Qiao Ming held was no ordinary commercial commodity. It had been pressed during the reign of the Seventh Emperor of the Yan-Luo, made from the heartwood of ancient stone-pines that grew only on the sheer granite cliffs of Mount Taihua. Those pines, stunted by freezing winds and nourished by stone mists, produced resin containing exceptionally high concentrations of diterpene acids and crystal-clear borneol. When burned slowly in clay pot kilns with limited oxygen, the soot collected on glazed baked-clay cones was so fine that a single ounce contained over ten billion…
