In the quiet, steam-filled chamber of Entry hall 638, adjoining the Great Kettle of the Hollow Burl, Qiao Ming sat upon a low stool of stone-hard ginkgo wood, his bare back bared to the warm stone vapor.
The air in the healing vault was kept at forty degrees, soaked with the aromas of crushed angelica, wild bitter pine-resin, and bitter mountain mugwort. The moisture was heavy and soothing, condensing in clear beads along Qiao Ming’s ribs and running in warm rivulets down his sun-darkened skin.
Beside him, Yan Zhiqiu sat wrapped in a light mantle of woven nettle-silk, her bare feet resting upon a warm mat of heated river-pebbles. Two apprentice healers of the clan were gently pressing heated jade cups along the line of her spine, drawing out the leftover dampness and frost from her lung spirit veins with slow, rhythmic suction. The sound of the cups releasing against her skin—thwup, thwup—echoed with cold and exact regularity in the warm chamber.
The head healer working on Yan Zhiqiu tapped lightly against her collar bone with a rounded horn mallet. The sound returning from her upper chest was thin and papery. It marked that while her lung tubes had relaxed, the deep lung-sac tissue of the Hand-Taiyin channel was still squeezed tight by tiny frost-nodes left by the upper rifts. The healer nodded, noting that she would need a backup decoction of warm tree-marrow broth to dissolve the stubborn thick spit.
