On the wooden breakfast table of the [Gu Family Flying Courtyard], the hollowed-out five-hundred-year ginseng root sat inside a sealed glass specimen dish.
Inside the dish, the four-inch black [Blood-Leech Soul-Parasite] was still snapping its ring of needle-like teeth against the glass, trying to get at Auntie Qin’s fingers.
“Disgusting little thing!” Auntie Qin scolded, rapping the top of the glass dish with her brass thimble until the leech curled into a ball. “Look at how cleanly the inside of that ginseng root was hollowed out.
Whoever raised this parasite didn’t let it crawl into the herb by accident in the field. They used an alchemical needle to inject the egg straight into the root core before sealing the bark with wax!”
Beside the table, seventy-year-old Grandpa Yao lowered his brass magnifying spectacles and stroked his gray beard with a dark frown.
“Madam Qin has a sharp eye,” Grandpa Yao rumbled. “This is a mutated [Soul-Sucking Blood-Leech Gu].
In the old days, only the most unscrupulous black-market doctors bred these things. When a patient drinks soup boiled from that ginseng, the leech egg hatches inside their dantian. Moreover, Releases a brief surge of warm stimulant Qi that makes the patient feel ten years younger for a month—right before the leech latches onto their heart meridians and starts chewing!”
