The smell of boiling vinegar and crushed wormwood struck Lin Ke before he reached the threshold.
His right hand was tucked into the sleeve of his grey clerk robes, throbbing with an ugly, rhythmic heat that matched the rhythm of his heart. Every time his pulse spiked, a flare of sharp, glassy pain lanced up the forearm bone, streaming into his elbow.
The Laogong palm vent had saved his life in the chimney pipe. But the physical chassis was paying the bill.
The medicine room annex was a low-ceilinged stone cellar carved directly into the western cliff face of the Seventh Ward. Shelves of warped cedar sagged under hundreds of unglazed clay pot crocks, bundles of dried roots, and dark glass bottles sealed with dirty beeswax.
In the center of the gloom sat Apothecary He.
He was seventy years old, shaped like a dried gourd, with yellowing teeth, a wispy grey goatee stained with tobacco juice, and fingers scarred by acid burns and black flesh-rot cautery. He sat on a three-legged stool, peeling the skin from an ugly grey toad with a dull iron bone-knife.
“If you’re coughing blood, go outside and die in the ditch,” Apothecary He grunted without looking up. “The sect doesn’t pay me to wash corpse linen, and I’m out of pine coffins.”
“I’m not coughing blood,” Lin Ke said, his voice flat.
He stepped into the dim lantern light and tapped the copper medallion on his sash.
The old apothecary squinted, his knife pausing mid-clean cut. His watery old eyes flicked from the grey robes to the copper badge, then to the starved soot-streaked neck above the collar.
“An Assistant Ward Clerk?” He snorted, a dry, rattling sound. “Wu DeZheng must be truly desperate if he’s giving copper badges to fire sweepers. What do you want, boy? If you’re looking for marrow-clearing pills, they’re forty spirit stones each. Your monthly clerk pay won’t buy the dust on the jar.”
“I don’t need pills,” Lin Ke said.
He pulled his right arm from the sleeve and laid his hand flat on the stained wooden counter.
* * *
The apothecary stared at the palm.
The outer skin at the center of the palm was fully gone. In its place was a circular crater of blackened, weeping flesh. It was surrounded by pale pink blistering and angry red streaks streaming outward like the spokes of an iron wheel. The skin was tight, hot to the touch, and weeping clear serous fluid.
Apothecary He laid his toad knife aside and picked up a pair of dull iron shears.
With rough, unsentimental care, he prodded the edges of the wound. Lin Ke didn’t flinch. He didn’t pull his hand away. He simply tracked the apothecary’s fingers with the detached calm of an engineer watching an oscilloscope.
“That’s not a fire splash,” He murmured, his tone shifting from casual contempt to cold curiosity. “A melted rock waste splash burns from the outside inward, leaving charred edges and ragged tears. This crater... This was blown from the inside out.”
“A high-pressure steam valve,” Lin Ke recited the official lie. “The backing-up pressure was severe.”
“Steam doesn’t burn in a perfect nested circle, boy,” the old healer sneered, poking the center of the crater with the blunt end of the shears. “And steam doesn’t cause high-hum energetic deep ring in the outward bone.”
Lin Ke felt the old man’s Qi probe his forearm.
It was a thin, oily thread of healing energy, slow and probing. It brushed against Lin Ke’s glassy glass channels. Then, the old man’s hand jerked back as though he had touched a red-hot iron.
He dropped the shears onto the counter with a loud clatter.
He turned around, hobbled over to a dark wooden cabinet. Then he pulled out an unlabelled heavy clay crock filled with a pungent, foul-smelling green sludge.
“Pills are for young masters who think immortality is a gift from the heavens,” Apothecary He muttered, dipping a wooden spatula into the sludge. “In the Seventh Ward, flesh is meat. Meat obeys heat, rot, and friction. You want it fixed? It’s going to hurt.”
Without waiting for permission, the apothecary slapped a massive dollop of the green sludge directly into the open crater of Lin Ke’s palm.
The agony was instant and savage.
It felt as though someone had poured packed strong etching acid into an open wound. The sludge was fermented willow bark, crushed river-moss, and sulfur-salt water. An aggressive, raw living antiseptic designed to chemically strip rotting tissue and suppress tiny blood vessel inflammation.
Lin Ke’s left hand gripped the edge of the wooden counter until the cedar groaned. His knuckles turned white, but he didn’t utter a single sound. His breathing remained strictly measured: four seconds in, four seconds hold, four seconds out.
Apothecary He watched him, his watery old eyes narrowing with grudging respect.
“Tough bastard,” the apothecary muttered.
He took a strip of coarse, raw, unwhitened hemp cloth and bound the hand with ferocious tightness. He wrapped it five times across the palm and anchored the weave around the wrist. Every turn of the bandage tightly packed the raw nerve endings. That forced the herbal paste deep into the torn tissue.
“Fermented willow bark suppresses the fire in the blood,” He said, tying off the hemp knot with a violent tug. “River-moss draws out the body-energy melted rock waste. Keep that wrap dry for fourteen days. Don’t touch a bellows lever. Don’t lift an iron metal bar. If you vent that channel again before the new skin forms, the backing-up pressure will shatter your outward bone into five pieces. I’ll have to saw your arm off at the elbow.”
“Fourteen days,” Lin Ke repeated, nodding once. “Understood.”
He reached into his sash. Then he pulled out three low-grade spirit stones—part of his advance clerk pay from Elder Wu—and laid them on the wood.
Apothecary He swept the stones into his greasy pocket without counting them.
Then, moving with surprising speed for a seventy-year-old cripple, the old man drew a thin, five-inch silver test needle from his lapel and tapped the blunt end sharply against Lin Ke’s right collarbone.
PING.
The sound was not the dull, fleshy thud of an ordinary human skeleton.
It was a high, crystal-clear chime. Hollow, brittle, and ringing like a fine china bowl struck with a silver spoon.
The old apothecary froze.
His yellowing eyes widened, fixing on Lin Ke’s hollow neck with an expression of pure, pure horror.
“What cursed manual have you been swallowing, boy?” Apothecary He whispered, his voice trembling as he pulled the needle back. “Your bones... Your bones sound like dried fine china on the verge of shattering.”