The magnifying quartz lens was scratched at the upper outer edge, but under the focused yellow light of two animal fat lamps, it revealed a landscape of monstrous building.
Lin Ke’s hands were clamped into iron wrist-rests bolted to the wooden bench.
Between his fingertips rested an ultra-fine silver razor knife, its blade ground to an edge four times thinner than a human hair. Beneath the lens, resting in a concave fine china cradle, sat one of the official Sect-Sponsored Foundation Pills.
To the naked eye, the sphere looked like a jewel: spotless, seamless. It was wrapped in swirling crimson mist that smelled of honey and fresh mountain dew.
Under the lens, with Lin Ke’s 9th-Layer sense senses channeled into the glass, the illusion dissolved into a horror of hungry manufacturing.
The Tian Fu dismantled the pill’s physical and energetic strata into an upright cross-section:
Four distinct physical layers, Lin Ke analyzed, his razor knife hovering motionless above the crimson lacquer.
Layer 1 was a purely cosmetic masking agent. Dried sweet-root resin combined with a mild neuro-narcotic derived from dream-poppy flower. Its sole purpose was to dull the subject’s taste buds and induce a mild, euphoric happy warmth rush upon ingestion, convincing the student that they were experiencing divine enlightenment. Meanwhile, the poison slipped past the palate.
