The fine china box felt cold against Lin Ke’s blistered palms.
He sat on a three-legged wooden stool in the locked backroom of the Seventh Ward workshop. On the heavy slate table before him, the pill rested on a bed of red velvet. A dull gold sphere the size of a pigeon’s egg, faintly warm, exhaling a sweet, cloying aroma of scorched sugar and mountain peonies.
An official Outer Sect Standard Foundation Establishment Pill.
Elder Wu had fished it out of an iron safe beneath his floorboards with trembling tongs, swearing that its value exceeded forty tons of high-grade copper. To any ordinary outer student, this small sphere of tightly packed herbs was the holy grail of training. The sacred spark that promised a forty-percent probability of melting the mist of Qi Gathering into an enduring spiritual lake.
To Lin Ke, it was an uninspected twin executable provided by a hostile vendor.
He didn’t swallow it. He laid his right index finger against the wax sealant and engaged the test sub-routine inherited from Sub-Vault Zero.
A set of pale grey glyphs cascaded down his field of vision.
The outer layer was standard carrier medium. Thirty-two percent refined honey-wax, eighteen percent wild ginseng pulp, used to slow digestion and prevent sudden stomach ulceration. Nothing alarming.
