The smell in the central sick room was that of a slaughterhouse left to rot in midsummer.
Lin Ke’s boots slipped on the wet dark rock tiles as he followed Apothecary He through the double oak doors. The low-ceilinged ward was packed wall-to-wall with narrow wooden cots, and nearly every cot held a convulsing man.
Outer sect students—hardened frontier guards who had survived years of border skirmishes—were writhing beneath soaked wool blankets.
Their faces were swollen, purple-black masks of water-pressure congestion. Dark, rubbery ropes of clotted blood hung from their nostrils and ears, pooling on the floorboards. Several men had chewed their own tongues in half during the spasms, their throats gurgling with thick, choking foam.
“Intravascular clotting,” Apothecary He barked, tossing a tray of shattered bone-needles onto an iron trolley with a violent clatter. “The weeping-blood spores enter through the water intake, bore through the gastric mucosa within six minutes, and begin cross-linking with fibrinogen.”
The old apothecary leaned over a gasping student. He drove a three-inch hollow silver drain needle straight into the youth’s right thigh vein.
Nothing came out.
No blood. Only a dark, jelly-like worm of crimson curd that slowly crept out of the tube like cold sausage meat, plugging the silver hollow tube fully.
