The cold toad-skin compress felt like a slab of greasy ice bound across raw fire.
Apothecary He didn’t use soft silk. He used coarse, raw, unwhitened linen, winding the wrap with brutal smooth speed until Lin Ke’s left hand and wrist were locked still in a thick, herbal cast smelling of crushed bitter herbs, snake gall, and stale marsh water.
“Second-degree chemical scalds,” Apothecary He snarled, knotting the bandage so tightly that Lin Ke’s blackened fingertips turned dark purple. “Liquid silver in the under-skin tissue. You have three cut nerve branches along the palmar arch. If you move this wrist in the next thirty days, the tendons will slough off like rotten cabbage.”
“Give me... The bamboo pole,” Lin Ke whispered from the cot.
*
His teeth were chattering wildly.
His body heat was swinging wildly between freezing shock and a raging, toxic fever as his liver fought the heavy metal poisoning. A fine layer of grey sweat covered his forehead. It pooled in the deep jagged cut on his left cheek.
“You’re not touching a pole,” Apothecary He snapped, shoving a bowl of steaming, pitch-black healing brew under Lin Ke’s nose. “Drink this. It binds the liquid silver in your gut before your kidneys melt into jelly.”
