The smell of scorched cloth and sour vinegar hung thick inside the Seventh Ward’s tally office.
Apothecary He worked without speaking, his gnarled thumbs digging brutally into the muscle tissue of Lin Ke’s right forearm. Every press squeezed dark, clotted fluid from the micro-fissures in his glass channels. It sent sharp spikes of white-hot agony straight to Lin Ke’s temples.
“Non-elastic waveguides,” Apothecary He spat. He tied off a strip of boiled canvas with an aggressive yank that set Lin Ke’s teeth grinding. “You treated your arms like iron pipes when you were an apprentice. Now you treat them like blown quartz. One day you’ll turn your wrist blood vessel into powdered glass. I’ll use your bones for fertilizer.”
“The wrap is tight enough, Elder He,” Lin Ke murmured, testing the tension. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Pay me in bitter-root animal fat,” the apothecary grunted, wiping his stained hands on an apron stiff with dried healing wraps.
Across the low cedar desk, Elder Wu DeZheng was pacing so rapidly his ritual hem was whipping against the floorboards. In his right hand, he clutched a jade tablet carved in the shape of a fat persimmon. His three-hundred-year old family retirement token, polished smooth by decades of nervous thumbing.
