In the peaceful lower quarter of the Azure River town, shaded by weeping willows and flowering plum trees, stood Doctor Su’s apothecary and clinic.
For thirty seasons, the clinic had been a place of quiet desperation. In the old days of the Starry Board, mortal bodies had broken down under the relentless strain of the royal tribute drain tubes. Men of thirty had arrived with rotting teeth, brittle bones. The hollow, wheezing breath of early decay, while women had bled out in childbirth. That was because the sky court siphoned ninety-four percent of their life-force into the heavens.
Doctor Su had spent forty winters fighting an impossible battle with cheap willow bark, bitter herbs, and wooden splints. He watched her patients wither despite her best efforts.
Today, the clinic was bathed in warm, dust-mote-filled sunlight.
Lin Tao sat on a low wooden check bench, his canvas coat draped over the back of a wicker chair. His bare torso was exposed to the cool morning air. He showed a landscape of old battlefields written upon mortal flesh. The jagged white scar across his left ribs from a sky axe-spear during the siege of Base Zero. The network of faint blue lines along his shoulders where high-voltage lightning had arced in the Astral Core. And the deep, leathery calluses on his forearms from decades of hammer and chisel work.
