Chapter 217: The Date on the Label

At the Snake hour on the eighth day of the Third Month, the line of red in the furnace door's seam slowly turned white.

Cheng Banshan shifted his low stool forward half a step and angled his body slightly aside, keeping his empty sleeve well away from the furnace rim. "Open it."

Bai Xiaoman stood beside him. She hooked the iron bar under the band sealing the furnace lid, pried it loose, and pulled it free. Her wooden hand set against the lid's rim and lifted. The lid came off, and the hot blast surged up toward the Medicine Hall's eaves. The wooden palm flipped over to support a shallow wooden tray and slid it in beneath the furnace mouth. Pills dropped into the tray one by one, each landing with a sound as light as sand falling on paper.

Du Xiaochuan crouched nearby, counting. "One, two, three, four..." At ten he looked up. "Ten pills."

Cheng Banshan's one hand still pressed against the furnace door, regulating the alchemy flame. Only after the heat at the furnace mouth had dispersed did he close the door and withdraw his hand, the knuckles flushed red from the heat.

Ten pills, not a single crack.

"Thirty years. The third batch," he said.

Shi Po stood at the doorway, a sweat rag draped over his shoulder. Qi Qi squeezed past him to look, but only caught the faint dark color at the bottom of the tray. Beneath the veranda, Huo Qing stopped mid-motion, his sword hanging at his side, and watched for a while before returning to practicing that one thrust.

Cheng Banshan picked up one pill, held it close to examine it, set it back on the tray, and scraped the furnace bottom with a bamboo slip. The thin layer of pill powder came loose to the furnace mouth, where Xu Yan caught it on a sheet of prescription paper, folded it shut, and wrote "the eighth day of the Third Month" on the wrapper. He set it on the Medicine Hall shelf behind the two existing wrappers—one from the eighteenth day of the Second Month, the other from the twenty-eighth day of the Second Month, their ink already faint.

Ten pills went into ten small porcelain vials, each mouth stoppered tight with prescription paper. Bai Xiaoman stood the ten vials upright and checked each base. "This batch of vials—the ones from town last time?"

"That batch," Xu Yan said.

"The walls are thin. Keep them back from the edge of the counter."

"Noted."

Xu Yan moved his worktable to the window side and wrote labels, one at a time: "Qingya" at the top, "the eighth day of the Third Month" below. He laid them out on the table to dry. Only after the ink had fully dried did he apply one to each vial, label facing outward, pressing each flat.

He opened the furnace log and added a line at the end: "The eighth day of the Third Month. Qi-Gathering Pills, ten."

"On sale the tenth?" Du Xiaochuan asked.

"The tenth," Xu Yan said.

"This batch came out fast."

"The furnace's warm." Cheng Banshan unstrapped the wooden hand from the leather cord and set it on the table, flexing the five fingers flat. "When the wood's warm, the fire listens."

At the fair on the tenth, all ten pills sold out before noon. Xu Yan picked the next batch's materials from a consignment packet of spirit herbs in the Market, twenty spirit stones, the money dropped into the market box and recorded under the consignor's name in the market book. Qi Qi bought a load and a half of charcoal at the wharf—fifteen spirit stones, two baskets lugged up the mountain. Back at the sect, Xu Yan gave the one spare vial from that batch to A Sui. On the eleventh day of the Third Month, the charcoal stove outside the Medicine Hall was lit again.

The fifteenth day of the Third Month. Market day.

The door panels came down and were leaned against the wall. Shao Ming hung the scale from the nail inside the door and took the hand scale out of its wooden box, working the counterweight along the beam twice before it settled. Qi Qi opened the cabinet and carried goods out packet by packet: talisman paper from Ink Pool Gate, sun-dried spirit herbs from Willow Bank Gate, two small sacks of seeds from Azure Brook Sect—all arranged in a row on the counter, mouths facing the daylight so the quality showed through the paper.

Xu Yan sat behind the counter recording the market book. The crowd came earlier than last month. The first customer was a rogue cultivator with half a sack of spirit rice over his shoulder, which he hung on the scale hook.

"Twenty-nine jin," Shao Ming said, reading the scale.

"Twenty-nine," Xu Yan wrote.

The rogue cultivator took the sack down and moved to squat under the eaves at the door, waiting for buyers. Next came an old man carrying a chicken coop on a pole. The counterweight settled, and the chickens thrashed in the coop, shaking feathers onto the ground. Across the street, Qian Duoduo bellowed across half of Market Street: "Four bowls left, come eat!" Then he ducked back behind his stall.

After that came two unfamiliar faces with a bundle of dried medicinal stalks. They had it weighed and asked when the Market would pay out.

"The tenth day of the Eighth Month," Xu Yan said.

"That long?"

"Settled once a year. No one gets paid on any other day." Xu Yan repeated the line Qian Duoduo liked to use. "Goods stay at the Market. You don't have to carry them around yourself."

The two strangers exchanged a glance, left the stalks at the counter, priced them themselves, and only left after confirming they could retrieve the goods on any market day if they went unsold. The sun crept toward the doorway.

The Snake hour was more than half gone when Miao Zhong came up from the far end of Market Street with a stack of talisman paper in his hands. Before entering, he scraped the soles of his shoes twice on the door panel. The paper was weighed, and Xu Yan recorded it in the market ledger under Miao Zhong's line. But Miao Zhong didn't go in. He stood at the door, glanced around outside, then turned back and said, "Sect Master Xu, there are three people here to see you."

"From where?"

"One from our sect," Miao Zhong said. "The other two are rogue cultivators."

"Show them in."

When the three entered, the noise in the Market dropped a notch.

In front walked the Ink Pool Gate disciple, in gray-green robes with a loosely tied sash, his face pale and lips colorless, stopping every couple of steps. Behind him came two rogue cultivators, neither old—one tall, one short. The tall one pressed a hand to his ribs as though the walk had been too much and he was holding something in. All three glanced at the goods on the counter first, then shifted their eyes to Xu Yan.

Miao Zhong stood half a step to their side and drew four small porcelain vials from his sleeve, placing them one by one on the counter. Only when they were lined up neatly did he speak: "Sect Master Xu, are these your sect's pills?"

Xu Yan set down the brush, picked up a vial, and carried it into the light at the doorway.

It was the small porcelain style Qingya used: the paper stopper pressed flat, the label centered, edges unpeeled. He turned the vial over to look at the label—"Qingya" at the top, a date below. His finger pressed on the date line for a moment before he set the vial down.

"What date is on the label?" Miao Zhong asked.

"The first day of the Third Month." Xu Yan rotated the vial so the label faced him.

Miao Zhong craned his neck forward for a better look, frowned slightly, and said nothing.

"When did you buy it?" Xu Yan asked.

"The fifth day of the Third Month," the Ink Pool Gate disciple said. "At the south end of Linchuan Market, from a stall."

"How many?"

"I bought two," the disciple said. "They bought one each."

"How much?"

"Six spirit stones apiece," the short rogue cultivator said. "The stall had 'Qingya' written on it, two stones cheaper than here. We figured, cheaper means buy more."

"How many were on display?"

"A whole tray." The tall rogue cultivator gestured. "Dozens, all with the same label. The stall owner said it was going fast—wait any longer and it'd be gone."

"What time did you buy?"

"The sun was heading west." The tall one said. "Ate it right beside the stall."

"On the spot?"

"I ate mine first," the tall one said. "Half a street later, my meridians started prickling. In waves, from the wrist upward, stopping at my shoulder, then working back down."

"I figured it was the cold water on the road," the short one said. "When I got back to my room and lay down, I couldn't draw qi no matter how I tried."

The Ink Pool Gate disciple let his hands hang at his sides. "I bought two. Took one that night. All night my chest felt stuffed with wet cotton—couldn't move qi at all. The other pill I didn't dare touch. I've been carrying it since."

"How many days were you down?" Xu Yan asked.

"Three days," the tall rogue cultivator said. "Couldn't get up. Only yesterday could I stand."

"We took a cart down from Linchuan. The whole way, the bumps nearly killed us," the short one said.

Miao Zhong added from the side, "This one is a disciple at the sect. After a few days in bed, he reported back. The sect sent me to ask about it. I've heard all three of them tell it twice. Same story."

"Where's the other pill?" Xu Yan asked.

The disciple reached out and slid the last vial toward himself, pressing the mouth for a moment before letting go. "Just this one. The other three are empty."

Four vials in a row: three empty, one with a single pill, its faint dark color visible through the porcelain.

Xu Yan picked up the one with the pill and studied the label against the light again. The "Qingya" characters were too uniform—every starting stroke and finishing stroke identical in weight, the edges sharp as knife cuts. The date below was in handwriting, and the ink looked fresher than the line above. His own labels didn't look like this: both lines in one continuous flow of ink, the writing carried by a single breath.

"Has anyone ever bought your pills in bulk?" Miao Zhong asked.

"No," Xu Yan said. "Sold one at a time. Everyone buys one or two. No bulk sales. We never sell in lots for resale."

"Is there anywhere else in town selling your pills?"

"Nowhere. Pills are sold only at the Market—on our stall or consigned. Every one labeled, every batch with a retained sample."

Miao Zhong slid his stack of talisman paper toward the counter's corner to clear space.

From under the counter, Xu Yan brought out the furnace log, opened it to the last few pages, and laid it flat, turning the pages toward Miao Zhong.

"The log records dates," he said. "One line per batch."

The page showed his own writing:

The eighteenth day of the Second Month. Qi-Gathering Pills, ten.

The twenty-eighth day of the Second Month. Qi-Gathering Pills, ten.

The eighth day of the Third Month. Qi-Gathering Pills, ten.

"This date on the label—no such date in the log," Xu Yan said. "That day, the charcoal stove at the Medicine Hall was just being lit."

Miao Zhong bent down to look. His fingertip traced down the page line by line, reached the last entry, then went back up and started again. The Market fell quiet. A rogue cultivator at the scale glanced over his shoulder, then quickly looked away. Shao Ming came in from the scale and stood beside Qi Qi; Qi Qi still held a packet of talisman paper and hadn't put it down.

"Qingya pills come in batches of ten. I write the labels. The date is the day the batch comes out of the furnace," Xu Yan said. "The batch from the eighteenth day of the Second Month sold out on the twentieth. The batch from the twenty-eighth day of the Second Month sold out on the thirtieth day of the Second Month. This batch from the eighth day of the Third Month sold out on the tenth. There were no other dates in between. The next batch doesn't come out until the eighteenth."

"Then this vial—" Miao Zhong lifted his eyes. "What is it?"

"It isn't Qingya's," Xu Yan said.

The Ink Pool Gate disciple's lips moved but no words came. The tall rogue cultivator took his hand off his ribs and gripped the counter's edge. "Then what did we eat?"

No one answered. The short rogue cultivator looked down at his three empty vials, righted one, then righted another.

"The pills aren't ours. The injuries are real," Xu Yan said. "Keep this one. Don't throw away a single vial. Where, when, how much you spent, how you felt after taking it—since you can all describe it, write it down. On paper, with your thumbprints."

"Who do we write it for?" the tall one asked.

"First, we see who claims it." Xu Yan closed the furnace log and laid his palm flat on the cover. "This vial has Qingya written on it. Qingya has to settle this account. If you're in no shape to run around, I'll keep the records for you first."

Miao Zhong was still looking at the furnace log, studying it for a long while before finally lifting his eyes from the page. He nudged the vial still holding a pill back toward Xu Yan.