Chapter 235: Ready Money

On the eighth day of the Sixth Month, at the Dragon hour, a red line of light showed under the seam of the charcoal furnace door outside the Medicine Hall. It had been glowing for seven days now.

Du Xiaochuan crouched by the furnace, an iron hook laid across his knees, the hooked end wedged into the door seam. Hearing footsteps, he looked up, dark hollows under his eyes.

"Sect Master."

"What time did you add charcoal?"

"Once at the end of the Chou hour, once at the end of the Yin hour." Du Xiaochuan pulled the hook out half an inch, then pushed it back in. "Elder Cheng said no more after the Dragon hour today."

Cheng Banshan came out from the inner room, his empty sleeve tucked behind his back, a bamboo slip held in his one hand. He crouched down and studied the red line for a while. "Du Xiaochuan, go wash your face at the water vat by the west wall."

"I'll wait and watch it finish."

"If it leaks, your eyes won't make the difference. Go."

Du Xiaochuan stood, looked back at the furnace once from the courtyard gate, then left.

Cheng Banshan let his empty sleeve fall loose from behind his back. He pressed his hand against the furnace chamber's outer wall, fingers curling slightly, and the alchemy flame inside shrank under his palm. The red line collapsed to a point. He gripped the ring on the furnace lid, lifted it off, and set it aside on the bricks.

Ten pills lay at the bottom of the furnace. Round, with a sheen on the surface. Not one had cracked.

"Ten," Cheng Banshan said.

He fetched ten small porcelain vials from the shelf and lined them up on the bricks, one by one. He pinched the pills into the vials one at a time, corking each before setting it aside. At the seventh pill he paused, switched fingers, then kept going. Ten vials held ten pills. Not one left over.

One empty vial still sat on the shelf. Cheng Banshan pushed it toward him.

"A Sui's?"

"A Sui's." Xu Yan tucked it into his robe.

Cheng Banshan slid the bamboo slip into the furnace mouth and scraped along the bottom. The powder that fell into his palm was a small pale yellow pinch. Xu Yan had already spread a sheet of herb paper out on the bricks.

"This batch's pill powder is finer than the last one." Cheng Banshan tipped the pinch from his palm onto the paper. "The fire was steady."

Xu Yan folded the paper's corners over, pressed it flat, and wrote on the packet with a brush: the eighth day of the Sixth Month. When finished, he placed it in the wooden box on the shelf, next to the packets from the Second Month.

He carried the furnace log on him. He opened it and added a line at the end: the eighth day of the Sixth Month. Ten pills. Not one cracked.

"The labels?" Cheng Banshan asked.

Xu Yan drew a stack of paper tallies from his robe and laid them beside the ten vials. He'd written them on the night of the seventh, one by one, each in the same size characters, each saying the same thing: Qingya, the eighth day of the Sixth Month.

"Qi Qi will come down to paste them on the tenth."

Cheng Banshan glanced at the stack, returned the bamboo slip to the shelf, and tucked his empty sleeve behind his back again.

"Second batch starts the eleventh," he said. "Comes out the eighteenth. Goes on sale at the twentieth's market."

"The materials I'll buy in the market."

"I've gone over the spirit herbs from the market twice. The quality's sufficient. When you pick, don't just take from the top layer—there're good ones underneath too."

"The charcoal I'll buy at the wharf on the tenth. A dan and a half."

"A dan and a half." Cheng Banshan flicked the charcoal ash from his hand onto the ground. "If you're half a dan short, the fire dies on the seventh night."

Du Xiaochuan came back from washing his face and crouched by the furnace, watching the ten vials lined up in a row. Cheng Banshan slid the furnace door shut and crouched to move the bricks back into place.

On the tenth, at the Mao hour, the sky hadn't fully brightened. A layer of leaves had fallen across the stone slabs at the mountain gate. Nie Bo's broom pushed through them, gathering them into a pile against the ground. Xu Yan slung the market box across his shoulders from left shoulder to right ribs and tightened the strap. Shao Ming was waiting on the west slope, a carrying pole across his shoulder. The two of them went down the mountain one behind the other.

At the Dragon hour, the market gate swung open. The hinges creaked, as always. Shao Ming hung the scale hook on the nail inside the door, hung the scale weight, and hung the hand scale beside it, then pressed down the curled bottom corner of the posted market rules. Xu Yan ground ink and wrote the date at the top of the market ledger.

The tenth day of the Sixth Month.

Miao Zhong arrived before even the first rogue cultivator. He set the things off his back onto the counter: a stack of talisman paper wrapped in oiled paper, and three bundles of sun-dried spirit herbs, tied with grass rope, roots aligned at one end.

"Steward Miao."

"Sect Master Xu." Miao Zhong unwrapped the oiled paper and slid the talisman sheets onto the counter one by one.

Shao Ming hooked a herb bundle onto the scale, watched the beam rise, read the marks, announced the weight, and set the bundle behind the counter. Once all three bundles were weighed, he hung the weight back on the nail and retreated to stand against the wall inside the door.

Miao Zhong named his price. Xu Yan wrote it on paper tallies—three of them—and pinned one to each grass-tied bundle, then added a line to the market ledger. He counted the talisman paper and wrote the number down.

"Same price as the Fifth Month's," Miao Zhong said.

"Mhm."

Miao Zhong stood inside the doorway looking at the scale for a while, then studied the rules posted on the wall, then turned back. "The wharf went up ten percent. I heard about it."

Xu Yan finished the line, lifted his brush, and looked up.

"Mhm."

Miao Zhong waited. No further comment came.

He folded the oiled paper and tucked it into his sleeve, shifted half a step toward the door, and cleared the entrance. A rogue cultivator carrying grass seed came in and passed by him.

A while later, a rogue cultivator unloaded a cloth sack from his shoulder and poured out a stack of yellow talismans. "This—does the wharf buy this?"

"That table only buys spirit herbs," Shao Ming said.

The man counted the talismans himself and named his own price. Xu Yan wrote the tallies and the ledger entry, then locked the talismans away in the cabinet.

At the Snake hour, Qi Qi came running from the far end of Market Street, stopping at the doorway to brace both hands against the frame and catch his breath.

"Ten vials set out on the stall," he said. "The loose stock I didn't touch. The pills—all ten are here." He pulled a cloth pouch from his chest and loosened the drawstring. Ten small porcelain vials rolled out onto the counter.

Xu Yan pushed the labels over. Qi Qi pasted one onto each vial, then lined them up across the counter.

The first pill buyer was a rogue cultivator with frayed cuffs. He picked up a vial and turned it against the light coming through the door. "What day was this made?"

"The label has the date," Xu Yan said.

The man read the label over, counted out eight spirit stones, set them on the counter, and left.

A few more came after. One bought two pills, laying out sixteen stones one by one. A young man dug around his waist for a long while, came up two or three stones short, and in the end only bought two bottles of Qi-Gathering Powder. Miao Zhong stayed by the door the whole time, buying nothing.

By the end of the Snake hour, only one vial remained on the counter.

The buyer was a man who'd come around from the wharf side, the uppers of his shoes wet with charcoal ash. He picked up the vial and examined the label twice. When he paid, he asked, "This batch—ten pills made?"

"Ten."

"All here?"

"All here."

He put down eight stones, tucked the vial into his robe, and went out, heading back toward the wharf.

Shao Ming adjusted the scale weight until it hung level. "The pills walk out one by one, but the herbs just sit there bundle by bundle."

"Herbs wait for the right price," Xu Yan said.

"The wharf's price doesn't wait."

Xu Yan let that one pass. He'd counted the pill money on the counter once over—eighty stones—and kept it separate. Pill money didn't go into the market box. That was a rule he'd set on the very first day the market opened.

At noon, he lifted the three herb bundles from behind the counter onto the countertop and untied the grass ropes. The dried leaves were curled; the mud on the roots had been washed off. He went through them bundle by bundle and set two aside.

"Steward Miao, I'll buy these two. Materials for one batch."

Miao Zhong came over and looked at what he'd chosen. "At my marked price?"

"At your marked price. Twenty stones."

Xu Yan counted twenty spirit stones from his robe and dropped them into the market box. In the market ledger, beneath Miao Zhong's line, he added an entry: Qingya purchases batch materials, twenty stones, recorded under Miao Zhong's name.

Miao Zhong watched the market box and wound the grass rope twice around his hand. "The money's waiting in there too?"

"Recorded under your name. On the tenth day of the Eighth Month, you collect it all at once."

"Fine." Miao Zhong said nothing more. He re-tied the remaining bundle and carried it behind the counter.

At the end of the Horse hour, the market gate closed. Market Street had long since emptied; the noise of it settled layer by layer until all that was left was the line still waiting outside the grain shop—Qian Duoduo would be getting the next shipment of spirit rice. Shao Ming bound the two herb bundles tight and strung them onto one end of his carrying pole.

Xu Yan put the market ledger into the box, locked it, and shouldered it. The door panels came together; the wooden bolt slid home.

"I'm going to the wharf."

"I'll come," Qi Qi said, hefting the pole onto his shoulder.

East down Market Street, at the very end, began the stone steps of Luoxia Wharf. The steps were covered in charcoal ash; every footstep left a pale print. Boats had docked, gangplanks were down, and grain sacks were being weighed one after another—the boatmen checked the numbers against their own books as they called them out.

The boat at the west end was the charcoal boat. The boatman lifted a corner of the tarp; the charcoal beneath it gleamed black.

"A dan and a half," Xu Yan said.

The boatman hung baskets on the scale and weighed them one by one, then dumped the charcoal onto the blue stone slab at the foot of the wall below the steps. Qi Qi spread out the hemp rope, cinched both ends, ran the pole through, crouched to set it on his shoulder, and stood to test the weight.

"Fifteen stones," the boatman said.

Xu Yan counted out fifteen and handed them over. The boatman stuffed the money into his belt and crouched to pull the tarp back over.

A dozen or so paces north along the wall from there was the buying table.

The table was low. On its surface sat a scale, a wooden box, and a small cloth money pouch. Beside it stood a wooden sign, propped at an angle with a brick wedged under it.

Several lines were written on the sign in charcoal. The top lines listed what they bought. The spirit herb line showed a price—the charcoal characters black and fresh, bold strokes, the final stroke in each smudged slightly. Beneath that line was another, one that had been erased, leaving only pale gray traces. You couldn't make out what it had said before.

A line stretched from the table back to the edge of the steps. Six or seven people with spirit herbs—some with bundles, some with baskets. At the back of the line, someone had a bamboo carry-basket strapped to his shoulders, an oilcloth covering its mouth.

Xu Yan knew that basket. It had appeared in the market ledger several times, on the line Bai Xiaoman had named.

The buyer sat behind the table, the scale hook holding a herb bundle, his fingers flicking the weight. He glanced up at the marks, called out a number. The seller nodded, and the buyer swung the bundle down, stacked it into a crate, counted coins from the pouch, and passed them over one by one.

The man took the money, stepped aside, counted it again, then started up the steps. No one haggled. No one waited out the days—goods on the scale, ready money in hand.

Xu Yan walked past the edge of the line.

Three steps from the table, the buyer glanced up.

He knew Xu Yan. Before the Qingya Market had even opened, this was the man who'd spoken threats against Qingya in front of the rogue cultivators right here at this wharf. Now, the scale in his hand never stopped moving, the weight flicking back and forth, the numbers never breaking.

He didn't say a word.

Xu Yan walked past the table. Five steps later, he heard the voice behind him—level, neither loud nor quiet.

"The Tower Master will be in Luoxia in a few days."

The words were meant for the line. The buyer said it while lifting the bundle off the hook and setting it into the crate.

Someone at the back of the line asked, "Who's the Tower Master?"

The buyer didn't answer. He wiped the beam of the scale with the back of his hand and gave the weight another flick.

Xu Yan didn't look back.

He filed the words away. The Tower Master was coming to Luoxia. What for, the wharf wasn't saying. This trip down from the market, what he'd seen was that newly written price line on the wooden sign, that bamboo basket in the line, and that little money pouch on the table—all of it someone else's ledger.

Qi Qi came up behind him with the charcoal, the pole bending under the load. As they passed the mouth of Market Street, Qi Qi glanced back.

Behind them, the table called out another number.