David

Senior Sister Hong was shorter than Alice and about as slim. David was also immeasurably stronger and faster than he had been back at home. Even though he'd carried her with a forearm tucked behind her knees and another behind her neck for four hundred li, or two hundred kilometers, or over a hundred miles on the Iron Road and into Dongjing City, he’d barely broken a sweat.

In fact, the last time he could remember sweating was in that sweltering heat, headed towards the library with Alice.

David liked the city of Dongjing a lot. If he closed his eyes and imagined the roar of chatter in the city were dozens of languages and pretended the pagodas were the skyscrapers that they rivaled in height, he was almost back.

What he liked less was the current state of Senior Sister Hong. Her lips had become a deathly shade of blue and her hair had lost most of its luster. She seemed aged before her time, or perhaps long after. She had already tried to pass on a memory of her life to him - they had just met, but they were of the same sect and no one more familiar to her had been available.

"For what purpose does Ji Kang call on this old Daoist?"

For just a moment, he struggled to put to words something as obvious as his situation to Daoist Nan, who stood at the door of a familiar tea shop with a small door and wide, glass windows. He was dressed the same way as David remembered - with dark, silken pants that were just a bit too short and a dark red sash that looped itself from right shoulder to left waist three times. Daoist Nan appeared older than most cultivators, with the beginning of wrinkles on his forehead and hard muscles that rippled across his body.

David had only met Nan in passing when the man had stopped the trio of David, Alice and Li on the Iron Road - also at the Linking Stone. He was still unsure of how to speak with the man in a way that would be considered polite. David hadn't had a plan when he'd noticed the aromatic qi of the man as he'd run through the streets of Dongjing - it was only instinct that told him this was the right way to go.

He certainly didn't have an easy answer for the man's question, not with the hundreds of eyes on the sidewalks and rooftops that pinned him to his place on the street.

Luckily, the question seemed to have just been part of that ritualistic greeting he'd cribbed from Li when they'd first met the man on the road.

"I see you have changed the color of your robes," said Daoist Nan, casting a disapproving eye on the onlookers. "Do come into my store."

David gratefully followed him into the tea shop. Daoist Nan closed the door behind him and then drew the curtains shut over the windows. It was evening in Dongjing, bright as day in any other city, but at that moment, the room was dark and peaceful.

Daoist Nan exhaled heavily. Candles of deep red wax lining shelves against the walls lit in unison.

The inside of Daoist Nan’s shop was almost stereotypical, in that it was everything David expected it to be. Little octagonal jars of brass, presumably full of tea, covered every shelf, each of them labeled meticulously. White tea from the Western Continent, green tea from the fields of Jiangxi, pu’er - the Daoist’s namesake - locally sourced. David noticed a few jugs of tea that bore the name of his roommate - Leng.

In the corner of the shop was the large cauldron that David had seen the man stir in front of customers. Attached to it was something Alice would have liked - a small contraption with a colander full of tapioca bubbles.

A large countertop split the room in two - behind it were more shelves and more little jars. Many of them were marked with scratches in the brass with the taichi, that symbol for yin and yang. David assumed these were teas with qi content.

But there were more pressing matters.

“She is dying,” said Daoist Nan, of the woman who David held in his arms. “Lay her down on my counter.”

David did so. “Can you save her?”

Nan frowned, but did nothing to imply whether he could or couldn’t. “You didn’t have a plan when you arrived at Dongjing,” he said instead.

David grimaced. “I have a friend at the Clear Skies, I thought-”

Nan shook his head. “The medical facilities at the tallest tower are not open to outsiders,” he corrected, “unless your friend at the Clear Skies happens to be my friend.”

“Your friend?”

“Tou Loulong, you may have heard of him.” Nan seemed proud of this.

David had heard of him - he was the man Chan Changshou had referred to as his master, the esteemed Daoist Tou.

“It isn’t common for the core disciples of my sect to live outside of the Emperor’s city of Xijing. But even if I were to arrive at the medical bay in Winds of Spring Tower, I doubt I would easily get treatment.”

There was a moment of silence.

“I must examine her,” said Daoist Nan. He walked from the curtained windows to stand beside David and stare at her.

He frowned. “She’s neither of the two you were traveling with last we met. You work fast, junior.”

David shook his head. “This is my senior sister. She was assigned to me. We were meant to deliver goods won in our sect auction to Huzhou.”

Daoist Nan nodded carefully. “Sit her up.”

Senior Sister Hong had been passed out the entire time they were inside of Nan’s tea shop. Her face had taken on a waxy pallor under the candlelight - unnatural, decomposing, even. Laying on the countertop, she looked more like a corpse than a living human being. As David pulled her up by her shoulders, strands of hair floated off her head and broke into dust.

Daoist Nan heaved himself onto the counter and sat behind her with crossed legs. He held out an open palm to the back of her neck and another one flat before his bare, muscular belly - perpendicular to his elbow. He closed his eyes and pinched together the forefinger and thumb of the hand in front of him. David heard the sound of the Song, still and bright.

Hong screamed.

It came as a complete shock to David.

“Do not move her,” Daoist Nan bellowed. “I’m no medic.”

David held her firm by the shoulders.

Hong’s facial features transmuted from drooping and yellowed back to a sickly pallidness. Between Nan’s pinched fingers was a globule of what looked like oil or grease, black as the night.

“Bring me a scale pan,” said Daoist Nan. Bullets of sweat ran down his face. “There are some in the drawer you’re sitting on.”

David let go of Hong’s shoulders and she pitched forward, but to his surprise, her eyes shot open and she caught herself, slamming a palm on the countertop. Her head whipped around and she raised her hand and David heard the sound of the Song, but before he could cry out she’d already stopped herself - she’d seen the globule of oil between Nan’s fingers.

“Thank you, Honored Elder,” she muttered, then she let herself go. Her arms drooped to the side and she sprawled at an angle violently. David caught her before she could fall off the countertop and let her down gently onto the burnished wood.

Nan hadn’t moved - his eyes were still closed and David could see the steam rising from his mouth, from his nostrils, from his ears. “Junior brother,” he hissed, almost violently.

David scrambled over the countertop and pulled open drawer after drawer, each full of various herbs and measuring stones and cups and writing utensils, with violent bang and violent bang before he opened a wide, flat compartment near the floor on which there were a stack of pans of brass and glass.

He pulled out a pan with a metallic clang-

“Glass, you idiot,” croaked not Nan, but Hong.

David obliged, sliding out one of the glass scale pans instead - it was as wide and long as his forearm, and many times as weighty as the metal one. He laid it on the countertop beside Daoist Nan with an almighty thud. David then winced. He had been rather heavy handed with it.

Daoist Nan’s hand ghosted over the pan and he opened the pinched fingers with a deep sigh. The rushing, rousing sound of the Song subsided and the droplet of oil or grease or tar the size of a fingernail fell through the air.

It hit the glass not with a splash but a clang and broke apart like shards - but those glossy, black shards didn’t hold their shape. They collapsed instead into a liquid, flooding the bottom of the pan evenly. There was far more liquid than a drop - nearly an inch’s height of fluid, but it was now less glossy and more murky black, like ink.

Daoist Nan groaned. “I hate poison cultivators,” he muttered. He pushed himself off the countertop to his feet, landing beside David and picked up the brass scale pan David had left discarded on the floor.

Hong was now sitting up with her own strength, though she still leaned heavily to her left.

“Who is your master?” Nan asked - not of David, but of Daoist Hong.

“The Master of Earth Peak within the Ascending Sky, Feng Shui, resolved.”

“And your name?”

“I am Daoist Hong Fanyi, the inheriting disciple of Earth Peak,” she muttered.

“Do you know of me?”

Hong shook her head.

“I would not expect you to. I am Daoist Nan Pu’er, of the Paper Flowers. It is considered impolite in the North, where both our sects hail from, to announce your enemies to your students. We’d much rather have them find out the hard way,” he said, his mouth twisting into a bitter, aggrieved smile. “But now, I have saved your life. Do you doubt this?”

Hong shook her head again. If possible, she looked more pale than before.

The smile slid into something more wistful. “But you are not Gentleman Feng, nor are you that despicable man - Grandmaster Ling of Sky Peak. You have written no wrongs in my eyes.”

Nan turned his attention to David. “Junior, why have you put me into this position? I am no doctor, so I follow no codes which insist I heal the sick and bless the worthy, but I am also a man of morality and honor. Why have you joined a sect full of my old rivals?”

David knew the man didn’t truly want an answer, so he made no comment.

“I will heal her,” decided Daoist Nan, “because no one else would. Were she a member of your friend’s sect, I would have taken her back on the Iron Road to the old beggar and left her on his doorstep like the rest of his children.”

“Friend? In the Iron Scripture?” Daoist Hong’s nostrils flared. She suddenly looked very much alive and very dangerous to David.

“It is none of your business,” whispered Nan, every inch as foreboding as David remembered from their first meeting. “If I am willing to forgive millenia of insult to heal you, then you should have less questions about whom your junior shares tea with.”

Hong swallowed, cowed. “I’m sorry,” she squeaked, “back in my day-”

Nan snorted, his chest heaving with mirth. “Back in your day? You are as young as a freshly grown garden herb.”

Hong blushed and cast her eyes at her hands - anyone would have found her quite fetching, but Nan only sneered.

“Give your junior what needs to be delivered, or whatever the story was,” said Nan. “You will stay behind, and I will heal you. Until he returns, or until you can leave by your own power, I will commit some of my time to healing you,” he growled. “Huzhou is not far, and if I’m not mistaken, Daoist Ji is a newly ascended inner disciple. Back in my day, none of those from your sect would ever consent to handholding.”