The clean rooms in Yin’s laboratory sat behind layered wards, each pane carved with clean lines and short runes. I verified the seals, then checked the air vents once more. I didn’t want to be sloppy.
Two earth spirits waited inside the first room. They stood like carved figures in a grotto, dust pooled around their feet. Their eyes clicked to when I entered, then to Yin. The earth-court envoy stood outside the glass and watched with his arms folded, the weight of his presence making the ward hum.
They were remarkably ta for being corrupted, but perhaps that was because of the multiple layers of seals they were experiencing.
“Do you agree to the following?” Yin addressed the envoy, her voice clear. “We won’t ss with their cores or anything that’ll disrupt them. Make them swallow these pills, and then we watch. If anything feels wrong, you can knock.”
The envoy nodded. He didn’t look pleased, but he didn’t argue either.
I set the tray down and went over the steps again. “This is the sa pill we gave our people yesterday. It cleans taint and gives a small refill without pulling from the Divine Tree. The leaf is only a guide. Stillness, separation, purification, in that order.”
The envoy listened without expression. “We need the earth-court’s help to make sure they take it.”
“We’re ready,” Yin said.
Two earth spirits from the escort stepped in, their forms heavy and steady. They faced their kin and spoke in a language that felt like the sound of rocks pushed together. The two test spirits opened their mouths. I held a pill out with tongs, which the earth spirit grabbed onto before heading to his kin. The first swallowed without flinching. The second swallowed and stood still.
“Start the ti,” Yin said.
I started counting breaths. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The spirits stood still in the center of the room. There… seed to be no change.
“Any change?” I asked, raising my voice.
Neither spirit moved. The envoy tapped the glass once. The spirits looked to him, then back to us. Still nothing.
I’ll admit, that wasn’t the outco I’d expected.
“Try a second,” Yin said.
We repeated the steps for the second spirit. Swallow. Wait. Watch the plates.
Nothing.
I frowned. “Any change in their miasma levels?”
“Stable,” Yin said. “No release.”
“Maybe the shell is interfering? The lack of liquid to dissolve it… Break one and we’ll feed it the paste on its own.” That would be much more likely to attract demon attention if Sheldon’s warning was right, but it was better than standing by and watching while innocent spirits beca demons themselves.
Yin nodded. We crushed a pill into a paste and loaded it into a small spoon. The envoy watched as the helper spirits held their kin steady. Spoon in. Swallow.
We waited again. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
No change.
I clenched my jaw and wrote what I was seeing: “Spirit, earth-aspected. v0 pill: no dissolve signature detected. No change, no purge, nothing.” Is it because of the earth aspect? Divine Tree leaves shouldn’t be elent sensitive. 𝑅ÁNО𝖇ÊＳ
“Could the ward be blocking it?” Yin asked.
“It shouldn’t,” I said. “Nothing in the ward should block a purification pill.”
Yin paced once to the wall and back. “Let’s move one to the second chamber and repeat this.”
We did. New room, lesser wards, more monitoring from the earth-court spirits as we did so, sa result.
“So with spirits, v0 is a flat fail.”
Yin didn’t say anything as she wrote “flat fail” in the log so we’d rember it without any softening later.
The envoy looked through the glass at his people and then back to , slight concern in his eyes. “Your Highness, do you perhaps have anything else you can do to help them?”
“I do.” I reached with my Chi towards the Spirits, ready to try and manually remove the taint. What I found made frown, but before I could verbalize that to the envoy, the courtyard bell rang three short notes. Then soone pounded up the stairs. One of the other researchers skidded into the lab door.
“Report,” Yin said.
“Ten people, the ten Your Highness and you took to experint, Miss Yin,” the researcher said, panting. “They’re—” He swallowed. “They’re not right. Sensitive to the air. Irritable. One’s gone bad. Sir—”
“Which post?”
“North ward infirmary. They asked for you.”
I didn’t waste a breath. Yin grabbed her kit, and I grabbed onto her, using my Chi to move to the infirmary imdiately. The air had the stale taste of old miasma soone had scrubbed hard but not fully cleared. The ten rested on cots, though “rested” was the wrong word for what I saw.
One man flinched whenever the lamp crackled. A woman rubbed at her arms with small hard strokes. Another stared at the ceiling and said the sa thing twice every ti soone touched him. The last cot had a curtain drawn around it. A low, wrong sound ca from behind it.
“What happened?” I asked the ward-minder. She bowed low as soon as she saw , and shot back up the second I told her to rise.
“They were fine last night, better than fine if anything. Today they woke angry. Every little thing set them off. Three tried to pick fights with the staff, another two we had to bind to stop them from going out to the lines. And him—” She nodded to the curtain. “He fell asleep and then started to choke. Sothing moved under his skin. We tried a purge. It didn’t take. He’s muttering about a bloom. I sent soone to call for Miss Yin, Your Highness.”
“Thank you. I need everyone out of this room except the woman on station and Yin.”
The ward-minder herded the curious out. Yin’s lips were pressed thin. I went to the first cot. Shallow breath, fast pulse, cool skin. I looked at his ridian lines with sense. Sothing along the edges of the channels looked raw, too clean, like we’d scrubbed the walls smooth and left them vulnerable. I didn’t like the feeling that gave .
“What did you find?” Yin asked.
“Too much air gets in now,” I told her quietly. “Everything gets in too easily. Miasma and Chi both.”
“I can see why that makes them irritable. Any shift in the ambient power would be a slap to soone not used to that much sensitivity.”
I pulled the curtain back on the last cot. The man’s eyes were open and glassy. Dark lines crept from his neck toward his chest. He muttered incoherently. I put my hand on his forehead and channeled a thin line of Chi into his brow, then drew it down along the main channel at the front. I took it slow. I watched for cracks. I didn’t want to break anything more than it already was.
The dark lines shifted away from my flow. I tightened my control and pressed them narrower. Yin set a basin beside the bed. The ward-minder steadied his head and shoulders. I guided the taint into small paths and then out. It ca out as thin threads that died at the edge of the bowl. When the last thread went, the man’s breath evened, then deepened. He closed his eyes and didn’t mutter.
I let out a sigh of relief. It seems I didn’t have to enter this man’s inner space to do this. That would’ve been less convenient, not that I’d not have been willing to do so despite that.
“Good,” Yin said, quiet.
I went cot to cot and did the sa, slower when I needed to, a little faster when the channels looked sturdy. The irritability didn’t vanish at once, but his shoulders lowered and the tension in his jaw softened. Eyes stopped jerking around the room.
I sat back at the end and rubbed my temples.
“Thank you,” the ward-minder said. “I was going to send for General Zhang, or Great Spirit Sheldon—”
“Sheldon is holding three lines. We don’t need him for this. I assu Zhang is busy managing the troops and training people too. Just call for if anyone needs healing.”
The ward-minder seed almost appalled at calling for the Fivefold Sage for such basic tasks, but my expression clearly indicated I’d not take any argunts, so she only nodded.
Yin stood next to with her kit open. “We need to write this down,” she said. “v0 worked yesterday, relapse today. Increased sensitivity to Chi and miasma both. One corrupted. Manual purge by you fixed it. The pill did not leave a residual ward.”
I took a cup of water and drank in short sips while I wrote that down.
“Try doing what you did for these people with the spirits?” Yin asked, low.
“I tried. I pushed a thin thread through the glass and touched the outer flow around the first spirit’s core when we set them in place. It didn’t feel good. Their bodies are… less body and more Chi. If I do for them what I did for our people, I could tear the shape they hold. If I go hard, I might fix them. Or I might break them.”
“Risky,” Yin said.
“Yes,” I said. “I’d have to dive into their inner spaces, which I’m willing to, but it’s ti consuming. Unless I go spirit by spirit, that can quickly beco unviable. It’s for the best to make the pills work out.”
Not to ntion, the Divine Beasts wouldn’t just lay down and let enter their inner spaces. Though I might need to, if the situation called for it.
—
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In the lab, the envoy waited with his arms folded again. The two test spirits had not moved. They could have been carvings set in the room.
“The pills don’t seem to be effective, Your Highness,” he said, hesitantly.
“On spirits. Did you give them more of the pills?” I looked at the v0 pills I’d left here. A few more had been consud.
“...yes. If it was reckless, forgive , Your Highness. I just…”
I sighed. “I understand. Pill creation can be a complicated process, however. It is not advisable to use pills haphazardly.”
“I apologize,” the envoy said, bowing. He turned towards his brethren. “...what do we do with them?”
“Let them stay here. We’ll figure out what went wrong, and the pills, and test them on the spirits again soon.”
“Thank you,” the envoy said, earnestly, bowing again. “We will wait here with them, then.”
—
“Why did this happen?” Yin asked, when we ca back to my house. “The people were fine, yesterday. And it should’ve provided so relief, even to the spirits”
“I don’t know yet,” I said. I didn’t like the fact that I didn’t know yet, but when did I ever let that dissuade ? Ignorance had always been sothing that pushed further. Things would be no different now.
I took the chalk, pulled the batch notes close, and started writing questions in the margin.
Why no dissolve in spirits? Why relapse in humans? Why increase in sensitivity to both Chi and miasma? Why did manual purge work, no internal dive needed for humans?
Yin pulled up a stool and added her own small notes. “Maybe the route needs sothing to bind to? Our ridians give it structure. Spirits don’t have ridians like ours, do they?”
“Maybe. And maybe we started at the wrong step. We copied the last two rings first. Stillness was just the timing we set with the shell. We separated and purified. We never anchored anything.”
“Anchor first,” Yin said. “Then separate. Then purify.”
I heard footsteps outside. Light ones. The door eased open and my master poked his head in. He looked tired, but he had a clean tunic and clean hands. He had a cup of tea in one hand and a bag of dried slices in the other.
“Master,” I said. The tightness in my chest eased a little.
“You look both completely rejuvenated and also rather tired,” he said.
That… was a surprisingly accurate assessnt. Being able to do alchemy again and experint had feeling like I was floating on the clouds, but knowing the spirits were being corrupted and having the demon god’s presence hovering over this world like the Sword of Damocles made tired. It felt rather dissonant, feeling this excited and tired at the sa ti.
“I do feel excited but tired,” I said. “Pills didn’t work on spirits. The people we tested it on relapsed. One got worse. I cleaned them by hand. I’m trying to figure out why this happened. I was thinking of approaching you, actually.”
He grunted and set the tea on the bench. Then he sat, very slowly, like his knees hurt, which they did, and looked at the log. He looked at the leaf slivers. He picked one up and rubbed the mark with a thumb, then set it down. “Show your steps, from the start.”
I walked him through it. Base, binder, refill, temper. Leaf mark with three rings. Dissolve targets. Paper assay. Live test. Ward plate check. Caps. Then the morning in the lab. The infirmary. The purge.
He listened without interrupting. At the end, he scratched at his cheek. “I don’t know spirits, but I know work. When you clean a pipe, you don’t just clear the dirt. You put a filter before the pipe so it doesn’t fill again when the wind kicks up.”
“So we need a filter,” I said. “A seed that sits for a few days.”
He nodded. “Rember to not be too fancy when you make it. Tired hands such as mine will need to reproduce it, yes?”
“I will.”
He reached into the bag and pushed a little packet of dried fruit toward . “Eat,” he said. “You get stupid when you’re hungry.”
I took one and chewed. He wasn’t wrong.
Granny Lang arrived while I was swallowing. She didn’t knock. She never knocked. She ca in with a basket, set it down, and began pulling out wrapped packets and a cloth bundle. “You look pale. Sit. Drink.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Drink,” she said again.
I drank. It was hot and bitter and then a little sweet.
She turned to Yin, clearly knowing the situation already. Or maybe she’d been lurking near the door and heard the conversation I had with my master. “What did you feed them?”
Yin told her.
Granny Lang listened, lips pressed together, then snorted. “Children. You cleaned the house and left the doors open.”
I blinked. “We did.”
“You made them smooth,” she said, tapping a knuckle against my forearm. “Smooth is good for a mont. Then wind cos in. You need a light film to hold the shape for a few days. Even mortals know how to grease a joint so it doesn’t seize when dust gets in.”
“A seed ward that sticks to the channels. Essentially what my master said.”
Granny Lang let out an offended gasp. “My version was much better than your master’s.”
The old man rolled his eyes at her words, and for a second, Granny Lang genuinely looked like she’d hit him over the head with her walking cane. I burst out into laughter, Yin joining a second later.
Granny Lang’s eyes softened, before she coughed into her fist. “For spirits, stop thinking about veins. They are nas wearing shape. You put your leaf mark in and it sees nothing it can hold. You need to call its na and tell the dicine where to sit.”
“Nas,” I said. “We could probably create pills specific for each spirit elent type.”
Granny Lang nodded as she unwrapped her bundle and took out a slate. She chalked a short, simple glyph—square, notch, dot—and then a second next to it. “This is how we call the earth in the old ways. You don’t need the whole song. Just enough to tell it ‘you sit here’ before you clean it. You always anchor the pot before you scrub it.”
She looked at then, with a soft smile. “You forgot the first step, brat.”
“I did,” I said, with a lopsided smile. It felt nice, taking lessons from his master and Granny Lang, after so long.
“Then you fix it,” she said. “I’ll tell you all the spirit types’ symbols. Creating anchors for the humans will be much easier. Now show your shell. The sll is still too bright. I can sll it from your remaining pills—you brats really have underdeveloped noses, if you thought whatever you did was sufficient.”
I brought out the stasis shells. She tested one with her nose, then cracked it gently with a fingernail and slled again.
“Hide your scent until it’s in the mouth,” she said. “Demons will crowd our city without the Demon God’s nudge, otherwise.”
“We wrote that,” Yin said, flipping the page to the note.
Granny Lang grunted, satisfied enough. “Guess it’s the lingering sll, then, from whatever you two did yesterday.”
I pulled the clean sheet toward . I wrote “v1 seed-first” in the header. Then I wrote the steps in plain words.
We split the work with an unspoken acknowledgent.
Granny Lang ground the seed base till it was fine and even. Yin asured binder and temper by the pinch, then wrote the ratios in clear script. I trimd treated leaf slivers and checked each edge under the light. My master etched: stillness ring first, then the tiny earth call-mark just beside it, hair-thin depth. He paused every third sliver and handed it to to check for cracks.
We mixed the seed core. I moistened the powder till it clumped and didn’t stick. Yin ward the small plate and set the dish to take the chill off the room air. Granny Lang showed Yu how to roll the tiniest cores without flattening them.
“Now the human anchor batch,” my master said. “No earth mark.”
We ran both in parallel: a spirit-seed line and a human-seed line. Two stacks of tiny cores, each labeled.
“Dry test first,” Yin said.
We painted a thin dirty stripe of miasma on paper. I set a spirit-seed grain on one end. The stripe stopped spreading, but didn’t clear. Good. Then we added the route by laying a sliver with the three-ring mark on the paper just downstream of the seed. The stripe narrowed and then faded.
“Again,” my master said.
We repeated it, this ti with the human-seed. Sa result: seed held the line, route cleaned it.
“Pill form now,” Granny Lang grunted.
“Mark each tray,” Yin said. She wrote v1-seed-first (spirit) and v1-seed-first (human) on scrap tags and tied them to the racks.
“Test the sll,” my master said.
I placed a finished pill under the hood. No rise on the scent plate. I cracked the stasis cap with a fingernail. The plate lit faintly.
“Good,” Granny Lang said. “That’s what we want.”
We didn’t bother with the paper assays; the results wouldn’t be much different since we’d not really changed anything in the composition. And besides, I didn’t think my master and Granny Lang quite liked the more ‘scientific’ parts of the process, if the way Granny Lang squinted at the paper assays was any indication.
It was so much more efficient, doing this with my master and Granny Lang. It only took a few hours, before we had a solid batch of pills again.
It was ti to test them again.
—
The room was quiet except for the soft hum of the ward and the sound of breathing. Yin stood with the tray. Granny Lang watched with her arms folded. My master sat with his hands on his knees.
The envoy looked at with slight surprise still, clearly surprised I was back so soon. He probably expected to take a few days—so did I, honestly, but my master and Granny Lang were just too knowledgeable.
The two earth spirits waited behind the glass. They looked stiff and tired. The envoy stood near the door, jaw tight.
“We’ll start,” I said.
He gave a short nod.
I slid the first pill through the slot. The escort spirit spoke in low sounds and placed it on the test spirit’s tongue. We waited. I counted breaths. Ten. Twenty. Thirty.
At first nothing. Then the spirit’s eyes moved. He blinked twice, and his brow drew tight, as though waking from a bad dream. His hands opened and closed and he took a breath that didn’t scrape on the way in. His mouth trembled. His eyes filled.
“I think giving him a second pill would be advisable,” Yin said softly.
I nodded.
We sent the follow-up pill. The escort helped again. The spirit swallowed. The gray lines under his skin thinned and then vanished. He stared at his hands and let out a sound that was half breath, half laugh. Tears ran down his face in two steady tracks. He tried to wipe them and failed because his hands shook.
“It’s all right,” I said through the tube. “You can cry.”
He nodded, hard. He pressed a palm to his chest and said, slow and careful, “I can… I can move.”
The envoy’s eyes shone. He set his knuckles to his lips to keep them steady.
“Again,” my master said.
We repeated the steps for the second spirit. First pill. Wait. His shoulders dropped. He looked around the room like he hadn’t seen it in a long ti. Second pill. He choked on a small sob, covered his face, and shook once from head to toe. When he lowered his hands, there were wet marks on his cheeks. He breathed out and in like a person, not a stone.
He took one step, then another, and reached the glass. He pressed his hand to it. I set my palm to our side. His fingers spread, lined up with mine. He cried harder for a mont, then tried to smile and failed, then smiled anyway.
The first spirit moved close to him and gripped his forearm. They stood leaning together, not from weakness, but because they wanted the touch. The envoy bowed his head. His shoulders shook once. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and did not pretend he wasn’t crying.
“Thank you,” he said. His voice broke. He bowed low. “On behalf of my court.”
The escort spirits bowed with him. Inside the room, the two test spirits bent at the waist, then straightened and wiped their faces again. “Thank you, Your Highness,” one of them spoke.
The other said, “Your Highness’ reputation truly is not exaggerated." He laughed once, a small, raw sound, then covered his mouth and laughed again through more tears.
Yin’s eyes were wet. She sniffed and looked away as if dust had gotten in. I raised an eyebrow as I looked at her. Yin really was such a big softie, huh? She swatted my shoulder, protesting with her ears heating up.
“We’ll keep watching,” I said. “If anything changes, please alert us. We’ll co at once.”
The envoy nodded. “We will keep them here,” he said. “We will send word morning and night.”
“Good,” I said. “If you are fine after three days, then we can say it holds. The next three days matter. Small sips of water. Sit. Walk a little. Clean air. The standard, for a healing patient. You don’t really need to stay contained anymore, really.”
Both spirits nodded. The first wiped his face again and tried to stand straight, then gave up and laughed at himself, and that made the second laugh too. They held each other’s forearms like brothers.
All this laughing made smile too.
Yin wrote the ti in the log. “We’ll note checks at dawn and dusk,” she said.
“Thank you, Your Highness,” the envoy said again, quieter. “Thank you for helping us.” He bowed to Granny Lang, Yin and my master as well. “Thank you so much.”
The two healed earth spirits followed their envoy’s example, bowing to Granny Lang, my master, and Yin too.
My mind couldn’t help but drift as I realized just how powerful the Divine Tree’s leaves were. If them just being used as an alchemical material allowed them to purify miasma—could they be mixed with the bombs to be more effective towards the Demon God, I wonder?—then what if they were used as conduits?
Yes, healing Matriarch Shie and my master seed more and more doable, the more I thought about it.
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