The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Register
Pei Ruo read it to him by candlelight, standing at the table in the Pill Room's outer chamber.
The Elder had left the grey ledger on a stand, closed, with a red silk ribbon marking one page.
"He marked it," Pei Ruo said, and her voice was very flat. "He wants you to start there."
"Read it."
"Cen Yu. This is the Keeper's pill book. I have never seen the whole of it."
"Read it, Pei Ruo."
She opened it at the ribbon and put one scarred finger under the first line.
"Grey pill, family tier. One pill is one month. One vessel's blood, one bowl, boiled down with cinnabar and salt. Made by the Hall, for the vessel's own family."
The candle did not move.
"Source," she read. "The vessel's own blood. The family's pill is made from their vessel, and from nobody else. It is the only pill the vessel's family will take without a tremor, because the blood knows the body it came from."
Cen Yu said nothing.
"Entry for Cen Yu, vessel eleven," she read. "Thirty-six pills, to Willow Ford. Thirty-seventh and thirty-eighth, doubled, in the winter. Thirty-ninth, in preparation."
She turned the page.
"Each one entered in my own hand. I wrote it. I have written it every month since I was nineteen."
He had not moved, and he found that he could not.
He was standing in a cold stone room with the key to the first lock in his belt, and every slip tied to a grey pill went through his head in a line.
Charity of the Hall, no cost to the family.
The pill on the first of every month, the morning after he bled a bowl for the register.
His mother had been drinking his blood for three years.
She had been drinking it in a spoonful of warm water, in a one-room house at Willow Ford, and thanking the Hall at every sunrise.
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