The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal novel · Chapter 16 of 24
Chapter 16: No Bowl
The side path ended in a wall of firs, and the Medicine Brothers were gone.
Cen Yu stood in the needles with his lung burning and his cold hands open, and he could not tell which way they had gone.
He could not smell the smoke from the Pill Room, and he could not track a woman through a forest.
He had one thing left that the Elder could not burn.
He turned and ran down to the Long Shed.
It was the fifteenth, and the vessels were already up, sitting on their cots with their sleeves rolled.
On the fifteenth and the thirtieth a bowl was drawn from every arm.
Gao Tie was at the end of the row, and he saw Cen Yu's face and put his bowl down.
"What have they done?" he said.
"Everyone listen." Cen Yu's voice cracked, and he went on. "All of you. Hear me."
He told them in plain words, because he knew no other kind.
He told them what the family pill was, and whose blood went into it.
He told them what the second tier was, and where the fifty-one had gone.
He did not say it well.
When he said that the Hall told families their sons had died on the road, a man at the far end of the row began to shake his head, slowly, again and again.
The woman with the shaved head and the silver hands sat very still.
"My little sister has taken the pill for three years," she said at last. "She tells the neighbors it is the one good thing in her life."
Nobody answered her.
Gao Tie got up off his cot, which took a while.
He picked up his bowl and looked at it, and then he turned it over and set it upside down on the floor.
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