One Pill a Night to Keep the War God Alive novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Twenty-One Nights
The Sect Master ordered a junior alchemist to keep the burned war god alive for twenty-one nights, and his burning hand closed on her wrist and told her to leave the mountain.
The Sect Master's summons reached the Hundred Herbs Hall at noon.
Every alchemist in the room looked at Tang Zhiyi.
She was the only one with both hands in a basin of boiled bandages.
"Me?" she said.
"You," said the messenger. "Now. Bring your furnace."
She dried her hands on her leather apron and picked up the little bronze furnace she used for small batches.
It was the size of a rice bowl.
Behind her, someone whispered that five physicians had walked out of the Thunder Hall that week with gray faces.
The Great Hall of the Hundred Beasts Sect smelled of cold incense and wet fur.
Sect Master Qi Wanli sat at the head of it, a thin old man with a long white beard.
Hall Chief Kuang Shiyuan stood at his right hand in a plum-colored robe, smiling at her as if he had picked her himself.
He had.
"Junior Alchemist Tang," said the Sect Master. "Nineteen days ago, Heavenly Thunder sent one bolt down on our war god, Lei Juehan."
"I know, Sect Master," said Zhiyi. "The whole mountain heard it."
"That bolt was a warning. Nine more will fall on the night of the full moon, twenty-one nights from tonight."
His hand tightened on the arm of his chair.
"The physicians say his meridians are burned through. He will not live to see that night without a pill that mends thunder burns."
"Your Thunder-Quench formula saved the wolf struck last spring," he said. "It is the only one that ever worked on a bolt."
"On a wolf," said Kuang Shiyuan gently.
"A wolf is not a war god. My Nine-Yang Pill is ready, Sect Master."
"Let the junior try. My hall will stand by."
Zhiyi understood him at once.
If she failed, it was her failure, and his pill got the credit.
If she somehow succeeded, he would be standing close enough to share it.
She was twenty-six years old, and nobody had ever handed her a chance without a knife in it.
"I'll do it," she said.
Kuang Shiyuan's smile did not move.
"One pill a night," she went on. "Brewed at his bedside at midnight."
"I need the hall's thunder-ginseng, and nobody touches my furnace but me."
"Granted," said the Sect Master, too fast, like a man who had run out of other plans.
"Naturally," said Kuang Shiyuan.
The Thunder Hall stood at the top of the mountain, with a black tile roof and iron rods rising from every corner.
The two guards at its door would not look inside.
"The tiger bit the last two," one of them said.
"Which two?"
"The physicians. The ones who went in without knocking."
Zhiyi knocked, and went in.
The room was bare stone, with a stone bed and a stone floor and one lamp.
A white tiger as big as an ox stood in the middle of it with her ears flat.
The sound she made rattled the lamp.
Behind her, on the edge of the bed, sat Lei Juehan.
He was a lean, broad man with dark hair half tied up, and a white streak at his left temple.
His robe hung open to the waist.
A black scar spread across his chest and down his left arm in the shape of a fern.
It gave off a faint red heat, like a coal under ash.
His eyes lifted to her face, and they were brown, and very tired.
"Get out," he said.
"I'm Tang Zhiyi. The Sect Master sent me."
"I give orders in this hall."
"Then give me one that isn't 'die quietly,'" said Zhiyi. "I'm going to light a fire now."
She said the last part to the tiger.
"You can bite me or you can watch," she told her. "I'd watch. It's interesting."
The tiger stopped growling.
It was not a friendly silence, but it was one.
Zhiyi knelt by the bed, set the furnace on the floor and lit it.
At the hour of Zi, the stroke of midnight, the pill came out of the fire grey and silver, no bigger than a lotus seed.
She broke a crumb off the edge and put it on her tongue.
"What are you doing?" said the war god.
"Eating my own work."
Her fingertips prickled, and a small spark jumped from her hand to the iron leg of the furnace.
"An alchemist who won't eat her pill doesn't hand it over," she said. "It dies in a hundred breaths, so please hurry."
She crossed the room and held the pill out on her palm.
He did not take it.
His hand shot out and closed around her wrist.
It was hot, hotter than a pan just taken off the stove, and the grip was hard enough to leave marks.
Zhiyi did not pull away.
"Your pulse is steady," he said, low.
"I've stood next to worse furnaces."
His thumb lay across the inside of her wrist, and she felt the fever running through it.
"Eighty breaths," she said.
He took the pill from her palm and swallowed it.
Nothing happened for a breath, and then another.
Then the black scar along his collarbone paled by a finger's width.
The red heat under it flared.
He let go of her wrist and breathed out hard.
The tiger got up, walked across the stone floor, and lay down across Zhiyi's feet.
The war god stared at her.
"Xuezhao has not lain down for anyone but me in three hundred years," he said.
"She's cold," said Zhiyi. "The floor's cold."
His eyes dropped to the finger-width of clear skin on his chest, and came back up.
"Alchemist."
"Yes, War God?"
"Be off this mountain before the twenty-first night," said Lei Juehan. "That is not a request."
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