The Heretical Path of Occult Immortal novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Count
The Hall counts nine vessels left, and Cen Yu's old friend names him for the deadliest gu; he eats it, lives, and wakes to find the Elder has kept his mother's pill.
The Elder counted the vessels in the courtyard at dawn, and this year he counted nine.
Cen Yu stood in the second row with the other eight, barefoot on the frozen flagstones, and counted along with him.
Sixty people had signed on the same autumn morning three years ago.
A vessel was a person who rented out their body for five years to host gu, poison insects no bigger than a grain of rice.
The temple raised each gu inside living flesh until its poison turned into medicine it could sell.
Of the sixty, fifty-one were dead or sent down the mountain too sick to work.
Cen Yu was nineteen, tall and thin, with grey stains under his nails that never washed out.
He had signed for his mother.
She lived half a day below the mountain, and the wasting cough had been eating her lungs since it killed his father.
The temple paid a vessel's family two silver taels a month and one grey pill.
The pill held the cough back.
On the thirtieth of every month the Medicine Hall bled each vessel a full bowl for the register.
On the first, the courier carried the pill down the mountain.
The slip tied to it always said the same thing: "Charity of the Hall, no cost to the family."
Today was the thirtieth, so Cen Yu's left forearm was still wrapped from the knife.
On the Hall steps, forty Medicine Brothers in white-grey sashes stood in a line behind the Elder.
He was a gentle old man with white hair in a bun, and he wore no gloves in the frost.
"Nine," the Elder said. His voice carried without effort. "The Hall thanks you for outliving the rest."
"Each autumn we raise one vessel to Medicine Brother. A bed, a sash, a seat at the brothers' table."
"The one we raise is the one who takes the Black Ancestor."
A brother beside him held up a jade jar.
Inside it a black beetle the size of a thumbnail turned slowly in a circle.
Seven vessels had taken it in four years.
All seven had died on these stones within a day.
Cen Yu knew the number because he had watched four of them.
"The Hall's clerk will name this year's vessel," the Elder said.
Shen Ao stepped out of the line of brothers with the register open in his hands.
He had walked up this mountain beside Cen Yu three years ago, out of the same village, Willow Ford.
He had said that whatever happened, they would eat from the same bowl.
The Elder had made him clerk in the first year, because Shen Ao could read.
He did not look at Cen Yu's face now. He looked at the page.
"Cen Yu," Shen Ao read. "Nineteen gu taken in three years. Never feverish the next day. Never once sick."
Beside Cen Yu, Gao Tie breathed out through his nose.
Gao Tie had been a blacksmith, and he was the largest man in the Long Shed.
"He's naming you to die in good handwriting," Gao Tie muttered.
Cen Yu did not answer.
Shen Ao knew he lay still through a gu, because Shen Ao had slept in the next bed his first year.
Shen Ao looked up then, and for a moment he was the boy from the tea fields.
"You'll live," he said, low enough that only the front row heard. "You're the only one who would."
A friend says that to comfort you, Cen Yu thought.
A clerk says it to put your name on the line.
"A vessel may refuse the honor," said the Elder, mildly. "He may go home today. The pill does not go home with him."
Cen Yu looked at the jar.
He did not want to die.
He had never wanted anything as much as he wanted not to die.
He had stopped being ashamed of it in the first year.
But his mother was forty-nine, and she coughed blood in the cold, and without the pill she had until the first snow.
"If he lives," the Elder said, "her pill is doubled."
So Cen Yu took the jar.
The brother tipped the beetle into his open palm, and he put it in his mouth and swallowed.
It did not taste of anything yet. It moved going down.
The brothers had always taught the vessels the same thing: walk, sweat, fight it out of you, and pray.
Seven men had walked in circles on these stones until they dropped.
Cen Yu lay down flat on his back on the flagstones and folded his hands over his stomach.
"Yu, what are you doing?" Gao Tie dropped to his knees beside him. "Get up. Run it off."
"No," Cen Yu said.
Then the Black Ancestor began to eat.
It started under his ribs and went through him in a line, and every part it touched stopped being his.
Every part of him wanted to curl up.
He counted his breaths instead, and when he reached a hundred he started again.
The brothers watched for an hour, and then they went in to breakfast.
By noon the other eight vessels had been sent back to the Long Shed.
Gao Tie stayed and held his sleeve, and said nothing at all, which for Gao Tie was the loudest thing he had ever done.
Cen Yu counted through the afternoon, and through the dark, and past the point where he knew what the numbers were.
Near dawn the pain went out of him all at once.
Something rose in his throat. He turned his head and spat into his hand.
A black husk lay in his palm, swollen to twice its size, with its legs curled in.
The Black Ancestor had eaten its fill and died of it.
The Hall's rule said a vessel carried the dead gu to the Insect House in a bowl.
Nobody ate the corpse, and nobody in the Hall knew he did.
He put the husk in his mouth and chewed.
It should have been bitter. It should have been the worst thing he had ever put in his mouth.
It tasted of nothing at all.
He swallowed, and lay there, and understood that something else was gone for good.
Gao Tie helped him up. The sky over the gate was going grey.
"Yu," Gao Tie said, and for once he was not joking. "It's the first of the month. I watched the courier from the wall."
"He went out with the mule, and he went out with nothing on it."
"The gate keeper says the Elder kept your mother's pill."
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