Chapter 27- Business Opportunities

“How long have you been sitting there?” Aunty Wu slowly opened her eyes.

“I don’t know. It’s around midday, so a few hours.” Tian smiled a little.

“I guess the better first question would have been ‘What are you doing here?’” Her voice wasn’t as strong as it usually was.

“Same as you. Healing. Except I’m touring around the Broad Sky Kingdom with Elder Feng while I’m doing it.”

“Elder Feng?”

“Yep.”

She closed her eyes again. “Be careful.”

“That’s always good advice, but was there something in particular I should be careful about?”

“She’s the Sect’s chief diplomat. Her reputation is pretty good, but none of the other sects in our part of the continent are nice or simple people. So that means neither is she.”

Tian nodded. That made sense. “Would you like me to peel you an orange?”

“Hah. Sure.”

Tian started peeling it. He had seen visitors in the hospital carefully peeling the orange so it made one long spiraling peel, and he thought it looked fun. For a first try, the results were decent. A little wonky, sure, and not exactly even, but it was in one piece at the end and that was presumably the important thing.

“Here.” He passed her the segments on a little plate. “Can I fix you some tea? I have to warn you, my opinion of my leaves has gone way down since coming here and I haven’t yet managed to steal any of the good stuff.”

“How long have I been telling you to save your money? This is why.” She smiled, a little more life coming into her face. She ate a slice of orange, and her eyes opened wide. “What a fragrant orange!”

“Yes, Brother Wang got a deal on them, and he gifted them to me.”

“Good brother!” She chewed a bit longer. “Which Wang? There are a million of ‘em, and I don’t know of anyone in Depot Four with that name and an orange supply.”

“Three Rivers Town Outer Court Wang Shizhong. Comes from a rice merchant family, apparently.”

“Oh them. Yes, I know them. A rising force in the rice market, but they don’t have anyone in the Inner Court to hold the fort. We’ll see if they last.” She shook her head. “Still, nice of him.”

She happily munched the orange slices. “You aren’t asking how I got injured.”

“You are the quartermaster for the Depot. The warehouse would have been a priority target for plundering heretics. It wasn’t hard to guess. Though I can’t tell how you are injured.”

She nodded. “At the Heavenly Person level, things start getting a bit more… esoteric. Sometimes an attack is charged with elemental fire, or demonic ice or something similar. Sometimes, it’s aimed at your dao heart or soul or cultivation.”

Tian nodded along. He had seen things like that.

“And sometimes, some absolute bastard curses you to have no sense of balance, extreme nausea, a persistent feeling of terror, an endless burning sensation in the marrow of your bones and a dreadful foreknowledge that something awful is growing inside of you, and one day it will eat it’s way out of you and kill everyone you love. A sensation that grows in intensity if you try to cultivate, to the point where you start trying to claw your stomach open to rip out whatever the hell it is. And then ties it all to your cultivation so that, even if you do escape the immediate fight, you won’t be a threat ever again.”

Tian felt the room freeze.

“The good news, however, is that the Bamboo Medicine Hut is quite experienced at dealing with curses. Currently, the curse is suppressed and I’m not in any pain. I can still cultivate. I just can’t safely leave the hospital, and most days, I’m not strong enough to leave my bed. Can’t say I’m enjoying the enforced rest.”

Tian recognized the calm tone of voice. There was a state of helpless acceptance some patients reached, where they stopped caring about their condition. Not that they didn’t want to get better, just that it was out of their hands. It was what it was. It would be what it would be. Sometimes that attitude was a good thing. He hoped it was this time too.

“What’s the treatment plan like?”

“It’s a new curse. It builds on things they have seen before, nothing is completely new, but right now, there is no cure. So I’m to be a research subject in addition to being a patient. It seems I’m going to be here for quite a while.”

Tian nodded and started asking questions about trivial things. Auntie Wu knew what he was doing, but she just smiled and let him. After a while, it was her turn to ask. “What’s eating you?”

“Salt.”

There was a pause, then a long sigh. “I had explicit orders from the Monastery not to discuss that. A lot of us did. It’s why the war started, you know. We knew what the salt merchants were up to. We just didn’t know the scale of what the Gorge had managed. There are production limits to what you can get out of even an enormous brine spring. We figured that the income would be huge, but not above a certain level. We were wrong. We, all of us in the sect, and all the sects we are allied with, didn’t realize the big picture, because nobody at the highest levels cared about mortal affairs.”

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“Until it was too late.”

“Mmm. It’s like managing vermin in a grain warehouse. You will always have vermin trying to eat the grain, and you always have to manage them. It’s like a sort of constant pressure, and the amount of pressure varies based on the season and conditions of the warehouse and the world. The Heretic pressure just kept steadily building. We started seeing Heavenly Person Heretics more often, and they are supposed to be very rare. Then some Elders from different sects got together over some wine and started complaining to each other about their problems.”

“Then they started doing the math.”