Chapter 3- Bitter Water

The little village didn’t have a name on their crude map. It was just another little farming village off the Pebble River, a safer tributary of the Agate. They grew rice, kept ducks and chickens, had vegetable plots behind their houses, and some lucky few grew fruits on stumpy trees. Many lived to adulthood, and most of those who lived had a lot of kids. Then the older generation grew weaker, grew sick, and died. Their bodies were buried in the village graveyard, incense was offered, Hell Money was burned, and the living carried on living.

Mortal lives. Utterly ordinary, and uniquely precious to those living them. Or who had lived them. The cycle was cut short in this generation.

“Easy, easy Mother. Easy now.”

“My babies. Where are my babies?”

“My sister is looking for them. Easy, easy now. Let me tie the bandage- there. Now lie here and don’t move. You will reopen the wounds if you do.”

The smoking shells of farmers’ homes didn’t leave much room for hope, but there had been some survivors.

“Why did they do it? We pay them their tribute! So why did they do this?”

“Who harmed you, Mother?”

“Yellow Banner Bandits. It was the Yellow Banners! They said, they said…” She broke down sobbing.

“Brother Zihao!” Hong rushed over carrying a little boy. The boy twisted in agony, charred skin, laboring to breathe. “Save him!”

Tian closed his eyes. One part of him said the boy was beyond saving. That unless he had an immortal destiny, his future was brutally short and defined by suffering. Then he exhaled sharply, and got to work. “I’ll do what I can. Keep looking. There must have been four hundred people living here. I see thirty living. Where are the rest?”

He started with pulling out the infection. The Demon Pulling Art Doctor Pei had gifted him had started seeing a lot of use since they started their adventures along the river. Mortals had so little qi, it was reasonably safe to learn on them. Carefully manipulating his vital energy, modulating the elemental composition to just the right combinations to pull disease from tissue and blood, took a dreadful degree of understanding and control. It was a marvelous exercise, which he definitely appreciated when he wasn’t trying to clear out all the infections drilling into a child’s body through the burns covering a fifth of their skin.

“I have another here-”

“Put them on a clean sheet. Triage?”

“Bleeding internally. Not breathing well. Not conscious.”

“Damn!” Tian got the burned child stable-ish, and switched over to the middle aged woman. The crane cried from a rooftop. “She found some more.”

“I heard her!”

Tian wiped the sweat from his face. This wasn’t a job for a single orderly. There should be teams of people. Teams of doctors with decades of experience. There should be clean sheets and boiled cotton bandages and wall-sized cabinets of medicinal herbs and powdered medicines. There should have been soldiers here to stop the village from burning down in the first place. There should have been someone, some cultivator that went out and stopped the bandits before they attacked. Or someone to teach them better people before they became bandits.

What there was, was Tian, Hong and the Snow Grace Crane. No strangers to atrocities. This wasn’t the first massacre they had come across.

“More middle aged people.” Hong yelled.

“Any other kids?”

“Not so far.”

Tian nodded, doing the triage and trying to get things as stable as he could, so that he could repair what he could, extending the period of stability. He wasn’t going to get anyone healthy again. He just wanted to stretch out the time until death.

“We are about forty miles from Longhill Town. Make sure you found everyone you can here, and then-”

“I’ll let the magistrate know and bring the doctor back.” Hong nodded. “Shouldn’t take more than an hour, even going slow for the doctor.”

“Switch back to your robes. Let them know we are here on Monastery business.”

“Didn’t need reminding.” She was rushing back into the smouldering buildings, ripping them apart, trying to find anyone she might have missed. Tian got his head down and stuck to bandaging, suturing, giving what remedies he could that wouldn’t kill the mortals. Immortal medicine sounded wonderful, until you remembered a dose of medicine that would be effective on the cultivated body of a level nine Earthly Realm cultivator would exterminate a dozen mortals. Quite possibly more.

“The difference between medicine and poison is the dose.” That was an old saw. It was mostly true too, though some things were toxic in any quantity. His hands moved quickly, tying off a tourniquet a hand’s width above where an elbow should have been. Poking a hole open in a throat and threading a hollow reed inside, watching the wounded man breathe convulsively. Sickness was sure to get in. Certain to. But for the next few minutes, the man would live. Long enough for him to tend to the next one. And the next one.

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“DAMN! Brother Zihao, I found a mass grave. Has to be sixty, eighty people here!” Hong’s voice was a mess. Tian closed his eyes and breathed out slowly. Then sharply inhaled.

“Make sure none of them are still alive, and keep moving. You know what to do!”

“Yeah, yeah! Damn it all to Hell, I sure do know what to do!”