Chapter 66 — The Sign That Promised Heaven

CHAPTER 66

The Sign That Promised Heaven

“Master Shi, it’s finished!” Wu Tong called, carrying the sign into the lane with both hands.

Shi Feng read it once.

HEAVEN-DEFYING MEDICINES. TEN THOUSAND AILMENTS DISPERSED. GOLDEN CORE NOT BEYOND REACH.

“I ordered my name and the word medicines,” Shi Feng said flatly.

The sign painter tapped the largest characters. “I added a border!” Wu Tong said.

He drew the last stroke again in the air with his finger. He was still pleased with it.

“I used my best brush,” Wu Tong said. “My teacher couldn’t have made that character larger.”

“The character isn’t the problem,” Shi Feng replied.

Wu Tong looked offended anyway. He turned the board toward the light, admiring the ink while the owner read the ridiculous promises beneath it.

Wu Tong’s expression fell.

“They need ointment,” Shi Feng said. “Remove the rest. You wrote what I’d be arrested for.”

A woman stopped at the words Golden Core and gasped. She looked at Shi Feng’s ordinary grey robe, looked at the four jars on his board, and walked away much faster than she’d come.

“Golden Core?! From a stall with four jars?”

“The magistrate’s runners flog men for lies this big!”

“…”

Shi Feng sighed in his heart, his face dark. The sign hadn’t even been up for a few breaths, and it had already frightened away one customer. At this rate it would bring the inspectors before it brought the buyers.

“Then every other seller may pay you for the truth,” Shi Feng said, pointing at the road. “Go.”

Wu Tong left with the board. He returned by noon with a modest one.

“A small dragon?” Wu Tong begged.

“No,” Shi Feng said, and handed over the agreed coins.

Across the lane, Ling Qingzhu had watched the whole performance from the doorway of the silk shop. She’d seen the first sign, too. It was large enough to offend Heaven from two streets away.

When she passed the stall again, the plain board hung under the awning.

“Oh, so you do have some sense,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I was worried. That first sign was visible from the capital.”

“Honest claims are easier to fulfil,” Shi Feng said, folding a clean cloth over the finished jars.

She read the board. His name, the word medicines, and below them the prices and uses, in characters big enough for a customer to read without leaning over the ointment. There wasn’t anything in it to laugh at. Ling Qingzhu felt strangely disappointed.

“Shame about the gold border,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I was getting attached. Why not keep it?”

“It cost more than the medicine in two jars,” Shi Feng said.

“...Miser!” Ling Qingzhu said. She looked away, but her lips curved. Shi Feng saw it and turned back to his work.

Not every wrong judgment is worth an afternoon of argument, he thought. Let her enjoy this one.

A father and son came to the stall before she could leave. The boy held one hand against his chest, and a strip of dirty cloth was wound around his forefinger. He kept lifting the corner to peek underneath.

“Show me the finger,” Shi Feng said.

The father, Cheng Shou, unwound the cloth. A shallow cut ran across the first joint, and its edges were red with grit.

“He keeps checking whether it has closed!” Cheng Shou said.

“You’ll know sooner if you stop reopening it,” Shi Feng said.

He showed the father how to wash out the grit and how little salve was needed. The cut didn’t need a grand name. It needed clean hands and an owner who left it alone. Cheng Shou paid, then asked whether a bigger jar would be better.

“Only if someone else cuts a finger,” Shi Feng said.

Cheng Shou bought the small jar.

Ling Qingzhu had stayed beside the stall, and she saw Shi Feng rinse the little spoon and put the used cloth into a separate basin. He didn’t return either to the clean supplies. That care was a cultivator’s habit, she thought. Strange, in a man who’s supposed to be ruined. The thought annoyed her less than she expected.

Cheng An came running back.

“Will it make me grow taller?” Cheng An asked.

“Not unless you stand on the jar,” Shi Feng said.

The boy considered this with great seriousness.

Ling Qingzhu laughed before she could hide it. Her expression changed at once, startled at herself, and she coughed into her sleeve. Shi Feng looked up at the sound, and for a moment the lane between them seemed much narrower than it was.

Then Cheng An set the jar on the ground and lifted one foot.

“Cheng An,” Cheng Shou called, catching his collar just before the experiment began.

Ling Qingzhu was still smiling when she walked on toward the cloth shops. Shi Feng found himself watching the turn of her head long after she passed the awning.

His own heart gave a small jump. He ignored it and put the lid on the sample jar.

The plain sign sold no miraculous number of jars that afternoon. It did save him from repeating the same prices until his mouth went dry. Three buyers read it, asked sensible questions, and left with exactly what they paid for.

A fourth demanded the advertised ointment at the advertised price in a jar twice the advertised size.

“The board says one measure for two stones,” Shi Feng said.

The man demanded a larger portion in the same indignant voice.

“Read it again,” Shi Feng said. The man was plainly able to read. That was the whole difficulty.

At home he hung the board in the dry corner of the kitchen and checked his ingredients. Ordinary medicine paid a little each day, but the finer work swallowed that profit before it could become savings.

Before supper, Ling Qingzhu noticed a splash of dried ointment on his cuff and brushed at it with her thumb. He looked down, unexpectedly pleased by the care. She noticed his expression and immediately became stern again.

“Wash it before it sets,” Ling Qingzhu said. “I refuse to be seen with a walking medicine shelf.”

Later that night, while Shi Feng logged another small binding practice in the kitchen and saw the sign board she had quietly straightened under the eaves, a neat man in a grey robe—the last customer who had bought a single jar before the market closed and asked three careful questions about its maker—passed through the side postern of the Eastern Palace.

In the study, Sima Yu turned the plain ointment jar between two fingers, then looked down at the copied ward-office slip the grey-robed searcher had laid beside it.

“So her ‘crippled’ husband mixes workman’s salve by day,” Sima Yu murmured, his eyes resting on the second document—the formal notice Third Master Ling Zhen had filed with the Southern Ward office barring private surrender on a Yunze Wei clan murder inquiry. “And the Wei family of Yunze says he killed a Foundation Establishment elder at a quarry before entering the capital. Send word to our friend in the Southern Ward: keep that Wei file warm. A marriage registry won’t shield him forever.”