Chapter 68 — The Customer with the Wrong Wound

CHAPTER 68

The Customer with the Wrong Wound

“Poison!” Liu Bao bellowed, thrusting a red, swollen forearm over the board. “This peddler’s ointment is burning my flesh!”

His voice carried across the whole market. Two porters stopped beside the next counter, and a woman weighing a jar of wound wash set it down without buying. Shi Feng calmly moved the open ingredient pot out of the man’s reach.

“Show me what you bought,” Shi Feng said.

Liu Bao raised his arm higher, then winced when his own sleeve rubbed it. His eyes darted toward the crowd.

A spectator nodded too eagerly.

“The whole forearm!” Liu Bao shouted, remembering his complaint. “Burning!”

Shi Feng moved the open jar behind him. The man wanted an audience angry enough to pay him before anyone examined the wound.

Liu Bao slammed a jar onto the board. Someone had forced its lid back after breaking the seal, and the paper still carried Shi Feng’s plain instructions.

“Pay for my treatment,” Liu Bao shouted. “Or I’ll carry this arm down every lane in the district!”

“A cripple selling poison!” a man in the crowd cried.

“Is that the peddler from the awning?”

“…”

Shi Feng opened the jar. A sharp green smell rose beneath the ointment’s usual scent, and he knew it at once. Mo Tianheng’s memory named the root, how it was prepared, and several uses that had nothing to do with cracked skin.

The swollen arm told him the rest. The red strip had straight, neat edges. Someone had painted an irritant across healthy flesh with a brush. Beyond the strip the skin was calm. A little dry powder still clung where Liu Bao’s sleeve brushed the lower edge.

This man didn’t use my ointment, Shi Feng thought. Someone used a blistering root on him and sent him here.

“Who applied the blistering root?” Shi Feng asked.

Liu Bao’s shout faltered.

Then he grew louder.

“Lies! Lies! He’s poisoning honest people,” Liu Bao yelled.

More people gathered. One man asked loudly whether ruined cultivators should be allowed to sell medicine at all. He never looked at the wound or the jar.

Shi Feng took a clean spoon and spread a little of the mixture on a white cloth. The adulterated ointment left a yellow-green stain at its edge. Next he opened a sealed jar from his own stock and placed the same amount beside it. That patch stayed pale.

“Blistering root stains wet cloth,” Shi Feng said. “My preparation doesn’t. Anyone here who has bought it to clear old hide can smell the difference.”

One of the porters bent over the cloth and sniffed.

“That’s the green stuff the tanners use.”

“Then the jar was changed!”

“…”

The woman with the wound wash came back to examine both patches. Liu Bao snatched at the board.

“You swapped my sample,” Liu Bao screamed.

Shi Feng covered the suspect jar with its lid before the man could knock it over.

“Then let the Sky Pavilion tower test it,” Shi Feng said. “If it matches my stock, I pay for your treatment. If it doesn’t, you explain who changed it.”

The tower stood several streets away. Its test would cost a few stones and produce a finding far harder to shout down than a medicine peddler.

Liu Bao looked toward the tower and went pale. The road ahead of him seemed full of teeth.

“I’ve work,” Liu Bao said.

“You had time to visit every lane,” Shi Feng said.

A few people traded glances. Nobody laughed yet, but the smell of a better scandal made them patient.

Liu Bao lunged for the jar again. Shi Feng caught his wrist and stopped the hand above the board. The grip looked ordinary. It was exactly strong enough to end the argument.

“The evidence stays here,” Shi Feng said.

“Let go, you cripple!” Liu Bao howled, and wrenched his arm back. His sleeve slipped, and a folded slip of paper fell beside the stained cloth.

Shi Feng saw the mark before the man’s free hand could cover it.

Zhou’s Medicine House.

The porter nearest the board saw it too. He leaned in. The crowd was stunned into silence for a breath.

“Zhou’s Medicine House?”

The question passed from one spectator to the next.

“The big one on the next street?”

“The one that offered to protect him?”

“…”

Shi Feng released the wrist and picked up the slip. It recorded a small payment for an errand. It didn’t announce a conspiracy, because Zhou Mingde wasn’t that stupid. But set beside the altered jar, it made the accusation very hard to repeat.

“An innocent delivery,” Liu Bao said quickly. His voice cracked. “I run errands for everyone.”

“Then the tower can say so,” Shi Feng said.

The crowd erupted across the lane.

“Zhou’s Medicine House paid him to paint blistering root on his own arm!”

“A grand shop on the main street hiring a runner to smear a two-stone stall—how shameless can Shopkeeper Zhou get?!”

“No wonder he wouldn’t go to Sky Pavilion—the peddler caught him with one spoon and a piece of cloth!”

Liu Bao’s face turned the colour of wet ash. He bolted without his jar, and the two market wardens blocked the corner. They marched him, the jar and the stained cloth to the tower and were back before the lunch crowd thinned, with a stamped slip: the blistering root had been painted on, not mixed in, and a jar of Zhou’s salve, bought at Zhou’s own counter and tested beside Shi Feng’s on the same cloth, had left no such edge. The fine was set on that finding. Shoppers pointed at Liu Bao’s painted arm the whole way to the main avenue. Back at the awning, the woman who had set down the wound wash bought two jars at once, and four buyers who had been walking toward Zhou’s Medicine House turned around and lined up in front of Shi Feng’s board instead.

The wardens returned the jar and the cloth with the slip. Shi Feng wrapped all three separately and wrote down the time. Then he wrote the names of those willing to testify. Most suddenly remembered urgent errands elsewhere.

Shi Feng expected nothing more.

A false complaint was fraud, he told himself. It wasn’t yet murder, however angry it made him. I’ll keep the evidence, and if Zhou Mingde needs another lesson, he’ll have it.

By evening every jar was sold. A crowd was no honest way to run a business, but today it bought what plain honesty would take a month to earn.

At home, Ling Qingzhu had already heard three versions of the story.

In the first, the cheat had fallen to his knees and begged. In the second, Shi Feng named the root from across the street. The third version came from a vegetable seller who swore he could now diagnose any poison with a wooden spoon.

“A spoon?” Ling Qingzhu asked. “The vegetable man swears you caught a poisoner. With a spoon. Tell me he’s lying. I bought his cabbage.”

“It was a small crowd,” Shi Feng said.

She let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. She helped him clear a space while he put the evidence away in the box in his corner of the room. Her eyes stayed on the two stains, now dried into separate patches on the cloth.

“They tried to ruin you,” Ling Qingzhu said. “On purpose. Over a few jars of ointment.”

“Yes,” Shi Feng said.

He didn’t sound surprised. That troubled her more than any complaint would have done.

When he left to prepare supper, she stayed beside the table and looked at the little jar. She thought his stall amusing. Someone else thought it dangerous enough to pay for a lie.

It was getting harder to call both judgments equally sensible.

He kept the altered sample apart from his clean stock. Tomorrow he would ask what the tower charged for a fuller record than a warden’s slip. An argument in a market faded quickly; a sealed finding could wait for the day it mattered.