Chapter 72 — The Woman Who Brought Ingredients

CHAPTER 72

The Woman Who Brought Ingredients

A woman was waiting outside Gao Yuan’s yard with three sealed ingredient boxes and a chair of her own.

Yan Meizhen planted her chair where it blocked Gao Yuan’s favourite place to stand. One leg was tied with string. She tested it, shrugged, and sat again. She’d rather bring a broken chair than spend another morning listening to the landlord boast about his rooms.

“Master Shen?” Yan Meizhen asked, rising with a bright laugh. “You’re late! I’ve waited an hour. Is this how you treat a lady?”

Her name was Yan Meizhen. She wore a dark green traveling robe and dusty boots, and she was a Bone Refinement cultivator. Her clear eyes stayed on the boxes, not on the hood hiding his face. She didn’t beg for miracles.

“Twelve hunters come back in nine days,” Yan Meizhen said. “Some will be wounded. All of them will have full purses. I need medicine before they spend it all on wine and women!”

“You sell to your own company?” Shi Feng asked.

“At a discount. Hunters are men, and men are never satisfied,” Yan Meizhen said. She laughed loudly.

She managed supplies for a private hunting company. Her last supplier missed two deliveries and then told her Heaven decided whether any furnace succeeded. Yan Meizhen decided Heaven wasn’t getting any more deposits. Zhu Shan had given her Master Shen’s name, and she planned to take the introduction fee off the final price if she could.

Shi Feng opened the first box. The roots inside were properly dried and cut. The second held leaves packed too tight. The third smelled faintly of cellar stone.

He snapped one stem and showed her the dark rot at its center.

“This lot goes back,” Shi Feng said.

Yan Meizhen examined it without flinching.

“That slippery supplier swore it was natural moisture!” Yan Meizhen said, her expression darkening.

“Then pay him in naturally damp spirit stones,” Shi Feng said.

She burst out laughing. “Ha! I like you, Master Shen! Cold as a block of ice, and funnier than you look!” Yan Meizhen said.

Gao Yuan, listening at the gate, was stunned for a moment. Then he yawned and wandered off.

The two good lots would make plain wound ointment and a few common recovery pills. Shi Feng laid out his terms. The ointment gave a steady yield, the pills didn’t, and his present control was only good enough for small work. It couldn’t support a promise written just to flatter a customer. Better to say so now than to pay for it later, he thought!

He offered a trial run, a minimum he could cover from his own checked stock, and an open split of anything above it. Failed waste would be his. Any bad material would be recorded before firing.

Yan Meizhen tapped the fee line with one fingernail.

“You want to get paid even if the furnace fails?” Yan Meizhen asked, leaning forward with a smile. “So mean, Master Shen!”

“You want me to pay for your experiment with a new supplier?” Shi Feng asked.

She studied the hood and found nothing soft under it.

“…Fine! Men are even stingier than women!” Yan Meizhen said at last. “A small deposit for room and fuel. The balance after inspection. A pill share for you.”

“Agreed,” Shi Feng said. “If your hunters come back early, the furnace won’t hurry for them.”

She struck out a clause that allowed pointless delay. He struck out her attempt to demand a refund after using the goods. The brush passed between them seven times.

This woman is as stingy as I am, Shi Feng thought, with respect.

Eventually the paper was signed.

Yan Meizhen came back the next morning with dry replacement herbs and an angry note from the supplier. Shi Feng took the herbs and ignored the note. He rented the furnace by the hour, and reading someone else’s rage wouldn’t improve the batch.

The first firing gave four good pills and two collapsed lumps.

At the binding stage his qi faltered for less than a breath. Mo Tianheng’s memory showed him exactly how to catch it. But his channels answered too coarsely, and force could bring back heat without fixing a shape that was already broken.

Shi Feng wrote down the pulse he’d used and weakened it for the next run.

The second firing was better. The third wasn’t. He finished with enough approved pills for the trial, plus several useful failures that cost him time, herbs, and profit.

He ate one failure while checking the tray. The medicine entered his body without a fuss. The furnace didn’t care that his body could use whatever his hands spoiled.

Next time he’d need better control, Shi Feng thought. Much better.

Yan Meizhen’s inspection was practical. She weighed the ointment jars, checked the texture, and paid a company attendant to test a recovery pill on a tired day. The man left with his fee and a short, honest report, exactly what she wanted.

She paid the balance without asking for any favors. Now I see why merchants talk so warmly about customers who pay on time, Shi Feng thought.

“What about cheaper medicines for the road?” Yan Meizhen asked.

“A peddler named Shi Feng stocks ordinary road medicine,” Shi Feng said in the low, clipped cadence he kept behind the hood. “Leave a note at his stall. Those jars are a separate business.”

She understood and didn’t push. Shi Feng kept his hood and face cloth on until she left; when Yan Meizhen stopped by the street stall three days later to order ordinary road ointment in bulk, he kept the exchange to two plain sentences over the receipt so she never connected the quiet peddler to the hooded refiner at Gao Yuan’s yard.

From the ribbon stall across the street, Ling Qingzhu caught a single glance of the brisk woman in green laughing as she handed Shi Feng a deposit pouch. Ling Qingzhu lingered a beat beside the awning before turning away without saying a word—while at the corner of the lane, a runner from Zhou’s Medicine House watched Yan Meizhen’s porters load the ointment crates and hurried back to report that the peddler was now taking bulk company orders.