“Grandpa? What’s soup?” Tian was throwing up big clods of clay-heavy dirt as he dug his ‘soup pot.’
What’s soup?
“You keep saying we are making Tian soup, but I don’t know what soup is.”
Good question- you take liquid, usually water or water with flavors dissolved in it, and mix it with other food. Usually by heating it and cooking the flavors together, but not always.
“So… I’m turning into a liquid?”
That would be one way to do it, but I wouldn’t take it too literally. And by literally, I mean, it’s a figure of speech. You do need to get your whole body, and I do mean whole body, covered.
“Covered by…”
Whatever you make your soup into.
“Which should be made from the snakes and lotuses?”
Yep.
“And you…”
Nope. Up to you. Figure something out.
Tian snorted, but kept digging.
“Can you tell me about the adder venom? Why is it called “Three poisons seven deaths?”
Mostly because it sounds scary as Hell, and forensic pathology isn’t really a thing here.
“Grandpa…”
Alright, alright. Basically this snake venom really is damned nasty. It’s blood poison, in that it stops wounds from healing and kills off a load of blood cells at the same time. What’s really brutal, though, are the cyanotoxin and nerve toxin elements. Basically it fries your nervous system while sending you into organ failure. Imagine drowning while feeling like all your organs are exploding and your blood is on fire.
Tian could, in fact, imagine it. He had experienced that in the past. He shuddered. Kept digging. Shuddered again. “You mentioned the snake’s gallbladder?”
Grab one and cut it open- I’ll show you. Start from just above the tip of the tail and start peeling the skin off.
A few messy minutes later- Yes, you have your finger on it now. That tiny thing. It has a few uses. Properly prepared, it helps improve vision and correct minor vision ailments. It helps clear out coughs by making it easier to spit out mucus. But what we are really interested in are the last two effects- its impact on male vigor, and its ability to clear meridians.
“Male vigor? What does vigor mean?”
Tian, when you were in the womb, something very bad happened to you. I don’t know if it was from the moment of conception or later, but you were born sterile. Unable to have children of your own. You would probably never develop normally even if you survived long enough to hit puberty due to glandular problems and… other stuff. It’s a mess down there, Tian. On the off chance you lived to adulthood, the Heavens assuredly did not want you to breed. So anything we can do to help you rebuild all that is a very, very good thing.
Related to that- you know the situation with your meridians. Normally they aren’t something that can be regrown, but if your body was in a special state, who knows what might be possible? So the gallbladders are useful, if you want to use them in your soup.
“And the lotuses? What makes them special?”
Oh a lot of things.
There were digging noises, and not much else. The dirt was heavy, and progress was slow.
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“Could you explain more?”
Not really. Lotus lore, even mortal tier information, is expensive. And Dustless Lotuses are Earthly Person tier, with a possibility to grow to Heavenly Person Tier. Very expensive indeed. And not worth it because we can deduce things from looking at the pond. For example, it looks like lotuses are snobs.
“What? What is a snob?”
They look down on other plants. They are the symbols of purity, which is another way of saying isolation and separateness. They crowd out other plants around them. They do provide an environment for other animals and insects, but they are always floating in solitary splendor, on a platform of their own creation. Alone, untouched by the muck around them. Rooted in the world, but floating above it.
“Flowers on top, snakes underneath.”
Heh. That’s one way to look at it.
Tian hopped down in the hole. He could lie down in it pretty well. Then frowned. He had dug it fairly close to the pond, and there was water pooling in the bottom already. Then he smiled. One less thing to figure out- how to get water in the hole.
Snakes below, lotus above. He looked out over the pond. There really were only lotus flowers in there. He didn’t see any fishes or frogs. Just lots and lots of snakes. But the snakes wouldn’t be there if there wasn’t food. Tian thought about what Grandpa had said, trying to work everything out.
The snakes and the lotuses were a team. The snakes ate the birds and insects that came for the lotuses. Then the lotuses grew in the water and dirt fertilized by the snakes. Protected from predators that would eat them. It must have been what made the snakes go crazy and attack each other- the juice from the flowers was a signal to kill everything that moved.
But how did he get from looking at the pond to Tian Soup and a new, stronger, body?
Maybe Grandpa had been giving him instructions this whole time. Stretching and breathing to keep healthy was the start, but it was Gourmet that made medicine. Then the poison, destroying the blood, nerves and organs. Exactly what Gourmet thrived on- poison into medicine.
The gallbladders could probably just be eaten, they were tiny enough that he could eat them by the handful. But how to use the lotuses and snake meat? What use was the meat, other than as food? And… and grandpa didn’t say anything about what lotuses were good for, only what they were. Purity. Snobs. Rooted in the muck but apart from it. What can we ‘deduce’ from looking at the pond?
The bit of the lotus above the water was the smallest piece of it. The roots were quite thick and long. Many times bigger than the flowers and the leaves. It was floating in the water, yes, but it wasn’t really detached from anything- it was rooted in dirt, the same as any other plant.
Grandpa had always said that his body was broken. So it would be like a thrown away rag in the dump- he would rip it apart and make something new from it. His organs didn’t work well? Other than the ones the truffle fixed up, maybe. So there was no harm in destroying them for a bit. If his body was going to be remade, it would be better if they were destroyed.
Then there was the snake meat and bones, as well as the lotuses. Obviously the roots and leaves and flesh had to be mashed together and mixed with the muddy water in the ‘soup pot.’ Then he would jump in and coat himself in the mix. He would keep the snake heads and use them to bite himself as soon as he did that, then swallow the gallbladders and eat the lotus flowers. And while he was doing all that, he had to run Gourmet.
It was probably going to hurt a lot, but once he ate everything and could just focus on Gourmet, it would be a lot easier. Probably.
It was going to be a lot of work to mash everything down into a paste. He’d need some rocks and big sticks. Tian looked at the sky. There was a good bit of daylight left. Plenty of time to make everything.
While he was bashing everything apart, he discovered that some of the lotuses had tough pods with seeds in them. Tian thought quickly- seeds were what made baby plants. And Grandpa had mentioned his ability to make babies a lot. More than seemed reasonable. Tian supposed it must be important, but he didn’t get it. Still. Lotuses had a lot of seeds and seeds made babies so maybe he needed to get the seeds into him?
“I’ll eat them with the gallbladders.” He nodded decisively. He had no idea how any of this was going to work, so maybe that would work.
He made neat piles on the side of the now partially flooded hole. One was a heap of gallbladders and lotus seeds. The next was the snake heads, carefully opened with a stick where needed. Then a bit of a hollowed out rotten log lined with flat stones, holding the hideous mash of snake flesh and lotus root. Then a pile of the lotus flowers.
“Right. Time to cook.” He carefully tipped the mass of meat and plant into the muddy water, then stirred it with a long stick. It didn’t take long to turn the ‘soup pot’ into a reasonable portrayal of Hell. He stripped off what few rags he had on him and after a long moment of hesitation, hopped in. Even for a junkyard rat, this was disgusting. But Grandpa said it needed to touch all of him, so he lay in the muck and ducked his face under the surface. He used his hands to get every single nook and cranny thoroughly covered. He even pushed a bit up his nostrils, into his ears and, with an iron will and an adamantium stomach, ate some of it.
The mix was getting warmer, he noticed. Not steaming, but warmer. He could feel it starting to prickle on his skin, the combination of snake meat and lotus root apparently doing something together that they didn’t do apart. Tian hesitated about what to grab next, but opted for the gallbladders and lotus seeds.
No need to think too much, he just started choking the nasty things down. He’d chew a couple of times, just to get them going more easily, and then he shoved in the next metallic tasting, wood tasting handful of nastiness.
“This is going to hurt.” Tian was feeling giddy, lost in the insanity of what he was going to do next. He grabbed an adder head, and jammed the fangs down on his left leg. Another adder bite on his right leg. Then his right and left arms. He reached for another and couldn’t. The venom had kicked in.
His hands spasmed. His lungs locked up as his nerves turned into fire. He could feel his blood clump and die, his heart desperately trying to pump the dead blood around his body, trying to get it out of his body. His stomach cramped, trying to void everything he had ever eaten. Every inch of his intestines were knotting and melting. Everything was melting.
The pain of dying tissue made his vision fade, going white as the nerves in his eyes were burned away with everything else. He felt his bladder go. He saw the skin around the snake bites rotting in seconds, as black blood poured out of him. Everything was pouring out of him. The muscles he had worked so hard for were wasting into nothing.
Grandpa Jun hadn’t understated how much it would hurt. The failure was in Tian’s imagination. He thought he had experienced as much pain as there was. He was wrong. This was beyond what he had suffered before. Beyond being hungry. Beyond living with perpetual burns and tearing scars. Beyond his kidneys feeling punched or stabbed six times a day. He didn’t have words for it. He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. He fixated on his plan. Pain couldn’t be allowed to stop him!
“I have to get the last thing. I have to get the lotus flower!”Tian pushed as hard as he could. Drove every scrap of himself, every scrap of will into stretching out and grabbing the beautiful flowers. Then convulsing hands crushed the petals and dripped the juice into wide open eyes. Burning? Beyond burning. Corroding, like worms of acid burrowing in through his pupil. Like maggots of suffering bursting from the wet sack of his eyeball.
The pain had now reached every part of him. Tian forced the mass of crushed petals into his mouth and let himself collapse back into the soup. Eyes wide open.