The competition had been fierce to deliver the goods. Tian had posted the delivery job with one merit point and one spirit crystal, reckoning it was fair enough to carry a few items and a bit of paper across town. What he hadn’t expected was a dozen senior brothers swooping in to snatch the job, resulting in an all out brawl in the Mission Hall. It was highly instructive, Tian felt. He thought he was pretty decent at fighting. His senior brothers showed him that he still had a long way to go.
The brother who did a perfect horizontal split to punch two brothers in the crotch simultaneously was impressive, but Tian was more moved by the brother who kept jumping up and kicking off walls to land brutal headshots on anyone who looked like they were going to grab the letter. Then, of course, people came to find out what the noise was about and pretty soon there was a general, if surprisingly bloodless, riot. Even Senior Brother Fu turned up with a long stick.
Tian thought he was just there to keep things under control. What he actually did was use his stick to trip people and make them headbut each other. It was quite beautiful. Just a little poke and a senior brother with the back of a bear and the waist of a tiger would fall into the embrace of a graceful swordsman. And then their heads would smash together.
Brother Fu never seemed to get tired of it. Neither did Tian. “Get Old Mustache!”
“That’s Senior Brother Old Mustache, ah no, Senior Brother Xue. Manners, little Tian, manners!” Brother Fu skillfully snagged a stool and flicked it across the floor. Brother Xue, who did indeed have a fine long mustache, managed to hop over the stool… but fell victim to the brother flying off the walls. Their faces connected with a thunk of martial passion that brought tears to the eyes.
“YAY Senior Brother Fu!”
“Decorum, Junior Brother, decorum in all things.” Brother Fu’s staff darted into the melee like a striking heron, cracking an ankle and a knee with a single blow which resulted in the rare three-face mashup.
“I am learning, Senior Brother Fu!”
Twenty minutes later, Brother Fu and Tian were the only two left standing in the hall. Brother Fu shook his head sadly. “You gossipy old men! If you are so bored, go to the Southern Border and take some heads. Hell, go back to the secular world and take some wives! I think some of you could really accomplish something as farmers. Some of you. Not all of you are good enough to be peasants. But some of you could really make something of yourselves, instead of being a pack of nosy reprobates who like nothing more than making me sweat.”
Brother Fu shook his head with deep regret. “Alas, it seems none of you are in good shape at the moment. So I am taking this mission.”
Senior Brother Fu, demonstrating the grace and poise of the most senior member of the West Town Temple, deployed an exquisite light body technique. His soft shoes barely tapped on the red faces of his suddenly roaring brothers as he dashed to the desk and snatched up the letter and parcel. A light tap of his toes, and he leapt from the desk out a high window and was gone.
Tian didn’t know a light body technique. He did his best to emulate his elder and slipped away at speed. He’d snagged a long term mission during the melee, the only one not restricted to the senior brothers, so really, there was no sense in hanging around.
___________________________________________________________________
“Oh, it’s Little Brother Tian! You finally took the mission. Did you send the letter? What happened when she got it? Tell me everything!” The senior brother smelled faintly of herbs. Tian noticed immediately, as the old man crowded him as soon as he stepped into the medicine workshop.
“There was a bit of an argument in the mission hall about who got to do it, and eventually Senior Brother Fu took the delivery mission himself. I don’t know what’s happened yet. Why is everyone so interested?”
“Why is everyone so interested, Senior Brother Wong. And the clue is in the question. Our cute little junior writing his very first letter to the Hong Clan’s little princess? Sending her cough a thoughtful gift? We have brothers rushing in from a thousand miles away to see how this plays out.”
The senior brothers, Tian remembered, had been stuck at the peak of Level Nine for a very, very long time, and were very, very bored. He was starting to regret telling his seniors what he was doing. They kept asking why he wanted paper and writing brushes and ink when he had to be forced to read under threat of banishment from the martial practice courtyards. He quickly changed the topic.
“I understand you are looking for help in the workshop, senior?”
“Yes indeed. I had heard for a while now you had an interest in herbs and medicine, so I thought I would put something up.”
“Yes. My body was much worse than this before, but some of the seniors I met gave me some advice on making medicine, and it really helped,” Tian said. Grandpa Jun always said to tell the truth whenever he could. Just don’t say too much of it.
“Mmm. Fortunate.”
“Yes, I was lucky to meet them.”
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“No, I meant that it’s fortunate you didn’t die. Look around the workshop. Don’t touch anything, don’t sniff anything, above all don’t eat anything. Just walk around and look.”
The workshop was a modest sized building in the southern end of the Temple complex. High ceilings and whitewashed plaster walls, with large windows covered in elegant wooden lattices and translucent paper for plenty of light but no drafts. There was a large iron stove in the back, and a few work tables up front. There was a special room for drying herbs, strong strings stretching from wall to wall with dangling bunches of fragrant plants hanging from them. But what they seemed to have the most of was cabinets full of drawers.
The cabinets were polished wood, the drawers and corners softly rounded by years of frequent use. Each drawer was about as wide as Tian’s hand, and had a large paper card glued to it. On the card was a name, followed by a string of symbols and characters. Each was carefully color coded.
“Marsh Yarrow Root- Yin, Water, Dog… and I don’t know what the little pictures are.” Tian slowly read aloud. “Senior brother, I know what the words mean but not when they are in this order.”
“I would have been shocked if you did! It takes quite a bit of memorization to get the whole thing down but once you have a basic pool of knowledge, you can start making deductions about herbs you don’t recognize. You can figure out how different herbs will interact, and most importantly- how they interact with the body.”
“This is a herb for dogs?”
“It was harvested in the year of the dog. Well. A year of the dog. Some of the other symbols indicate when in the sixty-four year cycle it was harvested.”
“Dogs get a year? What other animals get years? Sixty-four year cycle?” Tian had seen a few dogs. He gave them space, and they let him be. Not things he wanted to fight with if he could avoid it.
“In the books you were assigned you should have read something like- “In the beginning there was just primordial chaos which was nothing, but also everything. From that perfect chaos came yin and yang, which contain the supreme principles of generation and destruction. Their interaction gave birth to the five elements, which created all of existence.””
“I think I saw something like that.” Tian nodded. Senior Brother Wong was smiling like someone who had carefully laid a trap.
“Well, it’s true. Every teaching from every ancestor confirms it, and if that wasn’t enough, you can prove it in your daily life. For example, medicine. However, just because a fact is true doesn’t make it useful.”
Tian nodded even more strongly at that. His struggles with learning anything useful from history completely convinced him.
“Everything is built off of that principle of yin and yang and the five elements, from the fate of immortal dynasties to which way a peasant’s shit lands in the ditch. And when I say everything I do mean everything. For example, the moving stars or what some call planets. There are five of them, each aligned with an element, AND they have divination significance AND they are connected to two organs in the human body, one yin and one yang, which means they ALSO impact pairs of specific meridians which means that they ALSO impact specific medicinal interactions depending to their degree of influence in the current sky as well as the birth chart of the patient.”
Tian stared at Brother Wong. He slowly blinked, and started subtly edging towards the door.
“In practice, you just need to know that Oil of Clove is a decent analgesic if someone’s got a toothache, but if you want the disease cured, you are going to need to drill the tooth and apply a compound of Casi Root, Oil of Clove, Powdered Bergin and a tiny bit of rendered tallow from a yellow female dog. Apply to the drilled tooth, make sure the cavity is completely packed without any gaps or voids, try to reshape the tooth as best you can to fix the bite, then solidify the compound with an application of vital energy.”
“Eh? Sorry! Eh, Senior Brother Wong?”
“‘Pardon’ is the word you are looking for, Junior Brother.”
“No, I know the word pardon, Senior Brother. I just can’t keep up with your explanation. The two examples seem completely unrelated.”
Brother Wong smiled thinly. He was a thin sort of person, so the smile gave Tian the feeling of looking at a spearpoint.
“Correct, yet incorrect. One is theory, trying to deduce the totality of something from the highest principles and working downwards. The other is empirical practice- knowing that Iron Thread Grass can be turned into a hemostatic compound with minimal processing, for example, or that someone’s old grandad has a bad heart but manages to keep on going because of the strong cinnamon tea they drink every night. You might not know why it works, but you have seen that it does work.”
“And from that, you start asking why it works.” Tian nodded.
“Most don’t, actually. But yes, those who have moved the art of medicine forward do ask the “why” questions, as well as the tricky “how” questions. Which brings us back to the drawer labels.”
“They say what the herb inside is, as well as a bunch of those high level principles.”
“Correct. Because most of the time, I know I’ll want that swamp yarrow root to cool the excess yang and Gold qi in white thistle based compounds. But if I need to compound something from scratch, to formulate a unique remedy, I don’t want to be digging through my manuals for hours trying to cross-check every last detail. I can walk through the shelves and put together a formula which balances all the relevant elements on the cards.”
“And the mission you posted- working as a herb boy, Senior Brother?”
“You are going to help me gather herbs, Junior Brother, and then you are going to learn how to process them. I heard Brother Fu had to thicken his face and beg his master to provide you a copy of Advent of Spring. That’s as pure a wood aligned art as there is. You will find that working with herbs comes quite quickly and easily to you.”
Tian was quite sure he had stepped into a trap now, but still wasn’t quite sure what it was.
“You will be able to earn merits, learn herbology, learn how to harvest herbs, and you will even learn a little about being an apothecary. Isn’t that wonderful?”
“Oh. Yes, Senior Brother.”
“And don’t worry. I promise it won’t take up too much of your time.”