Chapter 73: Chapter 71: Writhing Floral Veins

"NEXT!" The voice rang out, even more hoarse than before. The line flinched back at the sound before one man tottered forward to Lin's desk on uneasy feet. He got down to his knees and looked up at Lin with pleading eyes.

"...Nausea?" Lin guessed. It had been what just about every other patient had arrived for that day, filling his clinic up to the point he had to ask some of of the other doctors to come help him. Why did people need to congregate in his clinic for imagined ills?

"O-oh, yes! It's horrible sir! My stomach feels like someone's grabbed it and is swinging it around!" The man whined piteously.

Lin took the man's pulse, then gave him a white bottle, "take this when you get home and before you go to sleep. You'll feel better in the morning."

The man grasped the bottle with gratitude in his eyes, "thank you! Thank you!"

Lin waved him off, "I'm a doctor, this is what I'm supposed to do."

The man left, dashing towards the door with the bottle held tightly in hand.

Looking back out at the line, Lin's shoulders fell and some annoyance bubbled back up. He had more interesting things to do but his duty came first. Unfortunately that duty included handing out small bottles of water to people who were only nauseous in their own minds. He looked over at the two other doctors, who were all also doing the same regimen as he was. Check pulse, offer bottle. This always happened every time Lang Lang decided to move the village, he rubbed his temples in frustration. He should have waited to start his project.

His eyes passed over to the soup that sat on the desk beside him, the soft scent tantalizing and mouthwatering. He had not eaten breakfast, or even a small snack, so the allure of the soup was truly unbearable.

Another patient came up to his desk, pale and wide eyed as he settled in front of Lin. "S-sir..." The man was young, his arm wrapped up with strips of linen. "So, so I did as you advised."

Lin straightened up, happy to talk with someone who was not imagining their nausea. "Let me see your arm," he instructed, holding out his hand.

The young man hesitantly held out the bandaged arm, which Lin quickly freed from the wrapping. Beneath was a large pinkish splotch of new skin, shiny and moist. "So is it supposed to be pink?"

"Yes," Lin said, reaching under his desk to grab new linen wraps. "do you still have the mixture I gave you?"

"Uh, the watery stuff I need to put on? Yeah!" The young man nodded.

"Good. You no longer need to apply it at morning and night, I advise you to only do it before bed." Lin instructed. "When the jar is empty, bring it back to me and let me see your arm again and I'll decide if you need more. You are free to go."

"That's all?"

"Yes. Unless you want me to lecture you about drunken blacksmithing again."

The young man looked surprised but got to his feet and left anyway. With that, Lin decided that he would also leave to eat his soup and look at his project. He stood up and looked at the shrunken line and the two other doctors. Both also seemed weary. One looked over at Lin, "ah? Are you leaving?"

"I have some things to check on," Lin said, picking up the bowl and the plate that had sat over it. "And I need to return this to Hua before she accuses me of theft."

"Ah, 'returning dishes', that's what we're calling it nowadays hm?" The other doctor winked at Lin.

Lin did not bother dignifying the insinuation with a response, instead turning on his heel to leave the clinic's room, pushing open a heavy door in the back that he then shut behind him. Immediately behind the clinic was a narrow hall that he quickly walked through before it turned around on itself, spilling into his own proper dwelling. In truth, he preferred sleeping in the pond in the courtyard although a dry bed did have some advantages. He was not going into the pond just yet however, and while carrying the soup bowl still he went down a set of stairs into a room that appeared forever murky and bathed in a living green light.

The tables were just as he left them, with two large clear jars full of water and fish on one table while the other was occupied with books, scrolls, slates, an ink dish and brush, various needles, and knives. Acquiring glass jars was expensive and hard for most people, obtained either along distant trade routes or from the isolationist Eastern Kingdom and even then, they were often opaque, so Lin did what a reasonable man would do and took them from an empty city beneath the waters. They were not truly fit containers for fish, but they worked for what he needed them for.

He set the soup bowl down on the table covered in books, turning his focus upon the jars. Inside both of them swam minnows as long as his finger, stripes of purple racing over their silvery bodies. They were called 'purple nails' by fishermen and while they made for terrible eating they did make for excellent bait for larger fish. Lin was not planning to go fishing with them however, he had gathered them up for their other qualities. One that they were common in most rivers, second and more importantly was that they were utterly stupid. They would eat whatever was big enough to go in their mouths. Bugs, fallen marbles, rocks, brambles, offspring, seeds.

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One hand reached over to pick up a long slender knife, while the other fished out one of the minnows from one of the pots. He pressed the knife tip to its underside and pushed through, the thin flesh of the fish ripping open. He then hooked the tip around the organs of the fish, drawing them out slightly as he set the dying fish down on the table. Then he reached for the other pot, pulling out another fish that seemed a bit rounder than its fellow that flopped weakly on the table. The knife passed over its stomach and Lin watched in surprise as its organs easily slid out, the heavy weight of numerous white filaments clinging to them. Lin set the fish down on the table next to the now-dead minnow, examining them both closely.

The clean one looked like how he expected it would, but the one who had been eating seeds struck something unpleasant in his guts. Using two knives, he peeled back more of the thin fish flesh, finding the white filaments had wrapped themselves into the bones of the fish, entwining with the spine. The source of them seemed to be the stomach, which had ruptured open with the white filaments pouring out from it like unspooled thread. He carefully moved back the flap of surviving stomach tissue to find a tiny sprout, its green color standing out among the white and red.

Lin set his tools down and stared at the two dissected fish.

Hurriedly he started rummaging around the gathered items on the other table, a bubble of pressure forming in his chest as the unfamiliar sensation of cold sweat appeared on his back. He checked titles of books, opened scrolls, pulled up old slates, he knew what he was looking for and some part of him was fearful of what it would confirm. His suspicions were enough to make him start considering a fire pit to throw the fish in.

Finally his hand seized upon one small book, 'Brief Summary of the Bamboo Eater Sage's Annals', and he began flipping through the pages. The ink on the pages had faded some, and many of the edges showed tattering from years of less than gentle use. Darker ink bled through where a censor's brush had touched. Diagrams of animals, people, and plants would go by, punctuating blocks of text. He finally stopped at one page with the diagram of a flower with large elegant petals.

In the Seventy-Third year of ███████████

The city which formerly stood next to the Black River before the Drought in the Thirty Fourth Year of the rule ██████████████████████. The report of white flowers sprouting during full moons prompted investigation from the city's offices of agriculture. Under the policy of testing, no negative conditions were known from the flowers. The tendency to grow them for lunar festivals became fashionable. Their seeds were reported to have a sweet and pleasant taste, and were eaten during the winter.

The Duke's daughter passed from illness, and her body was wrapped in the flowers and with a white sheet in the barbaric traditions of ███████████████ ███████████ ███████████

██████████████████████ ███████████ seventh night, the daughter returned to her house. Her blood was replaced by white roots and she spoke of how she had learned . The Duke was overjoyed at his daughter's resurrection, but the Lady Immortal Lu Liyi warned of imbalance in the daughter's body. The daughter refused to let Lu Liyi examine her, and the Duke exiled Lu. Lu Liyi went to the Mountain of Lady Gu to submit a report. █████████████████████████████████

In the autumn of the year, more flowers were reported in the city█████████████████████████████████and any who defied the order to open family tombs were strangled. The Duke assembled an army counted as 23,400 ██████████████████████.

Marching on ███████████ surprised and captured its petty king ██████████████████████. Survivors reported the soldiers did not die when cut with bronze or iron blades, but suffered when struck with tools from the temples of Flames or burned. But there were not enough tools to stop

The summary ended there, marked up as it was by its censored sections it still told Lin enough. More than enough. The immortal that Lang Lang had killed was infected with the same seeds that the summary spoke of. He had no doubt that if he cut up every other fish who had eaten the seeds he would have found the same thing in them.

A flower that could raise the dead.

No.

It was not raising them, he thought. That would mean there would have been a true death at some point. The plant had supplied life supporting functions. But the censored sections made him think it must also be able to bring the dead, if not back to life than back to mobility. But there was not enough information. The daughter was speaking, did the others speak too? The people of that city ate the seeds, were they all similarly infected?

The passage had also mentioned Lu Liyi, which made his mind spin with the realization of how long ago the event had to have been. Lu Liyi was a friend to the Children of the Ancient Ocean and had contributed much to trying to improve relations between the heavens and waters. He had never met her, but in all his lives he had only known her to be mentioned fondly. Yet Lu Liyi had died so long ago that most humans no longer remembered her name, in fact out all of the Ten Immortals, only three were still around.

Maybe she had written something about the event and left it in one of the libraries?

Lin bit his thumb in frustration. He could not leave the town when Lang Lang was gone, and he would not even know where to start looking for something that might not even exist.

He set the book down and moved back to the table with the fish. The white filaments had moved, growing outwards towards the other fish. The heart beat sluggishly, barely perceptively. Lin's stomach twisted in disgust and fear as he grabbed the knife and brought it down on the reaching roots, cutting them midway through their journey. He threw the dead and undying fish into the jar with the other seed-fed fish. Before anything else, he had to get rid of these things before they became abominations.

Lin went to the stairs and looked upwards, noticing someone standing at the top, the murkiness of the room made them difficult to see. "If you want treatment, please go back to the clinic," he said tersely as he started climbing the stairs.

"I'm beyond treatment," the person replied in a hoarse voice, their sharp inhuman teeth somehow stuck out. "I'm actually looking for a little red haired girl called Zhu Er. Have you seen her?"

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