Chapter 151 - Brother Gau’s Friends

Five days after the group began their renovation efforts in earnest, much of the preliminary work had been completed. Zhang Bai had erected a Rainward formation that kept the lowest level and the two courtyards on the second level dry from the drizzle that seemed to have no end. The formation allowed the dozens of mortals working as a construction crew to completely remove the shoddy roofing and replace it despite the worsening weather. Ao Wen had frequently been called over to provide intense flames where needed to dry out sodden timber and burn stubborn lichen off of intricate stonework. 

Once the roof over a building was sound, even more workers descended on the building to haul away debris, patch walls, polish floors, and the dozens of other things that needed to be done to render it fit for use. Feng Xi had even taken Shuli into the city where the two Artists leveraged their insights to purchase everything from ornamental vases to paintings and scrolls of calligraphy to decorate their new homes. Ao Wen herself had snuck out to obtain tools and materials for a surprise of her own but she kept everyone, including Feng Xi, well away from whatever it was she was working on. 

The day after work had been completed on her new clinic, Ao Wen busied herself with setting up her indoor herb garden. The most potent of alchemical ingredients needed to grow for years, decades, and even centuries before they could be used but there were dozens of herbs that could be grown in a few weeks or months that formed the base of many useful medicines and elixirs. Initially, she had only planned on growing the things that she would need in vast quantities to produce pill seeds and to experiment with the components of the Darkwood tree but when Feng Xi brought up staying longer than just the winter, she changed her mind and doubled the number of varieties of herbs she planted, despite the fact that several of them wouldn't be harvestable until late spring at the earliest. 

"Excuse me, Alchemy Novice Lord Ao," one of the mortal workers said, stepping into the garden and bowing almost ninety degrees at the waist. "There are guests at the front gate who wish to see you for alchemy services. One of them said that he was a friend of Soldier Lord Zhang, he gave his name as 'Brother Gau.' There are three other men with him, but only one of them looks to be ill."

"I see," Ao Wen said, standing and wiping the dirt from her hands. "Bring them to the lobby, I'll see them there and decide what to do."

By the time Gau and his three friends had reached the lobby of Ao Wen's clinic, she had changed out of her dirty gardening outfit and into the stark red-trimmed black robes she'd favored since leaving Turning Leaf. "Brother Gau," she said as they entered. "I didn't expect visitors. Did something happen?" 

"It's not so much that something happened," Brother Gau said, scratching his short hair like a dog with flees as he looked sheepishly at his friends. "It's just, Sister Shuli stopped by the Lapis Lantern yesterday and mentioned that you were opening a clinic for people who had issues with cultivation or poisons that were hard to treat. None of us can afford expensive pills that start at five hundred spirit stones or more, but if it's a hundred spirit stones or two, we figured we should come see if you could help with our problems." 

"I see," Ao Wen said, looking over the trio of men who accompanied him. The one who seemed to have an actual illness was short, and wiry with a shaved head and deeply sunken eyes. The veins along his neck stood out starkly with an unhealthy greenish hue to the surrounding skin and a thickness that suggested his blood had difficulty flowing through his veins. The second man had brilliant orange-red hair cut shoulder length and flowing around his elegant features like a lion's mane made of fire while the third man towered over everyone with a body that weighed as much as Zhang Bai and Tang Jin put together and a height over two hundred centimeters. "I'll give you each a price once I've had a chance to examine you but I'd like to start with your ailing friend. What's your name, fellow cultivator, and how did you come to be like this?" 

"I'm Kui Chong," the sick man said, his voice thick with phlegm. "I was bit by a Darkweaver Spider in the mines. I'm tough," he said, interrupted by a coughing fit. "So it didn't kill me. But everything flows slowly," he wheezed. "Heartbeat is slow, energy circulates slow, even my hair grows slow," he said, rubbing a hand over his shaved scalp. "I shaved in summer. Still hasn't grown enough to shave again."

"Okay, Brother Gau, I'm going to take Kui Chong to one of the rooms down the hall where I can examine him," she said, less gently than she normally would. As an alchemist, a woman would be expected to be more gentle with her patients whereas a man would be expected to be more direct. As long as she wanted to maintain the illusion that she was a young lord rather than a young lady, she'd need to make some adjustments to her bedside manner. "The rest of you can stay here until I'm ready for you."

Once she had Kui Chong lying on a cot in a small exam room, she began by taking his pulse and palpating each of his acupoints from the head all the way down to his feet. "Strip off your top, I need to examine your skin. Where were you bitten? I need to look at that too," she said. 

"I was bit on the left calf," he said, gesturing to a spot on his leg that looked particularly swollen when compared to the same spot on the opposite leg. "Alchemist Ma said *cough* that I needed a Radiant *cough* Blood Cleansing pill *cough, cough, cough* to get rid of the venom in my body," he said, fits of coughing interrupting him as he shrugged out of his tunic. "Can you really help without one?"

Ao Wen frowned when she saw the unhealthy green tinge spreading out from the center of his chest like a spider's web. If his heart were the center of the web then its strands reached out to his upper and lower lungs, his spleen, stomach, even his bowel. Worst of all, two of the strands of the web snaked their way along his neck though they stopped just short of his jaw. The poison had been burrowing deeper and deeper into his body in the months since he'd been bitten. Perhaps now, not even the Radiant Blood Cleansing pill would be able to save him from his inevitable slide toward death. 

"I make no promises other than to try," Ao Wen said, drawing out a long silver needle and a basin filled with water. Moving to his swollen calf, Ao Wen inspected the site of the bite. It wasn't surprising that the puncture points where he'd been bitten were surrounded by small, green, weblike structures similar to the one radiating out from his chest. What was surprising was that the puncture wounds were located on either side of his calf and not immediately adjacent to each other. "How big is this Darkweaver spider?"

"Probably a baby," the sick man said. "Only a meter across. I got lucky."

"Some luck," Ao Wen said, shaking her head at the intensity of the venom from a massive spider that he considered a baby. It sounded like this Darkweaver spider had a bite almost as lethal as the sting of an Obsidian Night Scorpion. Such creatures were worthy of respect even if it was her opponent on the battlefield of life and death for her patient. 

Working carefully so as to not poison herself if Kui Chong's blood turned out to be toxic, Ao Wen took a silver needle and pricked his calf deeply enough to spill tainted blood into a small bowl of water she held beneath the wound. She expected that his blood would have taken on a greenish hue with the way the venom manifested on his skin but what she didn't expect was the way light seemed to be devoured by the blood when it dispersed through the water. It seemed more like she'd dripped the blackest of squid ink into the bowl than the blood of a living man. No wonder Alchemist Ma had wanted to use a Light attributed pill to cleanse his blood. The problem was that the time for blood cleansing was long past. Even if they cleansed every drop of his blood now, his tainted heart would pump fresh venom into his body and his marrow would similarly manufacture more tainted blood. The phlegm he kept trying to cough up was his body's attempt to expel the venom the only way it could, through the mucus of his lungs, but there was no way a powerful Soldier could expel such an insidious venom that way, much less a middle-stage Brawler like Kui Chong. 

"I understand the venom," Ao Wen finally said after carefully examining his body and blood. "I can attempt to treat you, but it will cost at least one hundred and fifty spirit crystals," she said. "If I need to treat you more than once, it will be an additional fifty spirit crystals for each follow up treatment. I cannot promise that you will survive," she added bluntly. "But I give you eight chances in ten of surviving if I treat you, and five chances in ten of surviving if you flee to Red Moon City before snow closes the passes. Once you're there, an Independent alchemist with access to the right pill recipes could probably save your life for between two and three thousand spirit crystals in pills and supportive elixirs. My method will hurt more, but you have better odds. What do you want to do?"

"Save me," he said thickly. "I'll pay anything." 

"I won't take advantage of you," Ao Wen said, beginning to write out a list of ingredients. "I'm going to leave you here while I send a friend to purchase ingredients I don't have from Alchemist Ma. While we wait for him to return, I'm going to brew you medicinal tea to drink. Right now, you're badly dehydrated and that will only hinder your treatment. You understand?" Ao Wen asked, looking into Kui Chong's eyes to ensure he would follow her instructions. When he nodded, Ao Wen gave him a reassuring smile that she copied from her Senior Brother Huang Yuze. "Cheer up," she reassured him. "You won't die today. It's a good thing that you came to me, when this is over, make sure to thank Brother Gau for bringing you here."