Chapter 37 - Hitting The Books

Moving the children proved easier than she'd feared. There had been a moment when two older boys, or at least bigger boys, had threatened her, wanting to take whatever she'd looted from the clinic. A flash of Azure Flame was enough to discourage the mortal boys and send them fleeing but Ao Wen had called them back with an offer. If they helped her move the orphans she would provide the boys with breakfast each day at the gates. She didn't dare let them into the clinic even though she wanted to take in the boys but they'd already turned to bullying and robbing others. They feared her flames but they wouldn't fear sick children and there was only one of her. She just couldn't risk that they would turn against their benefactor.

The last thing she did at the orphanage was to remove the placard that hung above the door and move it to the clinic, replacing the sign that once hung there. "Names are still important," she reflected. Any locals would know that this had been a clinic but if anyone came looting from other districts, an orphanage was much less appealing of a target than an Alchemist's clinic. Besides, in nine days, the Medical Saintess from the sect was supposed to arrive. She didn't want to miss their rescue just because they'd moved somewhere safer.

Inside the clinic, Ao Wen enlisted the help of the children who were well enough to be out of bed for basic chores. When she served up their first meal of soft lentil porridge and steamed buns, Fen approached her with a sheepish look. "I'm sorry big sister Yu," he said softly. "I thought you were going away too."

"Silly boy," she said, ruffling his hair. "I told you, I won't leave until help comes. Now go help Gong clean up, he won't let anyone help him eat but his hands are too shaky to be neat about it."

"Yes, big sister!"

With the children settled, Ao Wen turned to the mess of Master Dongfang's study. As she'd suspected, he'd ransacked his own clinic attempting concoction after concoction to slow the progress of his transformation into a Yin Fiend. His desk was covered with pages of increasingly less coherent notes describing his own descent into cruelty and madness. From what Ao Wen could discern, it seemed like there was more to Master Dongfang than many had given him credit for.

In one early set of notes, Master Dongfang referred to a Headmaster Song Yufeng, stating that the esteemed Headmaster would never have sent him here if he didn't have faith in his abilities. Prince Song Yufeng, according to the deceased alchemist, was a great man who stepped aside from the bitter struggle for the throne, instead choosing to mentor younger generations to best serve the Mao Kingdon.

Further notes from Master Dongfeng were thicker with frustration. "This is my fault, my fault my fault!" the notes railed. "Headmaster Song resisted all corruption by having a pure heart dedicated to his people! The sickness is spreading in me like Heaven's punishment for my sins. I must do more, must save more! Salvation only exists on the road to sainthood, I must…" From there his notes descended into a desperate listing of herbs that purged "impure motives from heart and body" and a suspicious-sounding ritual to hide a person's sin from the eyes of the Heavens.

Later, he began to speak of making sacrifices, finding corrupt people into whom he could pour his sickness. It would be alright, the ailing Alchemist felt, if he rounded up criminals to serve as his subjects. Eventually, after a number of grisly attempts were made to halt the progression of his illness, he found himself looking forward to his transformation. In a moment of rare lucidity, he'd realized that there was no road back from this madness and took his own life.

"Master surely suffered greatly," Ao Wen said, trying to imagine what the poor tortured man had gone through to become so desperate. The notes, she decided, weren't something she should attempt to make use of but neither did she want to destroy the words of his last days. Instead, she locked them away in his desk, perhaps to be presented to a next of kin if he had one. With his notes put away and the books properly organized, Ao Wen tried to figure out where to start. Alchemy was vast, occupying a large number of disciplines. There was nothing on the shelf that said "start here" but there were a frustrating amount of texts that started with "beginnings of", "a primer on", "fundamentals" and half a dozen other words indicating that they were a starting point if not the starting point. Maybe Yu was smarter than her and could figure it all out, but right now she was Yu and this was what she had to work with.

"What do I need? I need medicine for mortals," she said. She didn't think for a moment that she could cure any of them. She just wanted to keep everyone alive long enough for help to arrive. She kept telling herself that. In a few days, the Medical Saintess would arrive and this would all work out.

"Six of them have a fever," she said, looking over a book titled "common mortal medicines and their concoction methods." If she could fight the fever, that would help, right? Finding a recipe that was described as "safe for children and pregnant women," Ao Wen began to read before realizing she wasn't familiar with half the ingredients. Taking the book with her she moved to the room where herbs were stored only to find that some of the herbs she needed had been spilled in with others and she didn't know how to separate them.

Another trip to the study and she returned with "A Primer on Common Herbs and Their Uses…" Each problem led to the search for another book and the answer to the next question until she found herself on the floor of the herb room surrounded by seven books and a growing collection of containers. Fen, bless his little heart, came in every few hours with a cup of poorly brewed tea and some leftovers from dinner. It wasn't until she saw him napping in the corner that she realized how long she'd been at it.

"Wake up Fen," she said. "You've been coming up a lot of stairs to bring me tea. You should rest your leg in bed and get real sleep. I'd carry you to bed," she said with a wave of her own ailing arm "but I'm not strong enough. Can you make it back to bed or do you need big sister's help?"

"I can do it," he said, rubbing his eyes. "Are you making medicine so we get better?" Fen asked.

"Soon. I have to learn all the steps first," she said simply. "Now go to bed, big sister is going to be up a while longer."

Ao Wen didn't sleep that night, or the night following. Her second day of study had allowed her to gather the ingredients for not only a fever reducing medicine but an ointment to expel impurities from the skin and a cream that would numb pain. The ointment was easy and only needed to have ingredients ground then mixed with a base oil and whipped. She even got help from the kids with the whipping when her arms got tired.

The other two, however, required her to purify ingredients with alchemist's fire before combining them in the cauldron. Among the "fundamentals of" books, she'd found one on Flame Control arts that included a beginner friendly "Swirling Flame Pool" flame control art that created a shallow pool of flame around the base of the cauldron to slowly and gently bring it to temperature. The book claimed that the method was inefficient but also unlikely to damage ingredients or produce cauldron explosions.

There were precious few herbs available so an art that was unlikely to ruin any felt like the best fit. To practice her flame control she'd been using her alchemy flames when cooking, brewing tea, starting fires, heating wash water and anything else that needed heat.

By her third day in the clinic, she was ready to brew her first concoction.