43 – Soot-Coated
Life, to my shock, returned to some measure of normalcy. Quiet days which bled into uneventful weeks, where I focused much of my attention on the farm. I drew up my crops and sold most of them to Tiode, and a few to the wandering merchants.
In planting new crops on freshly tilled land, giving the previous section of soil a chance to recover, I took it as an opportunity to try some new seeds I had picked up from Low Moon and Brazio the smuggler. Corn, and a patch of a local herb called mizuna.
With the right alchemical reagents bringing life to the soil, and the climate being as agreeable as it was, the plants had no problem in taking root.
Mikan came by from time to by, occasionally just to be neighbourly, occasionally to give me my share of the money for the potatoes. They seemed to be decently popular, selling out over the span of a few days.
And Haita and his idiot friends came by. I had a new project in the works, a barn I’d be using to house some cows. Didn’t need it to be too big, I wasn’t about to become a cattle farmer. Just enough to house maybe four cows maximum.
Well, it gave them something to busy their hands with.
I hoisted a large stack of wooden planks onto my right shoulder, walking them toward the skeletal outline of the barn, just as Haita came my way. “Uh, Aniki?” he asked.
“Hm?”
“I... have something important I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I just... never found the right time until now,” he said.
Which meant, of course, he’d been trying to work up the nerve and ask me.
I gave a sigh, setting the boards down a short distance from where Yun and Takeda were working. “Fine. If you wanna talk private, we’ll talk private.” I led him around to the side of the house, where Smoke had fallen asleep stretched out in a sunbeam. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well uh... um...” Rather than answer with words he suddenly scooped up a stone broader than a man’s fist from the earth.
I watched him in silence, one brow raised, as he pressed both palms into the sides of the stone.
Haita frowned, veins briefly popping around his forehead, and then suddenly the stone shattered and collapsed into a heap of dust and gravel. He let out a long, shuddering breath, and wiped his palms clean. Smoke was roused, briefly, and then dipped back to sleep in true feline fashion.
“Alright,” I said eventually. “That’s unusual.”
“I think... I think being near you, and bein’ on your farm so saturated in your qi, it might have caused like... a spark in me. Got the qi in my own meridians circulating about, you know?”
I shrugged at him. “I’m no expert,” I said simply.
“Huh...” He blinked at me, clearly confused. “But... your strength, all your power, do you... how are you not an expert?”
“I didn’t train for my power. I... had it granted to me, I suppose you could say.” I’m sure there were plenty of cultivators who would complain for how I hadn’t had to work for this strength of mine. But if I could have traded my power for my family, I would have given my strength up in a heartbeat.
Haita grunted. “But... if I have this power starting to build up in me... I don’t know how to like... channel it. You know? I need more control if I’m gonna be able to properly use it.”
I shrugged again. “Cultivators are all about... physical strength and discipline, yeah?”
“I mean, I guess that’s a part of it, yeah,” he admitted, seeming to mull my suggestion over.
“Then treat your... qi the way a soldier would treat his body. You need to regularly train it. So... drills, every day. Run laps, do pushups. That sort of thing. You do it regularly, your body adjusts and gets stronger. Seems easy enough.”
“Hey... yeah...” Haita grinned over at me. “That’s a really good point, Aniki!”
“Yeah, well...” I grumbled, rubbing at the back of my neck. “I reckon I can have good ideas from time to time, and-”
A great explosion echoed up the road. It was enough to halt the hammering and banging of the lads tending the barn, and the unwelcome familiarity of the sound sent a wave of cold dread racing down my spine.
Before I knew it I was running to the source of the sound, expecting to see another army of bandits and yokai prowling our way. Particularly when I saw the smoke rising into the sky from up the road.
Labourers had been hard at work erecting the two floors of Asquith’s shop, and much of the exterior had been built up. In the meantime he had been sleeping in a large tent in the back yard, which was only a short distance from some manner of rounded clay furnace.
A furnace that was, evidently, the source of the smoke, belching it into the sky at an alarming rate.
Asquith had been knocked into the fence at the far end of his yard, face blackened with soot and his hair blown out in every direction.
I sighed, the tension draining from me as I skidded to a halt. “Good grief,” I muttered.
The workmen were already working to help Asquith to his feet, the man coughing and wheezing as he fought to maintain his balance. “H-holy crap!” Haita shouted. “Y-you okay, man?”
“Ha... haha...” Asquith forced a grin. “I was er... giving the pill furnace a bit of a test run,” the Ilgardian said. “And er... hah... seems I... still need to study the manual I was given a little more thoroughly. What a beast this machine is.”
It sure looked it. The damn thing was taller than I was, and certainly broader, the sides fitted with strange funnels and nozzles.
I had never understood alchemy back home. All the jars of ingredients, the vessels of curved glass, all the coloured fluids... seemed Asquith was as confused about eastern alchemy.
Either the man genuinely was a fool, or this was all part of some ruse to paint himself as a harmless, incompetent boob. Couldn’t discount either possibility.
“Don’t you worry, my lads. I’ll get a handle on eastern alchemy before you know it!”
I stared at the pill furnace again. “Or blow yourself to smithereens before you can.”
“Whoa. I’ve heard of these things in stories, but... this is my first time seeing one up close,” Haita said, turning his head from tide to side as he examined the furnace. “You can do all kinds of things with this. Make pills to cure poisons an’ diseases... but in the old stories, cultivators put all kinds of things into the furnace, making pills that make their cultivation stronger.”
I heaved a sigh. “Very fixated on getting stronger, aren’t they,” I muttered.
“It’s a tough nut to crack, you know. But eastern medicine can, potentially, be very valuable to the world at large,” Asquith admitted. He gave his furnace an anxious glance, the last dregs of smoke hissing from the yawning opening. “Just needs a little bit of fine tuning on my end...”