B3 Chapter 23

To orange-crest's mild surprise, out of all his men, it was Fu Daxian who had the firmest opinions about wine.

"I think this is the wrong kind of rice."

Fu Daxian's face was red, but not from any alcohol. His head was fully engulfed in the steam emanating from the latest batch of rice, spread across a bamboo steaming basket. A single grain of rice slowly disintegrating between Fu Daxian's rubbing fingers, his expression growing steadily more dour.

"What's wrong with it?" As far as orange-crest was concerned, rice was rice. It was delicious when you were starving, and somewhat forgettable when you were not. Its ease of cultivation might be the foundation of human civilization, but each individual grain was not very impressive.

"Wine rice is sweeter. Plumper. Sticky, when it is steamed."

"That does sound better than normal rice." Orange-crest countered glibly. He remained firmly of the opinion that everything should be sweet. Rice, meat, it was all better with fruit, or honey, or rock sugar. Sweetness was like saltiness, anything was much improved by a dash of it. He'd had rice with orange slices for dinner, but had not been able to convince any of his men to join him in mixing the two together.

"They didn't tell you what sort of rice is used with this jiuqu?"

Orange-crest grinned. "No. But rice is rice. I'm sure it will make wine."

Fu Daxian sighed. They had been at work for several hours now. Wine jars were deceptively large, when the time came to fill them. Every bucket of water from the well needed to be long-boiled, because orange-crest could still detect the faintest whiff of old rot upon them. And Fu Daxian had insisted on steaming the rice in batches, rather than just boiling all of it at once, which slowed the process even further.

Fu Daxian insisted that boiled rice made for cloudier wine, which struck the monkey as possible enough to warrant investigation. Only one jar had boiled rice in it, and Sun Guiying had noted down which. Orange-crest enjoyed cloudy wine as much as clear, but his purpose with these first batches was not to produce his favorite wines, but to learn.

"Do you have any real idea what you're doing?" The steward asked his master.

Orange-crest's grin vanished. He liked to think himself a patient monkey, but he was starting to get tired of this.

He reached over. Fu Daxian stilled, but to his credit, he did not flinch. Of all the humans he'd met, orange-crest suspected Fu Daxian was the only one who had never truly feared him. Even bound and helpless, he'd just been... annoyed. Like he'd always expected the saber to fall upon his neck, and only the angle could ever be a surprise.

The monkey reached out and placed his palm on the scarred man's near-bald head.

"Boss?"

"Why do you always do that? Isn't it tiring?"

"Do what? Doubt you? Someone needs to keep your tail from rising too high. If you start forgetting how high the heavens are, we're all liable to find our heads and bodies resting in different places."

"But you aren't doubting me. You're doubting you."

"I am not."

"Is." Orange-crest retorted simply.

"Is— I am not."

"You is." Orange-crest insisted wrongly, enjoying the vein pulsing in Fu Daxian's forehead. "I think my way will make wine. Maybe I'm right. Maybe I'm wrong. Either way, I learn. But I'm doing things your way, for some jars. Most jars, even. And still you doubt."

"I can know better than you, and still not know anything. Brewing is a skilled trade. Anyone can get rice to rot in a jar, but I've seen my cousins waste plenty of good rice fermenting themselves nothing but five-colored rot."

"Mm."

"Hmm?" Fu Daxian pressed. "You can't just hum at me when you run out of arguments, boss. That only works when men don't know you."

"Not out. Never out of arguments. Just thinking about yours. I already said maybe wine goes bad. But you just repeated that. We remain where we started. I believe, you don't."

It was Fu Daxian's turn to grumble wordlessly, in lieu of answer.

There was a knock at the door to the workshop. Orange-crest trudged through the tedious process of donning his hat, breaking the seal of qi upon the room, letting his men in, and reversing the first two steps. Hong Bo and Sun Guiying entered, lugging the last of the jars for the evening.

Orange-crest really needed to figure out formations. He wanted to be able to walk around his own workshop hatless, and cultivate without disturbing the neighborhood's peace.

"I have made a lot of bad wine." Orange-crest muttered.

"What?"

"Not even bad wine." The monkey clarified. "Bad not-wine. Rotten fruit that dried like meat long-dead. Tree-jars that got emptied by birds. Wine so sweet that it barely got mortals drunk. Spirit wine that powerful cultivators were afraid to drink, because they thought it might poison them."

"Wait." Sun Guiying cut in. "Are you going to explain that last one?"

"No."

"Boss—"

"Not today." Orange-crest amended. "The spear-point is that I make bad wine, as well as good. And I want to keep doing that."

Fu Daxian scoffed with surprising venom.

"What, more advice from your vaunted master? Don't be afraid to fail? You can just try again?"

"No." Orange-crest said sadly. "Just from me."

Fu Daxian's face was dark.

"Some of us," the scarred man said quietly, "do not get to fail. So excuse this small steward if he's still not used to the idea that we can just waste good rice."

Orange-crest half expected Fu Daxian's hand to rise, to trace the brutal scar that stretched across his brow. But he didn't.

Something orange-crest couldn't quite identify passed over Hong Bo's face. Not quite sympathy, nor agreement. But it wasn't quite regret either. Some curious mixture of the three. Sun Guiying still looked mostly curious about the centipede wine, and a little sheepish, seeing his former boss speaking so candidly.

Orange-crest took a deep breath. He spread another helping of rice upon the latest steamer, then turned to face Fu Daxian more directly.

"Sometimes, we don't get to succeed either. You can steal inheritances out from the fingers of princes. You can defeat prodigies with spears like a tiger's fangs, and old men whose grasping hands can shake mountains. And still, you can lose everything that really matters."

Orange-crest paused. Just as Sun Guiying's mouth fell open, and countless questions readied themselves to tumble out, he continued.

"We make wine, when we have fruit in excess. Even monkeys know that. Fill the belly first, then the bellies of kin. Only then, do we fill trees with fruit, turn our eyes to long winter, or imagine drunken summer. So often, we don't get to fail. So it is good, to fail when we do."

"That is certainly a philosophy." Hong Bo said, his face as inscrutable as always.

Sun Guiying again opened his mouth to ask his questions.

"We have too many secrets." The monkey said firmly. "When the wine is ready, we're all going to get drunk, and share them."

Fu Daxian scowled. "Or what, you're going to kick us out?"

"No, we just will." Orange-crest insisted.

"You cannot schedule that sort of naked honesty, Brother Chengse." Hong Bo said reasonably, his own face now guarded. The old beggar had so many secrets. Orange-crest was getting a little tired of dancing around all of them. He wanted to learn where the old man had learned to fight so impressively, and why he grew withdrawn whenever mention was made of it.

"You haven't had my wine. I once convinced a man who stared down a Loong King to throw me across a mountain. Repeatedly."

"Boss." In that moment, Sun Guiying looked thrice the beggar Hong Bo had ever been. "Please, for my ancestor's sake, you cannot keep saying things like that and refusing to elaborate."

"I'll tell you all my stories. Once Ruo Ping is back, and the wine is ready, and you're all drunk, and we're all honest."

There were further half-hearted demurrals. But nobody said they would not be drinking, so orange-crest considered the matter settled.

Under his direction, the fifth and final jar of wine began to fill up. Steamed rice, and boiled water. A jiuqu ball ground to fine powder. Several knobs of ginger, withered, but still potent, for their medicinal edge. A little of the fiery powder that orange-crest had produced as a byproduct of the Crimson Ember Lozenges, to give the wine a tinge of qi and vital-heat.

For context, this text came from without consent, although the author publishes the chapter there.

This jar, above all others, he would watch like a hawk. It would rest outside, where the cool of early winter might counteract the heat of the yang qi. He'd add some oranges later, juice and peel, once the mash had begun its journey to winehood. Orange-crest knew from experience that sour fruits, like bayberries and hawthorns, could cause a fermentation to falter before it even really began.

Soon enough, the jars were sealed, and there was nothing left to do except wait, and make pills.

Days passed in a blur of chopping and boiling and rolling and selling.

Ruo Ping returned, laden down with a fat pack stuffed full of herbs and fruits and ominously glowing roots. Orange-crest had been ecstatic, he'd sniffed and patted at them, proudly naming the few he was sure about, and pretending he had any idea what the rest of them were. He suspected that, of his men, only the eldest two saw through his act.

The days slowly turned into weeks. Pills fell like spring rain from the presses, piling high. Silver flowed in, and silver flowed out. None of it turned into spirit stones to fuel orange-crest's cultivation. He did not accumulate enough money to even consider paying Pei Zihao's fine, or purchasing a proper pill furnace. There were too many mortal things to spend the silver upon.

Replacements for the stock orange-crest had used up added up to more than the orange-crest expected. He received several lectures from Fu Daxian about the concept of 'margins', and did his best to implement the surly man's advice, cutting back on the amount of expensive herbs like ginseng where he could, using either combinations of lesser ingredients, or fractional amounts of proper spiritual herbs, to replace them.

Ruo Ping left on a second trip a week later, and this time it was he, not orange-crest, who took the lead in selecting the goods he would take to the pigs. Apparently few things had pleased the porcine pair as much as mix of salty pine nuts and sweet chestnuts Ruo Ping had purchased from a nearby village, though they also rather liked wine and rice cakes.

Orange-crest couldn't wait to see what the pigs made of his own brews, once they were ready. It was a pity he still couldn't really afford to leave the shop. It became less tenable each passing today, as more and more valuable things piled up around the property.

As the monkey's second month in Huangshi drew to a close, he found himself with something he'd once dreaded and resented above all else, viewing it as the very pinnacle of human foolishness.

A schedule.

And yet, he did not feel chained. He knew where he would be for almost every hour of the day to come, but felt no urge to shrug off his commitments and vanish onto the rooftops of Huangshi.

The sense of forward momentum, of accumulation and advancement, was almost intoxicating. When orange-crest had lived with his master, he'd largely moved at Li Xun's direction. He pursued his own goals, advanced and improved, but his master had more often than not been the impetus driving him to cultivate or study.

On Mount Yuelu, he'd usually been too sad to discern one day from the next. Even the prospect of the Monkey King's rare offer of pointers, or sharing Li Xun's teachings with his brothers and sisters, had oft been insufficient to rouse him from his dark moods.

But here in Huangshi, every day felt like it carried orange-crest ever so slightly closer to his distant dreams of a cure for his master, and a place in the world where all the myriad creatures he'd befriended could share a peaceful night drinking beneath the stars.

Orange-crest rose late by his standards. Not because he slept much; he usually took an hour or two at the deepest part of the night, if he slept at all, but because everyone else slept a lot. The monkey rose with the many mortal laborers of the city, when the hour of the tiger crossed into the hour of the rabbit, and the predawn light was just enough for mortals to see by.

He almost always took his breakfast at one of two places, either Auntie and Uncle Ding's stall, where the buns were always the same, and perfect for it, or at Mo Yi's modest shop, which always seemed to have some new exotic fruit or vegetable for his consideration. More often than not, that breakfast was the monkey's only meal of the day.

Auntie and Uncle Ding treated him like any other customer, which orange-crest appreciated more than he could say.

Meanwhile Fellow Daoist Mo seemed to derive amusement from orange-crest's habits. Mo Yi was a worldly man, and with enough prodding, didn't seem to mind dispensing some tidbits of wisdom along with whatever fruit the monkey purchased that day.

Like Daoist Big Hat, he made his living mostly selling goods to mortals. This commonality, along with orange-crest's regular custom, seemed to be enough to endear the monkey to his fellow daoist. Apparently 'proper' urban cultivators looked down upon those who devoted themselves to such lowly businesses, and having an eccentric four small realms his senior treat Daoist Mo with such politeness was a welcome treat.

A few probing questions over half-coconuts had led to Mo Yi explaining the basis of his business.

"It's the storage and preservation formations." He confided in orange-crest one morning. "Plenty of daoists can inscribe them, or purchase them, but most of them stand at least as high as you, Senior Big Hat."

"Mmm." Orange-crest hummed in the space between gnawing bites at the coconut he was feeding behind his veil. "And they don't appreciate good fruit."

"They have better things to preserve. Like live spirit beasts, or rare herbs. I can't truly compete selling my formations, there are too many formation masters more skilled than me. But after decades in business, I have connections all across the empire. My warehouses are filled with all sorts of sundries that Foundation Establishment cultivators and wealthy mortals alike enjoy having grace their tables, but can't be bothered to source themselves. Much of my business these days is actually in regular bulk orders, luxuries shipped across the breadth of Xiao."

"You seem like a good man to know, Fellow Daoist Mo." Orange-crest said shamelessly. "I've been thinking about expanding my business into spirit wine, but I'm a humble hermit, I don't know the first thing about selling my wares to other cultivators. You should come by in a few weeks. We can share a few drinks, and discuss business. But there are a few things I've been looking to purchase, and I haven't been able to find them at the market. Tell me, have you ever heard of Fourfold-Marked Green Rotworms?"

Mo Yi had not heard of the worms, but he knew mortals and lesser cultivators who made their livings harvesting far more dangerous insects. Orange-crest didn't tell him where he knew them from, and implied they were ingredients for a pill he wished to refine. Mo Yi warned it might take a while but promised he would secure some specimens for his senior, for a reasonable fee.

Orange-crest's afternoons were more varied than his mornings. Some days he secluded himself to prepare pills. Others he helped Fu Daxian handle the shop, slowly refining his eccentric doctor persona.

On quiet and rainy days, he closed early, and spent his time practicing writing with Sun Guiying. The man's passion for the art was infectious, and while neither of them made much progress in the study of formations, orange-crest's calligraphy advanced by leaps and bounds. The monkey found himself writing for the sheer fun of it. He replaced his first sign with a much more elegant version, and spent several days making sport of Fu Daxian's earlier complaints about his lack of organization by labeling absolutely everything in the estate. Cabinets, rooms, boxes, even the chairs. Orange-crest even helpfully added a sign saying 'horrible danger, no money here' just below the largest lockbox, with it's half dozen sealing talismans keeping the ghost tightly bound.

He almost hoped a thief would see that, one day.

In the evenings, orange-crest, Fu Daxian, and Sun Guiying spent their hours poring over ledgers. The monkey found himself interrogated about his spending habits, and his laxity about writing down when a few taels of silver vanished here or there into sundry items for the estate. He allowed the two men to harass him into something resembling 'proper accounting practices', and was placed upon a 'budget' for how he could spend his own money.

Fu Daxian's stern gloom lifted a little, when he discovered that Ten Thousand Medicines and One Poison was turning a steady profit, even after ingredients and salaries. Not the sort of profit that would fund progress toward Foundation Establishment, but a comfortable one.

Yet, while the pile of silver and spirit stones in the talisman-sealed lockbox only orange-crest could access grew slowly, three piles around the estate were growing far faster.

The first was the library. Orange-crest's reckless spending wasn't all on food, and even Fu Daxian conceded that books about medicine were the very definition of a reasonable investment. And unlike taels of silver, books had no habit of vanishing as fast as they arrived. The variety of patients orange-crest felt capable of treating was steadily expanding. The monkey didn't think he would truly feel comfortable putting the breadth of what he'd learned into practice until he refined true healing pills to fall back upon, but he was beginning to comprehend the sheer variety of ways in which the human, and simian, body could fail and suffer.

It was too early for him to even consider drawing conclusions about his master, but every so often he came across a rare disease that had just enough similarities that he jotted down a short note of a test he might run, when he returned to Mount Yuelu.

The second growing pile was the now well-labeled drawers in orange-crest's apothecary's cabinet that contained Qi Condensation level spiritual herbs. Identifying all of them, let alone finding recipes that could use them, was slow work. But their steady accumulation represented a sizable volume of wealth, one orange-crest didn't really talk about. Ruo Ping didn't seem to care much about it, but the other three men were certainly aware of the possibilities the plants the pigs were bringing in represented.

In truth, those cabinets scared orange-crest a little. Mo Yi had implied that the reason orange-crest's fellow cultivators largely left him alone was that none of them saw reasons worth pressing their interest in him. They saw Daoist Big Hat's business, the prices he charged, and the scant spirit stones he would be pocketing, and dismissed him as an eccentric. There were rumors, Mo Yi said, that he was some sort of ex-demon who sought to redeem his karma treating commoners, or a man who had been brutally scarred in battle, and was now learning the basics of a safer trade.

A strange eccentric clearly too powerful to bother over pocket change. Once orange-crest began selling those herbs, whether as they were, or as wine or pills, questions would be asked, as he edged into the markets of 'real' cultivators.

And then there was the wine. Orange-crest might not have had a pill furnace yet, but he did have a great many spiritual herbs. As the first batches of wine began reaching the point where orange-crest could tell the good from the bad, he chose a few jars to add spiritual herbs to. The first was the orange-rice wine he'd been planning, with modest amounts of fiery and yang-aligned energy. The second was his first attempt at what humans considered an orthodox spirit wine, a purely rice based concoction with a carefully chosen blend of herbs intended to produce largely balanced qi. A simple plan in concept, it strained his alchemical knowledge to its limits, requiring half a dozen pages of phase diagrams and several risky taste-tests before the monkey was confident in his choices.

The third batch was just poison. Less a wine and more of a alcohol-fueled extraction. Orange-crest added those ominous glowing tubers, some roots he suspected came from a Two-Shadowed Yew, and several mushrooms that radiated earthen qi that had unsteady, yin-aligned, undertones.

He wasn't drinking that one. He would simply let it sit, hoping to never need it.

The three jars were but a start. Orange-crest had whole pages of ideas, small variations to test, and for once he was unrestrained by ingredients or time. The only limits upon his work were the availability of natural treasures and his lack of Rotworms.

Nights, of course, were for crafting. By the dim light of a single oil lamp, all the wonders that flowed from the shop took form. Orange-crest mostly worked alone. He did not ask any of the others to give him their twilit hours as well as the ones they spent shut away from the sun managing his shop. But they all joined him, in the meditative peace of endless chopping and grinding and soaking. Sun Guiying was his most frequent companion, but even Hong Bo and Fu Daxian sometimes found time away from their own lives to assist him.

When the monkey was alone, he often found himself meditating upon the concept of karma. Imagining all the lives these pills touched, considering the connections he knew, and those he never would. On the rare occasions all five of them gathered in the workshop, orange-crest found himself repeating sections of his master's lectures on the Dao of Alchemy, passing Li Xun's teachings on to students as unsuspecting as he'd once been.

It was a quiet winter, but it was a good one.

And then, as the third month began to yield to the fourth, shortly after the coldest day of the year, orange-crest opened a jar.

He stuck a paw within. Not directly. With a ladle clutched between his fingers, he wasn't a wild animal anymore. Except when he wished to be.

It was ready. A little bitter, a little sour, but not unpalatable. The first of what would be many jars.

Orange-crest sent Fu Daxian to gather his men, and began to draft a message to Mo Yi, one that Sun Guiying would not have been ashamed of writing.

He was proud of this small thing that he'd built. But it was not enough, to spend all his time making mortal pills for a profit each month better measured in silver than spirit stones.

He'd built the foundations. It was time for them to be tested, as the walls began to rise.