Chapter 7: The Customer in the Crater

The crater sat three steps from the teahouse door.

Lin Fan stared at it with the quiet despair of a man who'd just watched someone spill an entire pot of soup across a freshly mopped floor.

Broken ground. Dust everywhere. A few stray stones had landed on the roof, and one wooden letter on his sign now hung sideways like it had given up on life.

The roof itself was still standing, though.

That was really the only good news he had.

The five bandits ringed the crater with weapons drawn, faces bloodless, not one of them actually looking at the person bleeding inside it.

Lin Fan grabbed the broom and walked over.

"Put those away."

The leader turned, alarmed. "Owner, that man is extremely dangerous."

"He's also bleeding to death."

"That could be a trick."

Lin Fan peered into the pit. The man was flat on his back, clothes shredded, one whole side of him soaked dark. Wounds crisscrossed his chest, and beneath the skin something black moved slow and wrong, like a worm made of ink.

Years in a kitchen had shown Lin Fan burns, knife wounds, a fainting waiter, and one memorable cook who'd tried opening a can with a cleaver and lost.

This beat all of it by a wide margin.

It was still, technically, an injury. And an injury was an injury.

"Does anyone here know medicine?" he asked.

The five looked at each other.

One raised a hand. "I know how to stop someone from running."

"Not medicine."

Another raised his hand, hopeful. "I know how to make someone stop screaming."

"Somehow even less useful."

The leader pointed grimly at the black thread under the man's skin. "That is poison. A vicious one."

Lin Fan crouched at the crater's edge. He had no idea how he knew it, but the man was still alive — barely. His breathing was thin. One fist was clenched around a snapped piece of metal, and on his finger sat a storage ring, cracked clean through, its gemstone gone dark and dead.

Lin Fan eyed the ring.

"Does he have money on him?"

Five heads turned toward him at once.

"Owner. He may be dying."

"I'm aware. I'm checking if he can pay for treatment first."

The leader looked skyward, as if appealing directly to heaven. "The Heavenly trial shows no mercy."

Lin Fan ignored this entirely. "Help me move him."

The bandits piled into the crater and grabbed a limb each.

Nothing happened.

They pulled harder. The man didn't so much as twitch a finger.

The leader's face changed. "His body is suppressing our strength."

Lin Fan looked at five grown men straining like they were trying to move a locked iron cabinet, and had to ask. "Are you actually lifting, or just holding on?"

The one at the man's feet looked deeply offended. "We have moved many bodies in our time."

"That does not comfort me the way you think it does."

Lin Fan climbed down himself, grabbed the man by the collar of his torn robe, and dragged him out in one go.

The five bandits froze mid-motion.

Nobody explained anything. Lin Fan hauled him across the road and through the teahouse door while the bandits trailed after in total, reverent silence — as far as they were concerned, their owner had just moved a monster with one hand after five cultivators had failed with ten. As far as Lin Fan was concerned, the man was just heavy, the road was dusty, and there was clearly going to be a mopping situation.

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"On that table."

They laid him down with surprising gentleness for men who'd just been dragging him like a sack of grain.

Lin Fan washed his hands, cleaned the wounds with System water, and wiped away the blood. The black poison surged whenever his cloth touched it, then settled the instant it soaked in.

The man's breathing kept getting shallower.

Lin Fan's jaw tightened. He didn't know this man. Didn't know why he'd fallen out of the sky, didn't know if he was a hero or someone who'd just razed three villages before getting caught.

But there was a difference between a rude customer and a dying one, and Lin Fan knew which category this fell into. The rest could wait.

The System panel blinked to life.

[Emergency hospitality condition detected.][Tranquility Recovery Tea available.][Emergency serving issued.]

"...That's a recipe?"

The System, as always, declined to elaborate. A small packet simply appeared beside the kettle, labeled with three plain words.

Tranquility Recovery Tea.

Lin Fan opened it. The smell was soft, like rain hitting warm dirt after a long dry spell.

He brewed it fast, held the cup to the man's slack mouth, then remembered the obvious problem.

"Lift his head."

The leader obeyed so fast he nearly dropped his own sword.

Lin Fan poured it in slowly.

It worked instantly. The black poison froze mid-crawl. Torn skin knitted closed around the wounds. Breathing steadied out. A faint red glow moved under his skin, chasing the poison toward the surface like it was herding cattle.

Five men held their breath.

Lin Fan just watched the cup, mildly impressed. "Huh. That's useful."

The leader's knees actually buckled.

The man's body jerked once. A thin curl of black smoke lifted off his wounds and dissolved into the air. His fist finally loosened around the broken metal shard.

Lin Fan finished cleaning up and wrapped the wounds in bandages from the emergency box — bandages that stuck to the skin on their own and refused to budge no matter how hard the leader poked at one, apparently trying to test its craftsmanship.

Breathing: much better.

"Good," Lin Fan said, wiping his hands. "He'll live."

Five faces turned toward him, full of something close to awe.

The leader spoke low. "Owner. You have just saved someone who fell from the heavens themselves."

"I used tea and bandages."

"Tea that drove out a fatal poison."

"It's a recovery blend."

"Bandages even spiritual sense cannot detect."

"They're System bandages. From a box."

The leader nodded slowly, clearly having decided to believe whatever version of events sounded most impressive.

Lin Fan realized, a beat too late, that he hadn't actually explained anything useful. He pointed at the unconscious man instead. "When he wakes up — remind him this wasn't free."

Five heads bowed. "We will remember."

The man heard none of it. Somewhere in the dark, he'd felt warmth pour through him, felt the poison chewing through his foundation suddenly stop and retreat, felt wounds he'd been sure would kill him start, impossibly, to close.

He'd been ready to die. What he got instead was some strange, calm current moving through his meridians that wasn't spiritual energy, wasn't immortal energy, wasn't anything he had a name for.

He tried to open his eyes. The dark held firm.

Lin Fan pulled up a chair and sat, mostly to keep watch, partly to make sure the bandits didn't accidentally turn his teahouse into a funeral parlor out of sheer nervous energy.

The five stood in a rigid line nearby.

"Why are you standing like that."

"Guarding the senior."

"He's unconscious."

"That is precisely when he's most vulnerable."

"He is lying on a table in my teahouse. What exactly do you think is going to happen to him here?"

They all glanced toward the door as one. "His enemies may come."

Lin Fan eyed his crooked, dented sign outside. "If his enemies show up, they can start by fixing my roof."

The leader's eyes went wide with something like admiration. "Owner is already planning their punishment."

"I'm planning to bill them for property damage."

Nobody had a response to that.

Hours crawled by. Lin Fan brewed more tea for the bandits, counted the day's earnings twice out of boredom, and checked on the man every few minutes like he was babysitting an extremely expensive, extremely unconscious soup.

Near sunset, the man's eyes finally opened.

Dark red, both of them, like something out of a nightmare.

The whole room went still. Five hands flew to five weapons.

Lin Fan picked the broom back up, mostly on reflex at this point.

The man turned his head slowly, taking in the kettle, the bandits, the bandages wrapped around his own chest, and finally, Lin Fan himself.

"Who," he said, voice thin but ice-cold, "are you?"

Lin Fan lowered the broom. "The owner."

The man just stared.

Lin Fan gestured at the empty cup on the table. "You drank my recovery tea."

He looked down at it. "You saved me."

"That's the general idea, yes."

"Why?"

Lin Fan considered this for exactly one second. "You fell in front of my shop."

Something shifted in the man's eyes — deeper, unreadable.

"I can't exactly leave a customer bleeding out on the road," Lin Fan added. "Bad for reviews."

The man pushed himself upright. The bandits took a collective step back, like a wave pulling away from shore.

"Careful," Lin Fan warned, holding up a hand. "Don't move too fast. Also — that treatment was two Spirit Stones."

The man's face went completely blank.

Lin Fan recognized that particular blankness. He'd seen it on hundreds of faces over the years, usually right after a waiter set down the check.

"I have no money," the man said.

He touched the ruined ring on his finger, and it simply crumbled apart at the touch. No stones fell out. No medicine. No weapon. Nothing.

Lin Fan looked at the empty husk of a ring with real disappointment.

"You genuinely have nothing."

"My storage ring was destroyed."

"That's unfortunate for both of us."

The man started swinging his legs off the table, clearly intending to walk this off and skip town.

Lin Fan stepped directly in front of the door.

"You're not leaving."

The man glanced at the broom in Lin Fan's hands.

The five bandits glanced at the same broom.

Lin Fan looked down at it too, and privately admitted that at this rate the broom was doing more work than half his staff combined.

He hefted it once, thoughtfully, like a man weighing his options.

"Then," he said, "we need to talk about other ways to settle a bill."