The shortest way from my room to the library ran along the back of the warrior quarter, behind a high wall with plum trees leaning over it, and that was where I heard the Da Shixiong’s voice for the first time.

I didn’t know it was his at first. I was walking fast with four overdue books under my arm, thinking about the beds in the pocket, when voices came over the wall a few paces ahead of me and I slowed without deciding to. Two men, by the sound of it, walking the same way I was on the other side.

“Da Shixiong, since the Xiao Shimei likes you so much, why do you keep holding her off like that?”

The other man didn’t answer.

The first one laughed, a little uneasily. “All right, all right. It’s not my business. But this business of yours is. You’re really going after that thing yourself? At least take Zhou Peng with you. If the Grand Master finds out you went alone—”

“Enough.”

It was one word. It wasn’t even said loudly. But it was cold the whole way through, like a stone taken out of a river in winter, and it shut the other man up completely. Their footsteps went on together for a while and then turned off somewhere I couldn’t follow.

I stood under the plum trees until I couldn’t hear them at all. Then I went on to the library, a good deal more quietly than before. Whatever that thing was, it was dangerous enough that a senior disciple begged him not to go alone, and private enough that one word ended the conversation. None of that was any concern of mine. I told myself so twice on the library steps.

The old man took my overdue books without comment and gave me two new ones. One was a herbal with coloured drawings of everything up to level six. The other was a thin, practical manual called First Refinings, which I had picked because its spine was the most worn on the shelf. If enough probationers had thumbed it to pieces, it was the one that worked.

That morning Fang ChenYue took the five of us out of the Hall of Magic Herbs and down a passage into a room cut out of the mountain itself.

It was cool and dim, with a row of stone platforms along one wall. On each platform stood a cauldron of black metal about the size of a cooking pot, squat, three-legged, with a lid. Beside each was a plain wooden table. Fang ChenYue told us to pick one. I hung back. The others took the four nearest the door and left me the last one, in the corner, where the light was worst.

That suited me too.

“These will refine level-one and level-two pills,” Fang ChenYue said. “Level three needs a stronger vessel. Most of you will change cauldrons at every stage of your lives, unless you’re lucky enough to start with a good one.” He tapped the lid of the nearest. “Look at the top.”

There were three small openings in the lid, each about the width of my little finger, set in a triangle.

“You don’t light a fire,” he said. “You use your soul. Gather the force we woke yesterday, divide it into three equal parts, and send one down each opening. The force does the work inside: it breaks the herbs down, draws the essence out, burns off the rest. The better your control, the cleaner the pill.” He looked along the row of us. “Today you aren’t refining anything. Today you’re learning to divide your soul into three without blowing the lid off.”

Then he left us with a disciple called Wu, who was younger than him and much less talkative, and who sat on a stool by the door with his arms folded and watched us as though we were a pot he expected to boil over.

Zhou went first. He shut his eyes, screwed up his face and pushed.

The cauldron jumped half a foot off its platform with a bang like a slammed door and came down on its side, rocking. Zhou sat down hard on the floor with his mouth open. Wu got up without any sign of surprise, set the cauldron upright and said a few short, quiet things to him about patience. All four of us leaned in to hear.

I turned back to my own cauldron, shut my eyes and looked for the place the Soul Herb had opened.

It was there, behind my eyes, as plain as a lamp in a dark room. When I reached for it, it came: a pale, soft brightness, round as a ball of wool, faintly luminous, as if someone had wound moonlight into a skein. It was mine. I could feel its edges as plainly as my own tongue in my mouth.

Dividing it was not difficult. That was what frightened me.

I could feel exactly how to do it. Thirds, even ones, as cleanly as I’d once split a tablet along its score line. If I did it now, on the first try, while Zhou was still sitting on the floor and Ma was red-faced with effort two cauldrons down, every head in the room would turn.

So I split it unevenly on purpose: a fat third, a thin third, a middling one. I sent all three down the openings at once.

The cauldron coughed. There was no other word for it. The lid gave a single sharp rattle, a puff of grey dust shot out of the left-hand opening, and my soul force came snapping back into me so hard that my eyes watered.

I heard Ma snort.

When I opened my eyes Zhou had got up off the floor and was looking at me with something close to relief. Ma didn’t bother hiding his smirk. Even the yellow-aura boy, who’d done nothing yet, looked a little brighter. I lowered my head as if I was ashamed and let them enjoy it. A small humiliation is cheap. It’s the large successes that cost you.

I counted to fifty, slowly, as a nervous girl would. Then I tried again.

This time I divided it properly. Three equal parts, smooth as cream, each one sliding down its opening as easily as water down a drain. Inside, the cauldron was cold, colder than the stone room, and dark. My soul force touched the walls and I could feel them: black metal, dense and hard, flecked here and there with something that glinted, a hollow space at the centre waiting to be filled. I could see it without eyes. I moved my soul force around that hollow once, gently, like a hand feeling round the inside of a cup, and brought it home.

When I looked up, the stone room was quiet.

Wu was watching me from his stool with his arms unfolded. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he gave me a short nod.

“Second try,” he said. “Not bad. Da Shixiong managed it on his first.”

“I’m not the Da Shixiong,” I said humbly.

The smirks around the room eased. Second try was good, but second try was human. Zhou had managed it on his fourth by the end of the morning and Ma on his sixth, and by then they’d had time to decide I was clever but not alarming, which was exactly the opinion I wanted them to hold.

Wu, though, came over at the end of the session and set six bundles of herbs on my table instead of the three he gave the others.

“You can try a real refining this afternoon,” he said. “If you like.”

I liked.

The pill I made that afternoon was the Dispelling Pill, the most basic thing in First Refinings: Contusion herb, Life Root and Peaceful Mind Flower, extracted, combined and pressed into a small dull-green ball that would clear a mild poison from the blood. Practitioners used it after snakebites and bad wine. I had read the procedure three times the night before and my hands were still slick with sweat when I started.

I wasn’t going to fail at this one, on purpose or otherwise. A cauldron that coughed during a lesson cost nothing but a little pride. A pill that cracked cost three herbs burned to ash, and half of every pill that came out whole would be mine to sell.

The extraction was the strange part. I’d been doing it with solvents and heat in my head for two days, and the reality was nothing like that. The soul force went down into the cauldron and wrapped around the herb, and then it pulled, and I could feel the essence come away from the fibre like juice from a crushed leaf, bright and slippery. Everything else stayed behind as a grey residue that the soul force then had to burn. If I didn’t burn it all, whatever was left went into the pill.

My first Dispelling Pill came out lumpy and pale, flecked with grey. Low grade. Usable.

My second was a little better. By my tenth I could feel where the impurity hid, clinging to the essence in a thin film, and I’d started burning it more slowly and more thoroughly. By the end of the afternoon I had forty pills on the table in front of me, all of them whole. None of them had cracked or crumbled or turned to ash.

The disciple who kept the records for the stone room was a thin middle-aged man in a grey robe whom everyone called Zhao-shishu. Half of Capital Peak seemed to be called Zhao. He counted my forty pills twice and wrote the number in a ledger.

“First day?”

“Yes, shishu.”

“All forty whole.” He looked at me over the top of the ledger. “That’s a good start. The sect takes half. The rest are yours.”

I’d known that rule since the morning. It still stung to watch him sweep twenty of my pills into a jar with a hundred others and set it on a shelf.

The next day I made ninety. I’d learned a good deal overnight, mostly by lying in the dark going over the extraction in my head, and my hands had stopped sweating. Ninety pills, every one of them whole. When I brought them to the ledger Zhao-shishu didn’t say anything at first. He counted them twice, then a third time, slowly, and wrote the number down. Then he reached under his table and brought out a small cloth pouch drawn shut with a cord.

“Every disciple gets one of these,” he said. “Da Shixiong should have given you yours. It holds about as much as a storeroom, so don’t try to put a horse in it.”

A magic bag. I’d read about them, a little pocket of space sewn into cloth, nothing like my pocket but the same idea. I thanked him, put my forty-five pills into it, and was gratified to feel the bag weigh nothing at all.

“Shishu,” I said. “May I ask for a hundred portions of level-one herbs? Half for Dispelling and half for Accumulate Energy. And may I sign out one of the cauldrons, to practise in my room in the evenings?”

He didn’t look surprised. “The keen ones always ask,” he said, and wrote it down. “Bring it back clean.” Then he looked at me for a moment longer than he needed to, the ledger open in front of him, his pen hovering. “Ninety for ninety on your second day,” he said. “Don’t wear yourself out.”

“No, shishu.”

He was right to look. Ninety whole pills on a second day wasn’t normal, and I’d known it while I was making them. I could have cracked a few on purpose and walked out looking like everyone else. But every cracked pill was herbs turned to ash, and I would rather be stared at than poor.

I also liked it, more than was sensible. A hundred and thirty pills in two days and not one of them cracked. I couldn’t see why I would ever crack one.

The cauldron wouldn’t fit in the bag with the herbs, so I carried it back to my room in my arms like a baby. I set it on the table and sat looking at it until it was dark enough that nobody would come knocking.

There was something wrong with how the sect made pills. It had been bothering me since the afternoon before, and I’d finally worked out what.

Every book I’d read said the same thing about risk. Every pill carried some, because no mage could burn away every impurity, and a pill’s risk could never be brought below about fifteen parts in a hundred. That was simply the floor. Everyone accepted it. A good mage got close to it. Nobody went under.

But risk was impurity, and impurity was just residue. In my old life we’d had a word for what you did when one pass didn’t get a compound clean enough. You did it again.

That night I extracted the essence from a Contusion herb the ordinary way, burned off what I could, and then, instead of moving on, I sent my soul force back into the essence and burned it again. A thin film came off it that I hadn’t been able to feel the first time. I tried a third pass, and it was like wringing a cloth that was already nearly dry: slow, and harder than the two before it put together. When I reached for a fourth, there was nothing in me to reach with. I could still feel impurity in the essence, a faint film I couldn’t get a grip on, and my soul force ached like a swimmer’s arms on the last lap.

The pill that came out of that cauldron was a shade deeper green than the ones I’d made that afternoon, and smoother, with none of the grey flecks. On its own it looked like any other Dispelling Pill. I had to set the two side by side under the candle before I could be sure of the difference, which suited me perfectly.

I made eleven more like it before my soul force gave out completely.

It went all at once, like a lamp running out of oil. One moment I was holding the force in thirds over the openings, and the next there was nothing there to hold, and the room tipped sideways and my head hit the table hard enough to rattle the cauldron’s lid. I lay there with my cheek on the wood and a headache like a nail through my temples, and it occurred to me, with great clarity, that I’d been an idiot.

Then it occurred to me that I had a lake.

I had planned to test smaller doses anyway. This was as good a time as any. I lit a fresh stick of incense from the candle, wedged it upright in a crack in the table and watched the first thread of smoke go up. Then I went into the pocket with my cup, filled it to the brim from the shallows, and drank it, cold, every drop, before I came back out and sat on the bed with my eyes on the incense.

The headache eased before I’d counted a hundred breaths. Before the incense had burned down by a finger’s width, most of my soul force was back. It swelled slowly behind my eyes like water filling a cistern. When the stick had burned a third of the way, it was full.

The next night I drained myself on purpose, lit another stick and drank only half a cup. It took more than twice as long. Not a straight line, then, but close enough to plan around. I wrote both results in the log.

On the third night I did the same with Accumulate Energy: Rock Jasmine, Rabdosia and Korean Mint, the pill practitioners took to force their meridians open. The books called it crude and risky, and said most people avoided it unless they had no choice. That was exactly why I wanted it. One product would tell me what one kind of buyer would pay; two would tell me which kind wanted me more. On the counter where I’d trained, the best seller had never once been the one anybody predicted.

Those twelve clean pills went into a separate fold of the magic bag. They were the ones I’d keep. When I handed in my day’s work to Zhao-shishu after that, it would be good, honest, ordinary pills, low grade like everyone else’s, and they’d go into his jar and nobody would ever think twice about them. The ones that actually mattered were going down the mountain with me.

I wasn’t proud of it. I did it anyway.

The cream was harder.

I’d been thinking about it since I first saw the Contusion herb in the garden: something a woman could rub into a scar or a bruise, something she’d buy again because it worked and keep buying because it was pleasant to use. It didn’t need soul force. It needed what any first-year compounding student could have told you: an active ingredient, a base to carry it, and a way to stop the whole thing spoiling.

The active ingredient was easy. Level-one herbs were mine without limit, and I took my Contusion bundles from the Hall of Magic Herbs as openly as anyone. The base was harder. There was no shop on the mountain for beeswax or almond oil. In the end I went down to the canteen kitchen after the evening meal and offered to scrub pots for the cook, a vast red-faced woman with arms like hams, who stared at me as though I’d offered to sweep the sky. Three hours later I came away with a bowl of rendered pork fat, a stub of tallow candle and burnt fingers.

The first batch was a disaster.

I chopped the Contusion herb fine and steeped it in water, then warmed the water and fat together in a bowl over the candle and beat them with a spoon until they turned pale and thick. It looked like cream. It smelled faintly green. I scraped it into a pill bottle and went to bed pleased with myself. In the morning I opened the bottle and nearly dropped it. The mixture had split into a greasy yellow layer floating on cloudy water. The whole thing smelled like a butcher’s drain on a hot day.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the bottle held at arm’s length and said a word my mother would not have approved of.

Then I took out the log and worked it through. Water and fat don’t stay together without something to bind them. Water left in fat rots it. I’d known both of those things since I was nineteen; I’d simply been too excited to think.

The second batch had no water in it at all. I warmed the fat gently, far below spitting, put the chopped herb straight into it and let it steep for the length of a whole stick of incense, until the fat had turned faintly green and the leaves had gone dark and limp. I strained it through a fold of my old underskirt, which I didn’t need, and stirred in shavings from the tallow stub to firm it as it cooled. I added a few crushed petals of Peaceful Mind Flower at the end, because the fat on its own smelled like dinner and nobody wants their face to smell like dinner.

It set, overnight, into a soft green-white salve with a clean, faintly floral scent.

I had a beautiful bruise on my left hip from the morning I’d fallen off the stool after eating the Soul Herb, and a smaller twin on my right knee from the same fall. I rubbed the salve into the hip twice a day and left the knee alone. After three days the hip was yellow at the edges and fading. The knee was still purple.

It wasn’t magic. It was a decent salve made with a good herb, the sort of thing my grandmother might have kept in a jar by the stove. But it worked, it smelled nice and it hadn’t gone off, and that put it ahead of half the things in my old local chemist.

I was not going to sell it as Contusion herb in pork fat.

I sat with the log on my knee for a long time trying to think of a name that a girl of sixteen would want to own and a woman of sixty wouldn’t be embarrassed to ask for. Something with dew in it, I decided, because dew was clean and new and came for free. Something with jade, because everyone on this mountain wanted jade. In the end I wrote Jade Dew Balm in the margin and underlined it, and liked it better every time I looked at it.

Four days after my first refining, I went to Wu after the morning session and asked for permission to go down the mountain.

He looked at me with his arms folded. “Already?”

“I need to buy herbs, shixiong. And a few things for my room.”

He thought about it, then nodded. “There’s a group going down to He Ping the day after tomorrow, with Mo Gu-shishu from Heaven Peak. You can go with them. Be back by dark the following day.” He paused. “Don’t spend everything at the first stall you see.”

“No, shixiong.”

That night I sat cross-legged on my bed with the magic bag open beside me and the log on my knee and did my accounts, in the cramped script nobody here could read.

Day 10.

Pills, L1, ordinary (my half to date): Dispelling × 65, Acc. Energy × 20. Distilled ×3 (separate fold): Dispelling × 24, Acc. Energy × 20. Which sells? Risk est. ~10% (book floor: 15%). Do not hand in. 4th pass: can’t. Impurity still there. Limit = me, or the herb?

LW, oral: 1 cup = full soul-force recovery in ⅓ incense stick. ½ cup = > 2× as long. Not linear. Keep a cup in the bag.

Balm, batch 1: failed (emulsion split; rancid by morning. Water + fat = rot. Idiot.)

Balm, batch 2: no water, low heat, steeped 1 stick, tallow to set, Peaceful Mind for scent. Stable 3 days. Hip bruise (treated) fading at day 3; knee (untreated) not. Works. No LW yet.

Name: JADE DEW BALM. Containers: borrowed pill bottles × 2. Need: jars.

Body: underweight, improving. No menses since arrival. Original’s cycle unknown. Monitor.

Money: 0. Plan: sell ordinary pills in town for seed money. Hold distilled pills: find who pays most first. Test balm on one shop.

He Ping, day after tomorrow.