SU TANG (素醣)

  Day 24, 4th Month of the Lunar Calendar, 6000th Year of the Yun Dynasty, Taishan Province, Tian’an Sect

  It was a chilly morning. The kind that gnawed through the fabric of your sleeves and made even your bones consider retirement. Where the rose-gold fingers of dawn usually stretched across the rooftops like a tired housewife, today’s sky had the darkness of a newly made bruise. The winter moon still hung overhead, stubborn and silvery, casting its thin light over the towering silhouette of the Imperial Alchemist Guild.

  Despite the unearthly hour, the Guild bustled like a disturbed hive. Alchemists in their lacquered aprons, maids with their careful steps, and eunuchs with unreadable faces moved in and out of the oakwood doors with practiced urgency. A few spared me a nod in passing, before hurrying off with trays of elixirs or bowls of steaming soup cradled in polished jade. Some carried lanterns. Some, incense pouches. Others hauled squat brass braziers that belched great plumes of medicinal smoke. The air reeked of ginseng, scorched orange peel, and regrettably jasmine, which had been ruined for me ever since I came to associate it with the Empress.

  Candles lined the walkways like watchful eyes, and glass chandeliers twinkled overhead with all the cheeriness of a noblewoman’s laugh at a funeral. I grabbed my name tag from the board and tied it neatly to the ribbon at my waist, then stepped into the workshop. Compared to the chaos outside, it felt like stepping into the eye of a storm.

  The alchemy hall had its own music. Not of voices but of instruments in motion. The stoves grumbled and gossiped among themselves as I passed, emitting the occasional hiss or splutter like they were making snide remarks. Kettles whistled in different tones, and the great central furnace hummed a low, steady tune that was equal parts comfort and warning. Rhythmic thwacking echoed in the background from cleavers chopping through root and rind with the precision of a surgeon and the boredom of a bureaucrat.

  Everything was in order.

  Everything was just as it should have been.

  But for reasons I couldn’t yet name, something felt off.

  I made my way to my usual bench and skimmed the waiting prescriptions. A fresh spread of ingredients—gingko, ginseng, jujube seeds, angelica, even some powdered cinnabar—lay in a neat pile. Soil still clung to the ones with roots, like they hadn’t quite agreed to be harvested. I picked up the top scroll, eyeing the familiar brushstrokes of a physician who had, in my opinion, an unhealthy obsession with ginkgo.

  It was going to be a full day.

  For hours, the room ticked forward like a perfectly tuned clock. No one spoke, save for brief, perfunctory exchanges with servants who came to collect what we’d made. By midday, the outer hall began to quiet. Likely the bulk of the staff had migrated toward the kitchens, where a different set of recipes—culinary arts—were used.

  Sweat pricked along my forehead. My stomach grumbled in rebellion. It was then, somewhere between a boiled centipede and an overly sentimental soup request, that I felt a weight in the front pocket of my apron.

  I reached in, hoping—naively—for a snack.

  Instead, my fingers closed around a pill canister.

  No wonder I’d been clinking all morning.

  I pulled it out. It was a delicate thing: bone-white porcelain painted with lacquer-yellow dragons curling protectively around the lid. A cold-repelling prescription. Chun Li had been unwell lately and I had been making her various prescriptions in hopes that she would recover. This was the latest one.

  Ah no wonder something felt amiss.

  The Head of the Alchemist Guild, Chun Li, hadn’t come by to check our stations. And in Taishan, you showed up to work unless you were dead, dying, or foolish enough to pretend to be either.

  Somehow, swayed by the monotony of work, none of us realised; or if we did, no one said a word.

  I told myself it was nothing. People got sick. People needed rest. And if I just happened to be the only one irrationally bothered by it—well, that was very on-brand for me.

  I only have prescription left anyway. I might as well have a break. With the canister in hand, I padded down the quiet corridor toward her office. I stopped in front of the thick cedar door, knocked firmly, and called:

  “Chun—zhǎngbèi? This is Su Tang. May I speak with you?”

  Silence.

  I cleared my throat and knocked again. Louder.

  Still nothing.

  I sighed, the way one does when they know they’re about to do something inadvisable but can’t quite stop themselves. “Look, I have something to give you. I’m coming in.”

  I pushed the door open.

  The room was empty. But not the sort of neat, curated emptiness Chun Li was known for. No. This emptiness had intent. It felt like walking into a performance that had just ended. No audience. No actors. Just smoke and questions.

  A gust of wind barrelled into me like a slap. I staggered back, blinking, eyes watering. Why was there wind?

  My gaze darted to the far wall.

  I see.

  The window had been blown open. Not pushed, not cracked—blown, as in exploded. The frame was charred black, like lightning had kissed it. The bookshelf beneath it had collapsed in on itself, its contents now ash and embers. A few scorched pages drifted through the air like lost spirits.

  I stood there, staring. The wind tugged at my sleeves like a whisper.

  “Excuse me.”

  I jumped so violently my heart nearly exited through my throat.

  Spinning around, I found a boy standing behind me. He was small, around Xiao Wu’s age but there was something off about his face. Too symmetrical. Too smooth. Timeless. The boy could’ve been much older, and I would’ve been none the wiser.

  The boy gave me a faintly polite nod. “Could you move away from the door?”

  I blinked. “Did—did you do this?”

  He tilted his head. “We burnt it earlier. Now we’re tasked with the cleanup. I thought you knew, since you’re—well, since you’re here.”

  No. I didn’t know. I definitely didn’t know. And I didn’t like how he said you’re here like it meant more than it did.

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  I swallowed, dread settling in my chest like a cold stone. “Who ordered this?”

  The boy’s big eyes widened innocently. “The Head of the Alchemist Guild. Chun Li.”

  ***

  Huh?

  I had returned to my station afterward in the most dutiful way possible, pretending I hadn’t just seen something that burrowed deep into the creaky basement of my already overstocked suspicion vault.

  Not until I had finished questioning the boy, of course.

  I’d asked him if he knew whose office this had been. He didn’t. Which made sense. If he had, he likely would’ve recognised how absolutely bizarre it was to be cleaning this room in particular.

  Then again, I wasn’t exactly what most people called normal, so I refrained from asking too many questions that could be turned back on me. Fortunately, the boy didn’t come across as a chatterbox.

  Still. I knew what I saw. And surely I wasn’t the only one. The boy had seen it too—if not the atmosphere, then at least the…event.

  Charred wood fragments and calcified ink stains decorated the wreckage of the room. As he swept at the remains, a scrap of paper burst from the remains like a ghost rising from its funeral pyre. It launched straight at the poor boy’s face, propelled by some phantom breeze or a particularly vengeful spirit with a sense of irony.

  The boy panicked and dropped everything—his cleaning equipment, composure and grace—and swatted at it as if it were a wasp set on stealing his soul.

  It was not a wasp.

  It was, in fact, a featherlight sheet of thin parchment, which twirled like an autumn leaf before settling on the floor with the quiet, delicate finality of something that should not have been there.

  Naturally, I picked it up.

  Naturally, he pretended not to watch me do it, cheeks pink from embarrassment and maybe something else too—curiosity? I wasn’t bothered to tell.

  His mannerisms reminded me of Xiao Wu. The way his fingers lingered over the debris longer than necessary with the curiosity of an innocent. Or maybe that’s what all little children do.

  After that, I’d made the highly rational decision to leave before anything else tried to fly at my face. But not before committing that slip of paper to memory.

  It had two characters.

  Well—one and a half. The second was smudged, blurred in the ink as though someone had hesitated mid-stroke, or worse, been interrupted. However, the phrase was clear enough to shine: 明鏡. míngjìng. A bright mirror. A common metaphor, sure, used in classical literature and poetry to mean clarity, purity, reflective truth. The kind of thing court officials scrawled on scrolls when they wanted to appear wise, or scholars hung on their walls to convince themselves their thoughts weren’t mud.

  But here?

  In a room that had clearly burned from the inside out?

  Where the bookshelves had been reduced to ash, and the remnants of history were now scattered like bone fragments?

  Why would anyone write míngjìng here?

  That was the puzzle.

  And unlike most puzzles, which had the courtesy to look like puzzles, this one had the audacity to act like a broom closet accident. Which meant someone had gone to considerable lengths to make sure it didn’t look like anything at all.

  Chun Li…where are you?

  I squeezed the pill canister in my pocket, feeling the familiar ridges of the engraved lid dig into my palm.

  It could’ve been nothing. A discarded piece from someone practicing calligraphy. Maybe someone with aspirations of poetic greatness and extremely poor taste in fire safety.

  But something in me itched. Something deep.

  Call it instinct. Or too many years breathing in incense smoke and overheard secrets.

  You didn’t just burn your own study. You didn’t just assign a clean-up team to sneak into your room and deal with the remains.

  And you certainly didn’t write míngjìng unless you wanted someone, someday, to look.

  No. I was smelling something, all right.

  And it wasn’t the scorched cedar or the bitter medicine clinging to my sleeves.

  ***

  Usually, I would’ve waited for Chun Li to dismiss us. That was protocol, and I was a big fan of protocol. Not really.

  But Chun Li, evidently, had vanished into the ether, and I wasn’t going to stand around like a decorative vase hoping for her return. Since I was finished, and my questions with the boy had yielded all the insight I could squeeze, I made my way back to the Crown Prince’s manor, where more delights awaited me. By delights, I mean chores. Menial tasks. Still, familiarity had its comforts.

  Gossip ran freely in the palace, but not in the Crown Prince’s manor. So, it was nothing short of fishy to find news passing faster than fire through dry grass when I returned.

  As my cover, I swept the floor with all the enthusiasm of a wilting turnip, whilst casually drifting closer to a group of servants clustered like overfed pigeons in the marble corridor. They whispered urgently, their voices buzzing and overlapping like a hive drunk on fermented honey.

  “Have you heard? Zhao—”

  “The Empress ordered—”

  “—can’t believe—”

  “What a poor boy.”

  “Oh yes, that little kid—”

  “What was his name?”

  Their words began to swirl together, gradually coalescing into a single current of thought. And like all rivers in this court, it flowed toward scandal.

  “How would we know? He’s just another alchemist.”

  “Ughhh, alchemists. They think they’re so good.”

  “But he is a kid.”

  “Yeah, but he screwed up. There’s no saving him.”

  “Oh, it’s Su Tang.”

  Ah. Fantastic.

  An army of eyes swung toward me in synchronised dread, like I was a ghost who’d just passed through their tea circle. My sharp awareness had slipped at exactly the wrong moment. Somehow, I’d let my feet carry me until I was practically lounging against the marble column beside them.

  I glanced down, swept at some very imaginary dust with great purpose, and gave them the friendliest grimace I could manage.

  “Oh, don’t mind me.”

  Their whispers erupted like water spilled on hot metal—sizzling, hissing, escaping control.

  “Alchemist—”

  “It’s her—”

  “Xiao Wu.”

  Wait. Xiao Wu?

  My stomach dropped. I felt the blood drain from my face, pooling somewhere deep behind my knees. Without thinking, I reached out and grabbed the nearest servant. She recoiled like I’d spat poison on her, brushing me off as if my hands were nothing more than lint. The others shrank back, their gazes wary, half-terrified and half-thrilled.

  “Who were you talking about?” I demanded, eyes locked on the girl like I could dig the answer out of her brain if I just stared hard enough.

  She gave me the kind of look reserved for dust bunnies. She folded her arms and leaned back with leisurely contempt, unbothered by my simmering glare.

  “Just tell her,” said one of the others reluctantly. Everyone knew Xiao Wu. And everyone knew what he was to me. My little brother, my shadow, my one living tether to something that could still be called family.

  Don’t you dare touch him. Don’t you even breathe on him.

  “It’s not like she can do anything anyway,” the girl sniffed. I recognised her now. One of Zhao Lili’s court-bred sycophants. Loyal in the way weeds are loyal to garden rot. How did she get in here?

  She tilted her head and then said, all too pleased with herself, “Your little brother thought it would be funny to prank one of the noble ladies. He made a fake beautifying pill and handed it off like it was a divine gift. Unfortunately for him, My Lady ended up being the lucky recipient.”

  A spark went off behind my eyes.

  The girl went on, describing, in vivid, almost lyrical detail, the welts and rashes that supposedly bloomed across Zhao Lili’s pristine face, like she was reciting a tragic ballad about a noblewoman’s cosmetic downfall. Her voice curled like incense smoke, relishing each word.

  The other servants leaned in, drinking it up, enraptured by the drama like theatregoers at the front row of an execution.

  “That silly boy,” she sighed theatrically, hand over heart. “Of course, My Lady would never let it go. Who would?”

  I cut in. “Where is he?”

  There was a beat. A pause laced with venom.

  Then, she smiled. Not a kind smile. Not even a victorious one. No, this was the smile of someone who had waited for her moment in the sun and now intended to eclipse yours.

  “Where else? Getting the beating his arse deserves.”