This pavilion stood ten zhang high and had two stories; from a distance it was the very shape of a great gourd—no doubt the inspiration of 'chief designer' Li Changshou came straight from Jiu Jiu's companion treasure, the Evil-Slaying Ruyi Sword.
—That is, that great gourd that could swell or shrink and carry people through the sky.
The pavilion stood within a pool of water, and directly some eighty zhang before its gate sat a well, with the pool and the well connected by a channel beneath. Seen from above, a taiji pattern a hundred zhang across was embedded in the woods: the yin-yang fish were the pool, and the pavilion and the well were the two eyes. This was a feng-shui array, able to steady fortune and repel evil fortune; and as the Du Xian Sect belonged to the Human-Reliance lineage, the yin-yang taiji diagram carried its own weight of significance.
Landing before the pavilion and raising his eyes, one could see a wooden placard bearing five large characters: "Xiaoqiong Peak Pill Pavilion". Look closer, and beneath the placard ran two vertical lines of smaller script: "With the sanction of the Hundred Mortal Affairs Hall, a pill-refining pavilion is hereby permitted."
In plain words, this was a licensed, regulation building!
Stepping through the main door, one met a wooden screen, and behind it stood the grand cauldron, six zhang tall.
The cauldron took up a great deal of room, wide below and narrower above, cast from great slabs of purple gold and engraved with auspicious clouds and a hundred herbs; it fairly bristled with prohibitions. Only, the upper half of the cauldron was covered in patch upon patch, giving it a somewhat shabby air.
It had once been a discarded cauldron—only its upper half had blown apart—and Li Changshou had greased a connection through the Spirit Fish and bartered it back from the Hundred Mortal Affairs Hall, then spent half a year mending it without cease until it could serve again. The cauldron had three feet, two ears, and a round, bulging belly, with four 'windows' shaped like yin-yang fish opened in its sides; the main prohibitions below, the Flame-Gathering Array and the Qi-Evening Array, were all perfectly intact.
After Li Changshou's repairs, this cauldron's power fell short of the original unbroken one by only some three-tenths.
And what was rarer still, getting hold of the thing had cost him almost nothing. The thick purple gold could by itself press down the potency of the vast run of spirit medicines, and so the cauldron had become the most valuable treasure on Xiaoqiong Peak.
The little pavilion had been raised up around the cauldron. By its side stood several rows of racks, laden with jade bottles great and small, gourds, and jade boxes, in which reposed no few of the spirit pills this very cauldron had refined—ordinary grades, for the most part.
Blue Ling'e kept the place in perfect order, and this junior sister was at present shut away cultivating, working hard to lift her own realm.
When Jiu Jiu hopped in from outside, Li Changshou, in a light-blue long robe, stood by the cauldron, a dozen or so pale-gold pills hovering in the palm of his hand as he savored the lesson of the refining just done.
"Little Changshou, brewed up some new pills, have you?" Jiu Jiu crowded in, brimming with curiosity.
"Would Aunt taste one? Freshly made Heart-Clearing Focus Pills, with the flavor a touch improved; the efficacy should be decent enough too."
Li Changshou asked idly, and two of the spirit pills drifted up to float before Jiu Jiu, who popped them straight into her mouth, crunched them down, and soon let out a belch, exhaling a puff of fresh fragrance.
"So sweet—" Jiu Jiu held out her right hand. "A few more!"
Li Changshou casually summoned a white-jade porcelain bottle, sealed the pills away in it, and delivered the bottle into Jiu Jiu's hand.
Jiu Jiu's little hand still did not withdraw. "This month's Immortal Drunkenness and Beauty's Charm!"
"Don't worry, I wouldn't forget Aunt."
Li Changshou gave a light laugh, and honestly handed over two palm-sized jade pots.
Jiu Jiu opened one at once and breathed in its scent, letting out a most satisfied sigh.
"Nicely done. Changshou's skill at refining pills now runs neck and neck with his skill at brewing wine. Need me to do anything today? These two months you've not built any arrays; I can't go on taking and eating at your place for nothing."
"No need today," Li Changshou said with a smile. "Twenty days from now I mean to set the cauldron to refining an immortal pill of no small difficulty, and I'd ask Aunt to come and lend a hand."
Jiu Jiu cheerfully slapped her chest, and the short hemp sleeves gave a little sway.
"No problem at all! Leave it to me! Twenty days from now, is it?"
"Indeed, twenty days from now," Li Changshou said gravely. "This pill I refine is of the greatest importance to your disciple, and once I begin the preparations, there's no stopping. If Aunt should find herself without leisure then, pray do let me know in good time. And also—would Aunt mind keeping the matter secret for me?"
"What pill is it, so mysterious-like?"
"A venomous pill by the name of Immortal-Dissolving Pill."
Jiu Jiu was startled too. "The Immortal-Dissolving Pill? Isn't that said to be able to poison a True Immortal to death? I think I heard the Fifth Senior Brother mention it long ago. Whatever are you brewing that for?"
Li Changshou smiled. "Poison is but one kind of medicinal property, as dishes have their sour, sweet, spicy. A venomous pill can serve to kill, but it can also serve to save lives. Set Aunt's heart at ease: your disciple has no bitter enemies, loves the ascetic life of the Dao, and would not do aught that harms heaven or man. Should the Immortal-Dissolving Pill come out right, your disciple will give over a year's share of Beauty's Charm as thanks, and it will be over and above our agreement."
"Done!"
Jiu Jiu made a fist and thrust it before Li Changshou, who raised his own and bumped hers lightly, and Jiu Jiu's face split into a happy grin.
"I'll be over again in twenty days, then."
"Aunt, go safely."
Amid the laughter, Jiu Jiu seated herself on the great gourd and soared aloft, flying into the sky above Xiaoqiong Peak. She glanced back and saw thin mists rise over the very wood she had just left; in almost a blink, the mists enveloped the whole forest, but a breeze passing over swept the white mist clean away.
Within thirty li the dense woods seemed no different from before, yet Jiu Jiu knew well that layer upon layer of arrays within had already begun to turn.
"I can bring the Seventh and Eighth to tease around here another time, then."
Jiu Jiu murmured to herself, but then she thought of Li Changshou's perpetually unblinking, straight-faced features. "Still, I'd best have a proper word with that fellow first, or he'll go off declaiming one of his big lectures."
Shaking her head, Jiu Jiu rode the gourd and tore off through the air, soon returning to the rear mountain of Potian Peak, where she flew into layer on layer of overlapping arrays and vanished from sight.
That was the place where the nine disciples of the Venerable Wangqing sequestered themselves to cultivate, a stretch of connected pavilion buildings laid out along the mountain's contour. Though the 'Nine Immortals of Wine' were but one 'side-branch' of the Potian Peak lineage, the lowest among them and the most recently enrolled—Jiu Jiu herself—was a True Immortal, so their keep was not to be compared with the three of Qi Yuan's household.
Not only was there an excellent qi-gathering array here, there were many errand disciples as well, and around several of the pavilions were even guardian arrays forbidden by the sect rules—in truth a very ideal place to cultivate.
Jiu Jiu was the youngest, much doted on by elder senior brothers and sisters, and her residence sat close to Jiu Wu's, nestled vaguely in the protective ring of the other siblings' dwellings. When Jiu Jiu sequestered herself, the others naturally formed a guard about her.
Under the covert gazes of a few errand disciples, Jiu Jiu flew back to her pavilion on her own, kicked off her cloth shoes, and hopped barefoot onto the bed carved from green jade, hugging the two jade pots she had just received and giggling to herself in little bursts...
"Which one should I drink first this time, you, or you? Little Shoushou's really quite something, hmm, to have made such good stuff. The three years are almost through, and the 'Ganges River Old White Liquor' he buried underground is about ready to come up too—when it does, I'm drinking my fill! Sip—today I'll lavish my favor on Beauty's Charm, I will."
"Cough! Cough, cough!"
Outside the pavilion, a short Daoist tall only five chi coughed a few times. Jiu Jiu, sprawled on the bed, clapped a hand over the two jade pots, glaring warily out; on seeing who it was, she relaxed a little.
"Fifth Senior Brother, you just come on in; I haven't even activated the arrays."
"It's only that I was just scolded by the eldest senior sister, and acquaintances though we are, we should still mind propriety," Jiu Wu said with a laugh, stepping forward two paces, and then stopping short.
There was truly nowhere to put his feet.
Looking at the wine jars, the short robes, the belly-bands strewn about... Jiu Wu slapped his forehead and complained: "Little Jiu, you've been around eight or nine hundred years; can't you even tidy a room?"
Jiu Jiu sniffed a few times and waved a hand. "There's no strange smell to it, so it's fine."
She tucked the jade pots carelessly into her storage treasure and sat up cross-legged on the bed. On the floor, Jiu Wu hacked a hard path through the litter, settled himself by the low table, and pondered with a couple of hums.
"You know, Jiu Jiu, you've been running to Xiaoqiong Peak a sight too often lately," Jiu Wu said with a smile. "Er, what is it you do over there?"
"Play, of course—what else would it be?" Jiu Jiu blinked. "Fifth Senior Brother, why d'you suddenly ask that?"
"Nothing, nothing," Jiu Wu waved his hand again and again, then scratched his head, remembering the errand several of his senior sisters and junior sisters had laid upon him, and found for the moment that he couldn't quite get the words out.
How was he to say it?
He could hardly just come out and ask his junior sister outright whether she'd taken a fancy to somebody on Xiaoqiong Peak, could he?
Jiu Wu rallied himself. "Cough! I recall, in your first decades after coming into the sect, you and Junior Brother Qi Yuan of Xiaoqiong Peak kept fairly close."
"That's so," Jiu Jiu nodded. "Elder Brother Qi Yuan looked after me quite a lot back then."
Jiu Wu hesitated. "And you—did you...?"
Jiu Jiu frowned. "Fifth Senior Brother, what's gotten into you today, going all hem-haw over everything."
"I, I just... ah!"
Jiu Wu stamped his foot. "Then this humble Daoist will ask it outright! Lately—lately you've been dashing over to Xiaoqiong Peak every day! Even under sentence of no liquor, you keep up all this energy day after day! Your several junior-senior sisters got to wondering, is it that... hm, is it that..."
"Is what?"
"You!" "Me?" Jiu Jiu frowned hard, her eyes full of bafflement.
Jiu Wu's breath climbed to the very top of his throat; he steeled his Dao-heart, and turned it into a single interrogative cry:
"Is it that you! You're about to break through, or something...?"
"How could a breakthrough come so easily," Jiu Jiu rolled her eyes. "Tell the senior sisters not to worry—if I run into a bottleneck I'll come and ask the lot of you, I won't be so rash as to charge the gate on my own."
"Good, good. Then I'll be on my way; go on with your cultivation."
Jiu Wu fled in disarray, rose and hastened to the door, then turned his head to add one more thing: "Ah, right, Little Jiu—the two clutches of those spiders you brought back from Xiaoqiong Peak, mine got bred to death. Ask that junior nephew Changshou if he has any more, and I'll swap him treasures and pills for them."
"Hm, got it. I'll ask for you next time I'm over."
Jiu Wu smiled at that.
Tsk—ever since two years ago, when Jiu Jiu had brought back a clutch of Three-Headed Pupil Spiders, he'd gotten hold of that spider-silk that could view things across a distance, and his life had grown a great deal more interesting ever since.
Above all, laying that spider-silk beside the pool where his own Dao-companion bathed—the sight of that...
"Tsk, tsk." Jiu Wu bowed his head and hurried off, all wind at his tread.
"Why is the Fifth Senior Brother so strange today; whatever—must have quarreled with the Fourth Senior Sister again."
Jiu Jiu shook her head, then activated the arrays outside the pavilion, lay down on the bed, took out the two jade pots, and sank back into her happy dilemma. ...
On Xiaoqiong Peak, in the pill pavilion.
Li Changshou stood before the cauldron, the herbs for the next batch of pills already laid in. He turned and walked toward the cushion on the left.
In his left hand he held a jade tablet, carefully sensing the shifts running through the great array in every quarter; only after thrice confirming there was no danger did he casually activate the cauldron's prohibitions, and a few tongues of flame leapt up inside the cauldron.
And he sat himself down toward the cushion left of the cauldron—but in lowering himself to sit, a wisp of green smoke burst about him with a poof, and his form vanished in that same instant, leaving behind only a paper figure.
Within the green smoke the paper figure turned, in the blink of an eye, into a likeness of Li Changshou; and that same wisp of green smoke swiftly seeped into the small aperture beneath the cushion and vanished from sight.
The Illusion-Transformation Technique—Old Dao Qi Yuan's 'signature move.' As his eldest disciple, Li Changshou naturally had long since mastered it.
In fact, he could presently transform into several... times more things than his master could.