Just as Han Li had begun to suppose that this wet, overcast stretch of weather would linger on for days yet, the sun at last hauled itself back into the sky, and the skies cleared.
It had been the better part of a month since he had stumbled upon the secret of the green liquid, and he had long since grown impatient with the waiting. On the very night the weather finally turned fair, he beheld once more the very wonder that had unfolded before his eyes four years past—countless points of light, crowded thick about the little bottle until they gathered into one great, shimmering mass.
The instant Han Li laid eyes upon that marvel, the great stone perched uneasily above his heart at last sank back into place. It could now be all but taken for granted that the small bottle was no single-use thing destined to be spent and cast aside, but a strange treasure that might be drawn upon again and again.
He passed another seven days of waiting, and then at last another droplet of green liquid welled up within the bottle. Though his confidence had long stood at eight or nine parts out of ten, when Han Li saw that emerald-green drop, joy still surged through him beyond all measure. Here was proof that he would henceforth command an unending stream of rare herbs, and need never again vex himself with want.
For he knew well that the worth of a medicine plant was judged, by and large, upon its age. The longer a herb had grown, the greater its potency; and the older a plant was, the harder it became to lay hands upon—growing as such things did in deep forests and on dizzying cliffsides, where he who sought them must risk his very neck.
To be sure, some apothecaries and physicians had taken to cultivating herbs of their own, but these were only the common sorts—things that could be put to use after a few short years. Few folk were fool enough to plant what would not serve them for a decade or more.
Yet there were always the great and wealthy houses, those who feared the unforeseeable and so ordered herbs of rare quality raised especially for them, against the hour of crisis when a life might hang in the balance. Such herbs could yield little of worth until a prodigious stretch of years had passed over them; for anything common, men of such means could pick up for a trifle. And since these houses could pass their wealth from generation to generation, they cared little how long their plantings took to ripen. Thus were these herbs, more often than not, the very finest—some demanding a full century of tending—or else rare solitary specimens found nowhere else in the world.
Whenever some wild treasure of a herb made its brief, dazzling appearance upon the market, it was almost always swept up by these same great houses, and so the price of rare medicinal plants climbed higher and higher, until a buyer could scarce find one offered at any price.
Han Li held no great hopes for the outcome of Doctor Mo's expedition. Whatever the old man went forth to seek, he guessed the returns would be meager enough. But he himself need no longer vex over such matters; for now that he held this bottle, how many fine herbs could he not coax into being in a few short days!
In the tens of days that followed, Han Li, his spirits in a strange ferment, carried out one experiment after another upon the hastening of raw herbs.
Once he sprayed the green liquid, thinned and diluted, over a great many plants at once, and woke the next morning to find only an abundance of common herbs, each aged but a year or two beyond its fellows—nothing to compare with the bounty of that first trial. Yet even this failure taught him something; he began, dimly, to grasp some of the rules that governed the thing.
On the next trial he dispensed with the thinning altogether, and dripped the green liquid straight upon a single ginseng root. He woke the following day with a ginseng of a hundred years' standing in his hands, one that could not be told apart from a wild centurial ginseng in the least detail. This sent delight flooding through him—not because he had won so rare a medicine, but because he now held in his grasp a fair command of how the green liquid was to be used.
And so he turned to a fresh set of trials, this time upon the keeping of the green liquid. He set it, in turn, into every manner of vessel he could lay his hands on—porcelain jars, jade bottles, gourds, silver phials and the rest—and found that no container on earth could preserve it so much as a quarter of an hour. Once it left the curious little bottle, it must either be put to use within that time, or else it would fade away until it was gone without a trace. The diluted liquid bore the same failing, lingering a little longer, yet if left past a certain point all that remained was the other fluid that had seeped into it.
After several trials of this kind, Han Li gave up all hope of storing the mysterious liquid in any other vessel, and bent his efforts instead to testing whether its efficacy could be stacked up upon a single plant.
He let fall a single droplet of green liquid upon a green sanwu herb and turned it into a yellow sanwu herb with a hundred years of potency in it. A few days later he let fall another droplet upon it, and its age surged forward by another hundred years and more.
Finding that this practice truly availed, Han Li spent the two months and more that followed repeating it without respite. Whenever a fresh droplet gathered in the little bottle, he let it fall upon that sanwu herb, and the plant did not disappoint him. Its leaves slipped gradually from yellow to a black-tinged yellow, and thence to black, until at last they had all turned a glossy near-black, and it had become a millennial sanwu herb—a thing rarely matched in all the world.
This trial had been a thorough success, and to all appearances, had he the patience he could push the herb's age still higher. But for Han Li this was a wholly unnecessary exercise. It was enough to know the practice was sound; a plant of a few hundred years' potency was ample for his own consumption.
With this long series of trials at an end, Han Li could at last spare himself some rest and set his thoughts in order, for by now no small stretch of time had passed since Doctor Mo had gone down the mountain.
In that present hour, Han Li lay on the wooden cot in his own room, the millennial sanwu herb clutched in his hand, staring blankly at the rafters. His eyes fixed straight upon the black weed, as though he were studying it; yet had anyone else been in the room, they would have read at a glance that his mind was nowhere near that sanwu herb—that he was off roaming the farthest reaches of his own thoughts.
All the delight he had felt at first winning this herb was quite spent. Now he was turning over and over in his mind the good the little bottle had brought him, and the danger it bore in its train, and planning how he should provide for his own future.
From the many books in Doctor Mo's quarters Han Li had read no few tales of "those who held a treasure and were doomed for it." The bottle in his own hands was a treasure beyond price, and if any outsider ever learned he had such a thing, he would not live to see the next morning. He would be engulfed, as so many holders of treasure before him had been, by every manner of greedy wretch who came rushing at the news. And leaving aside far-off examples, take the case nearest at hand: did the several sect masters of his own mountain once learn the bottle's secret, they would never let him go free, but scheme by every means to slay him and seize the prize, leaving him the bleak fate of "the treasure carried off and the man cut down."
"I must never tell a soul of this bottle," Han Li resolved, "and on the mountain I must use it with the greatest care, for the way it drinks up the points of light is far too loud, and a single careless instant could betray the secret." And he swore never to breathe a single word of it to anyone.
"Yet here I stand in the very hour when I most need medicines to fuel my cultivation. To leave this bottle unused would be a great waste, and I must find some course that answers both ends." He thought of his own cultivation, which had yielded not the least progress, and some of the light went out of him. Whatever else might be said, the advancement of the formula could not be neglected. It was not for Doctor Mo's urgings that he cultivated, but because he had begun to suspect that the strange changes marking him out from common men these past years were bound up, beyond all parting, with the cultivation of that nameless formula.