Page 1 of The Scarlet Alchemist

PROLOGUE

I remember the day of darkness, even if no one else does.

When I close my eyes, I’m standing in a city my aunt says I’ve never visited, with my parents, who no longer exist.

The city of Chang’an is like a lifetime in a single moment, brimming with words in a thousand languages, the ghosts of footsteps softening the rammed dirt roads, silk clothes that shimmer like fish scales as people glint down the wide streets. At the faraway end of the road is a great stone gate with five doors opening into darkness.

I don’t know what’s behind the gate, but I move closer, away from my parents, past the merchants and their goatskin bags spilling wine, the pilgrims in robes the color of dust, the dancers in jewels that sharpen the sun’s rays and cast them back at me like daggers.

There is something beyond the gate. I’m sure of it. The five archways are screaming mouths, calling out for me.

A gong echoes, then the world flips and disappears, a door slammed shut in my face. I reach out for my mother, and my fingers snap in all different directions with a thousand tiny pops, like fireworks. I’m falling through a world that’s turned to sand, tumbling into the night sky. The universe unfolds my skin and stretches me across its endless dark, a pale tent over all the stars. I am the night that birthed the world. I am the bones of all the planets. I am silence. I am the end.

I hear my father’s voice speaking to me in a language that I’ve long forgotten. The words rise and fall like slow gusts of wind spilling across a valley, shivering through the grass. Somehow I know that they’re of great importance, but I am made of silk and the words flow through me. The only word I understand is my name.Zilan. Zilan. Zilan.

I wake in a bed in Guangzhou in my mother’s arms. My parents tell me it was a dream, but I know better.

I know because the way they look at me has changed. They watch me when they think I’m not paying attention, their gazes crawling up the knobs of my spine. They’re waiting for something.

What did I do?I think one thousand times over. But no one will tell me.

Then my mother dies and my father vanishes, and there is no one left to ask.

I am the only one who remembers.

CHAPTER ONE

Year775

Guangzhou, China

At high noon on the first day of the summer solstice, old man Gou barged into the shop carrying a rancid hemp bag over his shoulder. Even if I ignored the suspiciously human-shaped bulge inside, or the brown ooze sloughing onto my floor, or the purple fingertips dangling out the untied end, I would know that scent anywhere.

I closed my book and set down my tea that now tasted sour, the smell of hot corpse knifing up my nose and making saliva pool at the base of my throat, like I was going to be sick. I liked to think I was good at breathing through my mouth and swallowing back the nausea like a professional, but I typically only came across corpses when I was expecting to.

“You can’t bring that in here,” I said, taking a quick sip of tea to force down anything besides words that wanted to come up.

Old man Gou kept walking forward like he hadn’t heard me, hitching the bag higher on his shoulder. “I need you to—”

“I know what you need,” I said. “That’s not how this works. You make an appointment and you go around back after dark.”

He bristled at being interrupted, but I didn’t care. People with leverage didn’t come to me asking for help. His gaze twitched around the shelves packed with ceramic horses and tiny servants on their knees, thousands of glazed clay eyes witnessing his sins.

My family owned a míngqì store at the far west end of Guangzhou. Uncle Fan and Auntie So molded clay into ghost vessels to bury with the dead, and my cousins and I sold them to grieving families. No one could take real people with them to the afterlife, but they could take our painted ceramic steeds and beautiful glazed clay women and faithful servants the size of your palm. They crammed as many as they could into their tombs, hoping that cold clay would turn to warm flesh once their souls crossed over, that they wouldn’t be alone in death.

When I was younger, I asked Uncle Fan if any of that was true. He scoffed and saidIt doesn’t matter if it’s true, the dead can’t ask for refunds, and slammed the kiln door shut. But the dead could do a lot more than he thought.

That was only our business during the daylight hours. Uncle Fan and Auntie So were blissfully unaware of where the other half of our money came from.

“Take me to the back, then,” old man Gou said, as if it were that simple.

I shook my head, praying that no one had seen him dragging a rotting corpse to our shop in broad daylight. Getting hanged for forbidden life alchemy would certainly interfere with my upcoming travel plans. “I’m watching the shop now. That’s why you need an appointment.”

He narrowed his eyes, his irises glinting gold—a side effect of eating too many gold nuggets. These days, the diet of the rich was no longer steamed bear and phoenix pears but handcrafted gold pieces with pearls as garnish, still steaming from their alchemical transformation. Some said they ate it with spoons instead of chopsticks because they didn’t have the patience to eat the pieces one at a time.

A century ago, the royal alchemists learned the secret recipe for gold that stopped you from aging and made your blood run the color of sunlight. As long as you kept eating it forever, your smiles would never carve scars into your cheeks, your bones would never grow brittle and creak during rainstorms, your skin would never sag or speckle or crease.

But even ageless bodies were still made of soft human flesh, and neither gold nor gems would protect the rich from disease, or accidents, or whatever the hell had happened to the rancid corpse that old man Gou had dragged in. Those who could afford the gold of immortality often stayed locked away in their mansions to protect their investment, but clearly Gou’s family hadn’t felt the need. No one truly believed in death until it happened to them.

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