Page 3 of The Scarlet Alchemist

“This is forty-seven,” I said at last, holding out my hand for more.

Old man Gou waved his hand at me as if it didn’t matter.“Surely that’s enough for a consultation.”

I raised an eyebrow. “You want a consultation worth forty-seven gold pieces?”

“Please,”he said, teeth clenched.

“As you wish,” I said, leaning over the counter. I squinted at the sack’s hemp fabric, stained with gray liquid. I took a deep breath, the scent of death making my eyes water.

“No,” I said, swiping his gold off the counter into my clay bowl. “Thank you for your business.”

“No?”old man Gou said, red rushing to his face. “How can you call that a consultation?”

“The smell,” I said, taking a long sip of my tea that now had a metallic tang, like blood. “You waited too long to come to me. I’m not going to reanimate a corpse with maggots for eyes and send him on his way.”

“He has eyes!” old man Gou said, his voice rattling the row of ceramic singers beside him. “You didn’t even look at him!”

I took another sip of tea. “Looking costs ten more gold than what you paid me.”

“Threemore! You said fifty!”

“That was before you tried to shortchange me,” I said. “Now it’s ten more.”

Old man Gou huffed and reached into another satchel, shaking his head as he counted out ten coins and slammed them onto the counter. I added them to my bowl, then ducked under the counter and into the shop room.

I pulled back the hemp cloth, revealing a stiff and bloated body the color of cold porridge, his nails and lips blue. His nose dripped with a tar-black liquid that ran down his cheeks and pooled at the corners of his mouth. I touched his arm and felt the skin shift back and forth as I moved my fingers, like a piece of loose clothing. Old man Gou gagged at the smell.

“He’s already started purging,” I said. “His skin could slip off at any moment. I can’t fix that.”

“But you can bring him back?”

I looked up, frowning. “Did you hear me? You want a brother with no skin?”

“We’ll sew it back on,” he said, waving his hand like it was a minor inconvenience. “Anything’s better than death, isn’t it?”

I narrowed my eyes. “Toyou. He won’t be able to go outside. His appearance will alarm people.”

“Our house is large enough that he won’t be bored,” he said. “Can you do it or not?”

If I could afford to have a conscience, I would have said no.

But soon, my cousins and I would take our civil service exams, and if all went well, we’d be moving to the capital for the second and third testing rounds, leaving half our savings behind for Uncle Fan and Auntie So. I pictured them sitting in the dark, stretching out the last bags of rice into thin soup.

“Six hundred,” I said.

Old man Gou scoffed. “I heard you were charging five hundred last week.”

“Last week, gold was worth more.”

“How dare you—”

“If you don’t like it, find someone else.”

There was no one else, and he knew it. Alchemists who could repair broken toys or heal skinned knees were easy to find, but experimenting with life alchemy—or soliciting it—was punishable by death.

Old man Gou glared back at me, probably unsure if I would truly walk away from five hundred gold. But I had seen death and decay, things far more fearsome than an angry old man, things that Gou could never imagine in his endless, gilded life.

At last, he nodded.

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