Page 59 of The Scarlet Alchemist

I took a steadying breath, blocking out the scent of blood from my mind just like I did during my resurrections. I sank my fingers into the stones on the table, as if the right one would reveal itself to me by touch.Creatures aren’t made of stones, I wanted to scream.How can any stone create life?

I looked down at my palms, the calluses and lines and deep blue veins. Too late, I realized I couldn’t feel them at all anymore, that my vision was tunneling, as if I was staring at someone else’s hands from the bottom of a well, a loud roaring in my ears. I should have expected this, should have tried harder to stomach those cucumbers Yufei gave me. My ridiculous fire imbalance always made me look weak at the worst possible times.

All at once, I crashed back into myself as if waking up from a dream. My fists clenched, hands shaking, sun burning on my back.

It’s imbalanced, but there is still fire in me, I thought.Every element is in me.

Everyone was supposedly a mix of the five elements—wood that fuels fire, fire that forms earth, earth that holds metal, metal that carries water, water that feeds wood. We never noticed them until they were unbalanced, but they were always inside of us.

I dragged a pile of iron to my right, then picked up an earthstone. Suddenly, my hands couldn’t move fast enough. I transformed three earthstones into identical disks, then did the same to three waterstones, metalstones, and woodstones, lining them up to make sure they were the same size. Everything had to be perfectly balanced. For the firestone, I made three disks of chicken-blood stone—if it was strong enough to resurrect people, maybe it could create new life as well. When I had three of each of the five types of stones, I arranged them all in a circle. Alchemy buzzed in my fingertips—a warm, tingling sensation, like my hands were falling asleep. I had never tried to combine so many stones in a transformation before, but if there was any hope of creating life, this was it.

The stones would form the body. Now all that was left was qi.

I caught a glimpse of another alchemist trying to use his own saliva like some disgusting form of qi transfer on his stone rabbit, and I prayed he gave up before experimenting with any other bodily fluids. Qi didn’t simply leak out every time something left the body—it was much deeper inside of us than that. Spit wasn’t the same as qi. Neither was breath, or even blood.

Unless...

I held out my hand again, tracing the blue rivers of veins under my skin. Blood itself wasn’t the same as qi. But maybe it could be the path that led me to it.

I grabbed several pieces of iron and transformed them into a blade. Before I could second-guess myself, I dragged it across my palm. Blood rushed to the surface, dribbling over the stones. I clenched my fist, forcing more of it to splash onto the table. The Empress narrowed her eyes, leaning closer.

“Is blood alchemy the only kind you know?” Zheng Sili said. “Just because it worked for you once doesn’t mean it’s the answer to everything.”

I ignored him, squeezing more blood out of my palm as he told the other alchemists how I’d never even gone to school, how I was the prince’s pet, and a thousand other reasons I didn’t deserve to be here. But his words didn’t matter, because he wouldn’t have been standing around talking if he knew how to win.

The trickle of blood had started to dry up, so I carved another one into my palm, deeper. It spilled faster this time, splashing across the front of my dress, soaking the stones in glistening red, the air reeking of iron.

I couldn’t hear the stream of insults anymore, or feel the fiery glare of the Empress. The edges of my vision grew hazy, my breath coming faster, skin prickling with cold even as sweat beaded on my face. I fell onto my knees, gripping the edge of the table with my right hand, my left still bleeding over the stones.

“All you’re doing is draining yourself dry,hùnxie,” Zheng Sili said, somewhere far away. “You can feed all the blood that you want to those stones, but it’s not going to work.”

For once, Zheng Sili was right. All the blood in the world wouldn’t make this transformation happen.

But I wasn’t feeding the stones my blood. I was feeding them my life.

Darkness eclipsed the sky in a single breath, Chang’an blasted away with nothing but night in its wake. I was kneeling at the bank of the river. Water crashed against the riverbed, twisting over jagged rocks and roots, ice-cold as it splashed onto my knees.

You aren’t supposed to be here.

The words rose up from the dirt, from the whisper of rushing water, from the dark expanse beyond the trees. There were many things I wasn’t supposed to do, but if I only did what was allowed, I wouldn’t be kneeling before the Empress, a breath away from becoming a royal alchemist.

I cupped my palms and lowered them into the river, the coldness flaying my skin, and raised a handful of its dark waters.

The river disappeared and I was kneeling before my alchemy table once more, the sun searing overhead. I opened my hands and the liquid crashed over the stones, no longer freezing water but hot blood.

I felt the qi leave my body with a sudden rush, my vision grayed and mouth tasting like metal. This was what it felt like to touch death, to divert the river and force your life out of you.

Red light carved lines across the table between the stones, a pentagram scorching itself into the wood. The stones melted into the table in a swirl of marbled black, heat waves rippling the air around it. I snatched a couple moonstones from the table and managed to stop my hand from bleeding before backing away.

The black liquid bubbled over the edge of the table and spilled into the dirt, the red light searing brighter, casting the whole courtyard in a fiery glow. I raised a hand to shield my eyes as the transformation ripped all the colors from the sky, replacing everything with glaring crimson. The other alchemists retreated against the walls or hid behind their tables, but I couldn’t lift myself from the dirt as the molten liquid ate holes in the wood.

What have I done?I thought, my fingers sinking into the soft ground. There was a reason you weren’t supposed to experiment with life alchemy. Life was the greatest good, and that called for the greatest evil in return. I could flatten Chang’an with my carelessness.

With one final burst, like a shock of lightning, the light disappeared, the black liquid dripping like sludge onto the ground.

That’s it?I thought, rising to my knees.After all that, I’ve burned a table in half and created mud?

I crawled forward and sank my hands into the swampy substance, searching for something, anything at all in the mess that now reeked of scorched meat and blood.

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