Page 58 of The Blood Orchid

“That’s all you want?” I said incredulously. “What, a fountain of eternal gold?”

“Something of the sort,” he said, nodding. “It would be in everyone’s best interest. I wouldn’t need to pickpocket anymore. It’s beneath my dignity, I know, but it’s not as if I can get a job when everyone forgets me. You would be doing the public a great service by—”

“All right,fine,” I said, sheathing my knife. If he gave us the opal, I didn’t much care what he did next, as long as it didn’t cause more harm.

The Arcane Alchemist grinned. “It’s in my home, just beyond the fields,” he said. “So if you wouldn’t mind...” He glanced pointedly at his restraints.

Zheng Sili looked less than pleased, but bent down and dissolved the vines with a couple firestones.

The Arcane Alchemist sat up and rolled his shoulders, then rose to his feet and brushed watermelon seeds from his robes,striding confidently toward the horizon. “No time to waste!” he said.

We walked a few paces behind him, the gravel crunching noisily beneath our feet. Zheng Sili looked thoroughly uncomfortable with his hair matted by watermelon juice, a constellation of seeds still spread across his left cheek, which I had no intention of telling him about. Wenshu looked like he’d eaten something sour, glaring unsubtly at the Arcane Alchemist’s back as we walked.

“I don’t trust him,” he said in Guangzhou dialect.

“Oh, he’s full of shit,” Zheng Sili agreed, “but we need his opal, don’t we?”

“Right,” I said. “We don’t have to trust him to make a deal with him, as long as he delivers first.”

The Arcane Alchemist glanced over his shoulder at me, winking in a way that made heat rush to my face. “Gossiping?” he said. “How impolite.”

“About as impolite as setting off watermelon bombs in our faces,” Wenshu said.

The Arcane Alchemist rolled his eyes and faced forward, walking faster toward the horizon.

The sound of gravel grew quieter as we walked, the stones sparser as we reached the edge of the farmland, where the desert rose up to meet us at the end of the valley. Golden sparks of sand spiraled toward us, stinging our eyes. There, right where the desert began, stood a circular tent covered in wool felt, the fabric swaying dreamily in the desert winds, revealing whispers of darkness inside. The soul of this desert felt different than what we’d walked through in Lanzhou—the sands there had felt full of life, like the desert was a great golden beast with a beating heart deep in the groundwater. But this desert felt cold, lonely.

“I can see why you need money,” Zheng Sili said under his breath. “This isn’t much of a house.”

The Arcane Alchemist glared over his shoulder. “My inheritance was paid in copper,” he said bitterly. “As you can imagine, the age of gold has not been kind to me.”

Wenshu frowned. “Nothing has been paid in copper since the Sui Dynasty,” he said. “You can’t possibly be over one hundred and sixty years old. That predates life gold.”

The Arcane Alchemist only shrugged. “Who needs life gold?” he said with a wink. “The waters of Penglai are potent.”

Wenshu and I exchanged a startled look. “Is that a joke?” I said.

“Are you laughing?” the Arcane Alchemist said. “My jokes are always funny, so if you’re not laughing, there’s your answer.”

“They do call it PenglaiImmortalIsland,” Zheng Sili said under his breath. “Are you really immune to death?”

The Arcane Alchemist shook his head. “Oh, definitely not. Just immune to aging.”

“Like life gold?” Wenshu said.

The Arcane Alchemist grinned. “Exactly,” he said. “Where did you think the idea for life gold came from?”

“The Moon Alchemist,” I said, frowning.

The Arcane Alchemist laughed and shook his head. “That’s what the House of Li would love for you to think, but she wasn’t even born then. You can thank the Sandstone Alchemist for life gold. It just looks a bit... unflattering to the royal family if the person to discover it isn’t a royal alchemist, you know?”

The Sandstone Alchemist?I thought. No wonder he felt the need to hide so far out in the desert. Surely the Empress had done everything in her power to end him so he couldn’t take credit.

“But no, I am assuredly not immortal. I know at least several of my friends who also drank the waters have since perished.”

“Friends?” I said, grinding to a halt. “Wait, how many people have been to Penglai Island?”

The Arcane Alchemist pursed his lips, looking up as if counting. I knew the answer deep in my heart before he said it out loud. “There were eight of us in total,” he said.

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