My name is Caichen — cai for gather, chen for servant. My father named me for books; I followed him into herbs instead. That's fate.
On the sixteenth of last month I went into the ravine. The three herbs of Granny Tian's bounty have died out near the water, and my wife keeps saying the patients can't wait. I thought I'd push deeper — the hidden slope inside the cave. Only old herb families know it. Good medicine there. Bad road.
The road was bad. Halfway down, the rope snapped.
The fall didn't kill me; the cave's little yao did the rest. They didn't kill me either — they shut me in this hidden herb room and put me back to work. Don't laugh: there really is a herb plot down here, lightless, fed by watery light seeping off the ceiling. Pearlwort, bletilla — madder than outside.
Thirty-one days now.
Days, I tend the plot. Nights, I pound. The little yao take the paste. For what?
At first I didn't know. On day twenty I set a trap: I mixed a pinch of harmless cinnabar into the paste — too faint to see. Ten days later, outside my door in the passage, I found footprints—
Red footprints.
Paste laced with cinnabar, tracked. The tracks ran deeper into the cave — and not toward the demon king's seat.
Toward a place the little yao hardly dare name. They call it the Stone-Heart Pool.
The paste goes to the Stone-Heart Pool. My wife dries herbs, the Apricot Grove sells herbs, I've pounded thirty years — show me where the medicine goes and I'll tell you where the sickness is. When a whole cave's medicine flows to one pool, that's not nursing. That's feeding.
Feeding what?
And one thing stranger. Last night, the mortar in my room — I'd put it away — sounded by itself. Tok, tok, tok. Seven-tenths rhythm. My rhythm. I lit the lamp: half a mortar of fresh paste inside, the same two herbs, pounded to seven-tenths.
I don't know who pounded it. I only know that since that night, I leave the mortar at the door when I finish work — and every morning, there's half a mortar of fresh paste.
If my wife hears pounding in our yard at night — that's me, home.
I'm not mad. I know I'm in the cave. But this is how I stay alive — believing part of what I pound gets home to her. Even if only the sound.
If you come for me, don't break the door down yet. Let me finish this season's crop.
It's real medicine. And for three days now, no one has come from the Stone-Heart Pool to collect it.
When the feeding stops, there are two possibilities: what's being fed is full —
Or what's being fed is coming out.