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Patient: Foxian, female
Approximately 100 years of age
Shore Camp, Thalassa
One of the junior apprentices sits by the fire, hands shaking as she looks up at him. “Jiaoqiu-daren, how do you do this?” she asks.
He doesn't know how to answer her, because he hasn't found the answer himself. It’s tiring work, wearying work. Day in day out, tending to the injured and the sick, sending the people out only to have them return in stretchers, unable to walk by themselves. But there are days like this when some of them tell him their stories, tell him of the things they want to do and will do, and it keeps him going.
“One day at a time,” he answers, as he scoops a bowl of soup on top of rice. Bland and nutritious, easy to digest. The kind of meal he would give to those most ill among them, but simple and comforting. “Sometimes, with a little spice, just to make it better.” He sprinkles his special spice blend on top of the soup, the kind that warms you from the inside out. Carefully balanced so as not to trigger someone’s internal heat, but enough to make them feel again.
He hands it to her and she takes it, eyes downcast as she begins to eat. Almost immediately, her face scrunches up.
“Jiaoqiu-daren, this is too spicy,” she complains. He smiles and scoops more soup into her bowl to make it less spicy.
“Ah, but doesn't it make you feel something?” he asks. And she smiles, just a little.
“It’s very warm,” she says, holding the bowl close to her. “Somehow it reminds me of the soup my grandmother used to make for me when I was sick.”
“That’s it though, isn’t it?” Jiaoqiu asks. “The reminder that there are still good things to look forward to. Enough for tomorrow, and then tomorrow again.”
Little by little, day by day.
Patient: Foxian, male
Approximately 140 years of age
Alchemy Commission, Xianzhou Yaoqing
Ginger is heat and warmth in the depths of winter, dates for sweetness and blood replenishment. High heat enhances the properties of spices and some herbs, gingko nuts and barley make an excellent dessert when cooked together while having multiple benefits. His mother passes on her wisdoms as she asks him to measure out ingredients, instructing him in the basics of cooking. Nutrition is the foundation of health, and the best way to treat any illness. Medicines build on that, and no medicine is a substitute for sustenance.
Excess is poison, his father tells him. The careful balance between enough and too much, and Jiaoqiu knows it is too much. The first rule of healing and caring is that you, the physician, must be well enough to take care of others. A burnt candle provides no light.
But for all the medicines they have and they learn of, they have yet to find something that cures the illnesses of the heart. Perhaps if they did, then mara would be less of a concern. The closest they have come is the Longevity Pill of Cruelty, and even that isn't a real solution.
Yueyu asked him if this was an illness he wanted to cure, if this was his calling as a doctor. He doesn't know how to cure this kind of ailing, the kind that he sees in the older soldiers, the ones who survive. He doesn’t know how to cure it in himself, though he sees the signs manifest, the early symptoms of a lifelong disease.
Surviving is the hardest part, Yueyu tells him. The most important, and the hardest part.
What about you, he’d asked her, the two of them watching the plaguemark in the sky. She had smiled at him as she passed him the wine, sweet and fiery, the fire popping and crackling.
I’m here, aren’t I? she’d asked, like that was all there was to it, like that was enough.
Patient: Homo celestinae, male
Approximately 230 years of age
Forward Camp, Ketu Mirage
Jiaoqiu recognises the Cloud Knight from the week before and the arrow wound that had shattered his forearm. His name was Yuemin and he was a knight against the wishes of his parents, who were part of the Liujin Guild and wanted him to continue it instead of risking his life on the battlefield. Jiaoqiu had heard of his mother, who was a friend of his aunt or some such thing. Yuemin was to take over the family business once he’d retired from the Cloud Knights, and he’d promised Jiaoqiu a discount for any future purchases, all charm and chatter despite the pain he was in while Jiaoqiu splinted his arm and reset the bones.
He'd been well enough to join the relief troops yesterday morning; he's now pale from blood loss, a deep gash across his chest that looks like it may have been poisoned. There's pained moans coming from him, the kind of sound that haunts Jiaoqiu's nightmares like an unholy choir.
“Get boiled water and more bandages,” he tells one of the knights that had brought him in. He bends over the man and starts stripping the uniform off him to better examine the wound, three slashes that were deep enough to reveal bone, the flesh around the wound blackening and rotting.
“Get the surgery tools," he tells one one of the junior healers, as he wipes away the blood. “Painkillers and coagulants. He's bleeding out and we need to close the wound.”
In the midst of it, he feels a hand grab his arm, and Yuemin is looking at him, terrified. His breathing is shallow, the way he grips at Jiaoqiu’s hand is painful. “Jiaoqiu-daifu, let me die please," Yuemin begs. “I don't want to go back out there.”
“I’ve got you,” he says as reassuringly as he can. The junior doctor returns with supplies and slips Yuemin a painkiller, while Jiaoqiu wipes his hands clean to thread the needle.
“Please, Jiaoqiu-daifu. I can’t go back out there.” There’s something in Yuemin’s eyes that tells Jiaoqiu that he won’t survive, but Jiaoqiu is determined to try.
“It'll be fine,” he says, as the painkillers set in and Yuemin's eyes glaze over. Jiaoqiu gets to work immediately, cutting away the rotting flesh and stitching together what he can, binding to aid the body's natural inclination to pull itself together.
It'll be fine. He promised Yuemin after all.
Yuemin dies as the sun is rising, his shallow breaths getting shallower, pulse slowing. Nothing kills faster than the lack of will to live, Jiaoqiu knows for a fact. There are other wounded to tend to, but Jiaoqiu sits by Yuemin’s bedside until his body is cold despite the sun that spills in, hot and bright.
There's a few things he needs to do. He needs to scan Yuemin's tag and report him dead. He needs to get someone to move the body. He needs to clean himself up, the dried blood tacky on his skin. But he sits beside Yuemin and watches as the stiffness sets in, and wonders how he would be able to face Yuemin's parents after this.
Patient: Foxian, female
Approximately 105 years of age
Alchemy Commission, Xianzhou Yaoqing
“Will you promise me something?” she asks, watching him grind herbs for a supplemental tea. She's early for her appointment and he needs to finish this to be sent off, so she's waiting.
“Of course.” He portions it out into five different doses for packing, all while Feixiao sits there, distracted and restless, watching his movements with a kind of intensity that is unsettling.
She takes a deep breath. “I want to stop me in any way possible if needed,” she says. Jiaoqiu doesn't drop the herbs he's holding, but it’s a close thing. Instead, he continues, eyeballing the doses and reallocating them to his satisfaction.
“Do you know what you're asking of me, jiangjun?” he asks, looking up to meet her eyes. She doesn't meet his gaze, shifting away to look out the window. But there's something implacable in the way her jaw is set, the tenseness in her shoulders. Like they haven't spent the last ten years trying to find a cure of some kind for her, like he hasn't devoted his life to helping and saving people, like this doesn't go against everything he is or tries to be.
“This isn't a request, Jiaoqiu,” she says quietly. And he understands what she means by it, that she fears so much. That she trusts him to do what he must and what is right, but how could she know what sits in his heart when he has never told her?
“Orders received, jiangjun.” Jiaoqiu bends his head and continues packing the herbs, folding the paper packages the way his father had taught him. Once he's done, he gestures and they make their way to the treatment room, where he maps out Feixiao's meridians and blockages with his hands, working out kinks and blockages.
A healer's hands are the most bloody.
He’d first met Feixiao when she had been young, under the care of General Yueyu. He remembers the bedraggled thing that Yueyu had brought home with her, hair a tangled mess and always running off somewhere, usually barefoot. Different from the other Foxians, he’d told Yueyu in private. He never checked and Yueyu had never asked, but it was clear to both of them she was likely some mix of borisin and Foxian.
When she had first met him, he was retired and a different man from who he’d been when he worked with General Yueyu. He wonders how much she remembers of him, or if she remembers at all. He’d heard more things by then, the Moon Rage that took her over and the destruction that would take place. Like Digong’s Lux Arrow, some of them had said. Uncaring of friend or foe, only set on destroying what must be destroyed. Out of control, one of his former colleagues and sort of friend had told him when Jiaoqiu had dropped by the Alchemy Commission to purchase herbs for himself.
Will you help me? she had asked. He wanted to ask why him, because there were other equally qualified healers amongst the members of the Alchemy Commission. He had stepped away because he couldn't bear it, and he didn't want to go back out there. It was easier to stay in Feiyu Hu, collecting herbs and growing vegetables, dealing with the occasional minor illness in the village. Easier to wake up to songbirds and crickets than the noises of military hospitals, easier to pick lotus roots and peel lotus seeds than to wrap bandages and stitch flesh back together.
But he had said yes in the end, and followed her back out to the battlefield, where the starskiffs soared overhead and the thunder crossbows shattered silence, where he could hear the baying of the borisin as they attacked and smell the blood and sweat and fear in the air.
He doesn't tell her what it costs, she doesn't ask.
The more he reads about Moon Rage, the more he wonders what a cure might look like. Perhaps it is because they are already long lived creatures with ties to the Abundance, but Jiaoqiu wonders if the cure they are looking for lies that way.
For Feixiao, it is simply something to live with. It’s manageable now with Jiaoqiu looking after her, and that’s all she wants.
“I’ve lived far longer than I might otherwise have already had Yueyu-jiangjun not taken me in,” she says to him one of the nights she finds him up late, making notes from the various documents he’d requested access to. She’d pulled him away from the desk, taken his hands in hers and brought them to her face so she could nuzzle against his hand. “You’ve done more for me than I have any right to ask of you, so it’s fine.”
It wasn't, isn't fine at all. Each time it takes her, it takes other parts of her as well, damages her body in ways that it doesn't recover from. Her hands go to the ties of his robes and he lets her, lets her shed his clothes and loosen the ties of his hair, lets her push him down into their shared bed and kiss him like she is running out of time, gasping and grasping for everything she can have.
Time isn’t nearly enough on nights like this.
Patient: Homo celestinae, male
Approximately 160 years of age
Alchemy Commission, Xianzhou Luofu
“Does it hurt?” Jiaoqiu asks as he peels the cloth away from where it is stuck to the skin. Moze shakes his head mutely, but Jiaoqiu frowns. It’s an ugly wound, shards of bone embedded in the flesh where borisin teeth had broken off. It’s likely to be infected if not taken care of, to say nothing of how close Moze had come to death from being in such a position.
“I’m going to get some painkillers. It’s still going to hurt,” Jiaoqiu warns. Moze merely blinks at him, and Jiaoqiu sighs. He’s used to Moze’s silences, but they’re unnerving in their own way, how Moze seems to retreat into himself. It’s difficult to note any problems when a patient doesn’t communicate it, and Jiaoqiu worries that one day he will miss something and he will have Feixiao yelling at him, or worse, her silence.
“Here. I’m applying some numbing agents to the area as well.” Moze swallows the pill obediently, and Jiaoqiu injects the numbing agent. The shift in Moze’s breathing tells him it was far more painful than Moze had let on, and Jiaoqiu is careful as he examines the wound again. It’s still bleeding sluggishly and Jiaoqiu wipes the blood away, before picking out the shards of bone with forceps. It’s slow work, each removal making the wound bleed more. He keeps an ear out for Moze’s breathing, where it hitches in pain, pauses.
“That hurts,” Moze rasps out as Jiaoqiu pulls out one of the biggest pieces. There’s no way it wouldn’t Jiaoqiu thinks. But at least Moze said something, which is a lot more than he normally does. Jiaoqiu knows he doesn’t like being put under for these things, and being conscious for these things always hurts far more than it should. Jiaoqiu doesn’t like using the stronger painkillers, especially not yabruh. The line between enough and too much is a fine one, and varies person to person.
“Sorry, just bear with me a little longer.” He’s almost done, just one more shard of bone to pull out. It comes out quickly enough, then Jiaoqiu is quick to press gauze onto the wound to soak up the blood coming out of it. “That’s all of them now. Once the bleeding slows then I’ll wrap it up.” Moze nods in acknowledgement, staring out the window.
“You must be the least talkative patient I’ve ever had,” Jiaoqiu comments as he waits for the seeping of the red over white to slow. “Even Feixiao wasn’t this bad in the beginning, though the other healers didn’t want to look after her for other reasons.”
Moze and Feixiao were remarkably similar really. It’s no wonder she’d taken a shine to him, because he remembers disapproving as well when Yueyu had chosen to take Feixiao in. But she’d grown into it, being Yueyu’s protege. Weapon after weapon, campaign after campaign. She’d already been making something of herself by the Third Abundance War, her name whispered in equal parts admiration and fear. It wasn’t much of a surprise when he’d heard she’d become the general of the Yaoqing, though by then Jiaoqiu had decided enough was enough.
“She learned though. To talk, to speak up, in her own way. Now she’s so loud and brash you can’t imagine her any other way, but once upon a time she was like you. A quiet shadow trailing after the general.”
Disinfectant. then salves to help with healing. Gauze to keep the wound covered, bandages to keep it in place. Jiaoqiu’s performed these motions a hundred thousand times, familiar and well-practised. It will knit together in a few days, then scar for a few months before it would fade and slowly be replaced by new skin. With enough care, it could be as if it never happened, but Jiaoqiu knows the body will remember it somehow.
“Does it still hurt?” Jiaoqiu asks. He will make Moze take more painkillers anyway, since it had to hurt and what Jiaoqiu had given him had barely been enough for this. Water and he’ll have to get some blood replenishment tonics as well—Moze is far paler than he would like. He passes the water and painkillers to Moze, then fetches a shirt from the drawers where they keep patient clothing.
“I don’t have much to say,” Moze mumbles, gaze focused on the cup of water between his hands.
“But you do have something to say,” Jiaoqiu points out. “Not much isn’t nothing.” He tidies away the extra gauze and bandages, piling the bloodstained clothes and gauze in a corner for laundry. The tools would need to be sterilised, but that’s all for later. He should go prepare dinner really, but they can order in tonight or eat in the barracks. Tomorrow he’ll make something for Moze’s recovery and he needs to check in with Feixiao as well.
So much to do, but he stays in the examination room with Moze instead, watching him sip water. “You should say it if you want to,” he says. “I will listen.”
Moze turns to look at him, something young and vulnerable in the way he regards Jiaoqiu despite his usual lack of expression. Not yet then, Jiaoqiu concludes.
Not yet, but one day.
Patient: Homo Celestinae, female
Approximately 15 years of age
Feiyu Hu, Xianzhou Yaoqing
“Mu shushu!”
Jiaoqiu pauses in his weeding to see Sushang barrelling towards him, her tiny fists full of leaves.
“What have you got there?” he asks, amused. She grins up at him, toothy as she presents the leaves to him.
“I found plants that look like the one we were sorting last week. You use them for your medicine, right?” she asks.
“Yes, thank you very much.” He accepts them from her, squashed and misshapen as they are. She’s sporting new bruises all over, undoubtedly from whatever new form that Suyi has her practising this week. “Come, I made your favourite mung bean soup today, so it must be good fortune that you showed up.”
She claps delightedly and takes off towards his house, already wearing out her own little path in the grass. He abandons his weeding in favour of following her at a more sedate pace. She chatters about her day and how she had gone to see Jing yi before coming here, how their dog had just given birth to puppies and that they were tiny and hairless and also incredibly ugly.
“Mu shushu, did you know they’re very ugly when they’re babies?” Sushang asks him with all the solemnity of a young child can muster.
“They are. The baby chickens are too, when they first hatch,” Jiaoqiu confirms, as he opens the door to let her in.
“But they’re so small and cute and fluffy and yellow!” Sushang exclaims. “How can they be ugly?”
“Sit down, I’ll go get a bowl for you,” Jiaoqiu instructs. Sushang hops up onto what is her chair, the one with extra pillows so she can comfortably reach the top of the table. “You can come over next time they’re hatching and you can watch. It’s quite interesting to watch them hatch, and they become fluffy once they’re dry.”
“Mu shushu, how come they’re yellow when they are babies but then your chickens are all white or brown or black?”
It’s easy to while away the afternoon like this, ladling mung bean soup for Sushang and answering her many questions, watching as she bends down to help the chickens look for worms, writing new words in the sand for Sushang to learn. His teaching attempts are rarely successful, but at least now she understands that heng normally comes before shu and which stroke is xie and which is wan.
When Suyi turns up to pick up her daughter, he gives her a look that has her lifting her chin to hide her embarrassment.
“For her bruises.” He hands Suyi a basket with a bottle of liniment and a pot of the mung bean soup for her and her husband. Sushang is clinging to his leg in an effort to stay upright, sleepy but trying to stay awake to prove she’s a big girl who can stay up with him.
“Thank you.” She hesitates, but takes the basket. “Come on, Sushang. Let’s not bother Jiao-shu any longer.”
“It’s Mu shushu! And he doesn’t mind me staying, he said so!” Sushang presses her face into his thigh, and he pats her head.
“You can come again tomorrow if you want. I’m always here anyhow.”
“Promise?” Sushang asks, clinging tighter to his leg.
“Yes, and maybe we can go out to the lake and look for lotus seeds.” Suyi purses her lips at that, and Jiaoqiu simply shrugs.
“‘kay,” she says, reluctantly loosening her death grip on his leg. She takes her mother’s other hand and Jiaoqiu watches as they weave their way out of his garden, Sushang’s steps slow and faltering.
One day, she will walk out of here, her steps steady and sure, headed to a future that Jiaoqiu has seen played out too many times already. One day the skies above her will be filled with speeding starskiffs and the rumble of crossbows firing.
For now, she turns around and waves at him from the bottom of his garden, and he waves back.
Patient: Homo celestinae, male
Approximately 880 years of age
Feiyu Hu, Xianzhou Yaoqing
The rain patters down, soft susurrations that ease the heart. Jiaoqiu mixes in the spices and the herbs into the soup, the fragrance of it cutting through the dampness of the rain. It will be foggy tonight, a soft blanket that enfolds them, making it almost as if they are alone.
Feiyu Hu is one of the few places on the Yaoqing untouched by the endless innovation and spread of the IPC, and it's here that Jiaoqiu prefers to be. There is something comforting and easy about taking a boat out on the lake, hearing the wind sing through the clatter of bamboo, the small streams that run through his garden every time it rains.
At the table, his shifu sits with a bowl of hot soup noodles, the simple kind with very little to it. Some noodles, good soup, thin slices of fish, a side dish of fresh vegetables. Warm and filling, especially on a day like this.
“How is your heart these days?” he asks Jiaoqiu, who brings a basin of water and some lily bulbs over to the table.
Jiaoqiu shrugs. “Who knows,” he answers blithely. “That's not an answer I have, but someone else may better discern it than me.”
His shifu eyes him shrewdly. “I daresay your condition is much improved from when I saw you last.”
Jiaoqiu tilts his head, meeting his shifu's gaze. “And I would say yours has worsened,” he comments.
“Ah, getting older has its perils, does it not?” The old man chuckles to himself as he dips a bamboo shoot in the soup.
“Perhaps so, but with your condition, surely spicy food isn't advised? Too much heat?” Jiaoqiu asks.
“It does me good to have some spice every now and then,” he says, patting his stomach. “Just as it does my heart good to see you safe and well.”
Jiaoqiu smiles, amused. “Was I not before?” he asks.
His shifu hums as he sets down his chopsticks. “Safe, certainly. Well, I would disagree with your definition of well.”
“Perhaps, but then again I may not be the best judge of such things,” Jiaoqiu remarks as he rinses the shelled lily bulbs in the water. Tonight’s dinner will be lily bulbs fried with snow peas and ginger, Jiaoqiu’s concession to Moze and Feixiao’s ongoing petition for at least one non-spicy dish at mealtimes. He pops one of them into his mouth, partially habit, partially curiosity.
“How does it taste?” His shifu inquires.
It’s faintly sweet, like the promise of a spring ready to bloom.