Perhaps it was the blessing of fortune herself that saved him. Abruptly, a glimmer of sudden clarity flashed through Han Li's heart.
He dashed toward the pouch he had flung into the far dark, covering the distance in a few quick strides, bent down, snatched it up, and in the space of a breath prized open its mouth and drew out the peace charm his father and mother had given him.
The instant the charm met his palm, a cool sense of clarity, piercing to the very marrow of body and mind, came flooding up through his hand. The turmoil of his heart subsided at once; the heaviness and the queasy ill-ease vanished as though they had never been; and every strange disorder of his body quietly faded away, as if all had returned to health. All that remained was a calm and steady self-possession.
Now Han Li paid no more heed to the changes sweeping over him. He cupped the charm gently in one hand and raised it before his eyes, stroking it with the other, slowly, tenderly, gazing at it with the whole of his being.
It was a long while before Han Li let out a sigh, stilled his stroking fingers, and turned his gaze away from the charm.
What Han Li did not know was that the peril which had so nearly cost him his life was no "qi deviation" at all, but the "assault of a heart demon" that afflicts cultivators. Had he not taken warning in time and used some outward object to drive the demon out, in no long while it would have burrowed into his primordial spirit, mastered his every movement, plunged him into a false world of illusions, and driven him to cavort madly until he died. All this, of course, he only came to understand in later years, once he had set foot upon the road of cultivation.
Han Li exercised his art and made a thorough examination of his whole body. All was well within him—and to his delighted astonishment, his power had grown considerably as well. He had not yet broken through the third layer into the fourth, but he now stood at the very peak of the third, and was not far from the fourth at all.
A small smile stole across Han Li's face at this unexpected, welcome turn. But he quickly gathered himself and reined in his excitement, dreading lest the surge of emotion plunge him into so hair-raising a deviation a second time, when he could not be sure of escaping with his life again. He took up the pouch that held the charm, meaning to put the trusty charm back in its place and tuck it safely away.
"Eh!" The exclamation escaped him of its own accord, for he had stumbled upon something in the pouch that he had forgotten for a very long time—a keepsake laid aside for years past: the mysterious little bottle.
The very existence of that vial had slipped clean out of Han Li's mind; had his glance not chanced upon it now, he might never have thought of the thing again.
The Han Li of today was a very different man from the boy of four years ago in knowledge and discernment alike. By devouring every sort of book to be found in Doctor Mo's chambers he had grown vastly more learned, and the practice of his formula had sharpened his wits well beyond their former edge. He could now tell, from the manifold wonders the bottle had once shown him, that it was beyond doubt a singular treasure, one of the rarest in all the world, with uses most uncommon.
All that remained for him to do was to dig out the true worth of this bottle and see whether it might serve his purposes—not let it lie in unending darkness at the bottom of a pouch, squandering its mysterious potency to no end.
Han Li took the bottle out, yet he was in no haste to open it. With the eyes he had grown in four years, he scrutinized it anew, hunting for any detail he might have missed before.
But to his regret, after turning it over and over and inspecting it with the utmost care several times over, he found nothing new at all.
Han Li wasted no more time on fruitless peering. He carefully drew off the stoppered lid. Within, the drop of emerald liquid still lay quietly at the bottom of the bottle, in no way different from four years ago.
Han Li understood very well that all the bottle's secrets very likely lay in that single tiny drop of green. The liquid must surely hold some property he had not yet discovered, and to get at its secret he would have to find some small living creature and perform upon it a cruel experiment on the body alive.
But it was night, and the world outside was dark—no proper time to go abroad searching for living quarry. And after a hard day and half the night spent in toil and anxiety, Han Li found he was quite worn out. Besides, even were he to find some beast, under the dim and flickering lamplight of night, if he could not make out the precise changes of the trial, would not all his labor have gone for nothing?
Having weighed the matter fully, Han Li resolved to sleep, and to rest himself thoroughly for one night, performing the experiment on the morrow. And who knew but that some great wonder might be waiting for him when the night was done—so he hoped as he laid himself down to sleep.
The next morning, after Han Li rose and washed himself, he went first to the great kitchen beyond the valley and ate a plain breakfast. In the old days, when Doctor Mo had still been up at the sect, it had been his habit to have the kitchen send meals directly up to Spirit Hands Valley, and Han Li, basking in Doctor Mo's reflected glory, had not needed to go beyond the valley for his meals either, for the cook brought his share along. But now that Doctor Mo was away from the Sect of Seven Mysteries, the folk of the kitchen naturally no longer carried food to his door. This set Han Li to reflecting, with no little sourness, on how cringingly servile the kitchen stewards were, and how he had come to know the sweet power that rank and office can command.
When he had finished his breakfast, Han Li did not leave the kitchen at once. Instead he sought out the steward, laid out a few small coins of silver, and traded them for two young wild rabbits with close gray fur, both of them lively and kicking, which he brought back to Spirit Hands Valley.
Back in the valley, Han Li tethered the rabbits in a broad, open patch of the herb garden and left them to bake under the scorching sun.
Only when they had grown limp with the heat and parched of throat did he fetch a great white porcelain bowl. Carefully he poured the green liquid from the bottle into the bowl and mixed in some plain water.
That single drop of liquid, no larger than a bean, dissolved readily into the water and turned the whole bowl a bright jade green. One look at that green sent a deep cold welling up, unbidden, from the beholder's heart.
He laid the bowl of watered-down liquid beside the thirsty rabbits. Already dried out by the sun and mad with thirst, they crowded eagerly around the rim and drank the water down in great gulps. Not wishing to let them take too much at one go, Han Li drew the bowl away again once they had drunk about half.
Then he stood to one side with the porcelain bowl in hand, patiently waiting to see what curious change might come upon the rabbits.
The time passed but briefly—the space of half a burning joss stick, no more—when the rabbits began to leap and frisk in agitation, and then to grow more and more frantic, their movements more violent with every instant. Then the startling transformation set in: beneath their fur, welts the size of hen's eggs began to swell up, more and more of them, until they covered the whole body, and then ran together into one unbroken mass. The rabbits' bodies, grown larger than they had any right to be by a full circle in girth, sat upon their small heads with a look that was almost comical.
The bloated carcasses held that size only a little while, then swelled once more, slowly at first and ever faster, as though some unseen gas were being pumped ceaselessly into them, stretching them larger and rounder and still more taut. At last their bodies bellied out like two great watermelons, round and taut as a pair of blown-up balls.
Watching the rabbits' bodies turn monstrous and strange before his very eyes, and hearing their agonized shrieks, Han Li felt a cold dread creep over him.
All that was happening had gone far beyond anything he had imagined. Had the nameless liquid proved some deadly poison, or some miracle drug that magnified one's power, that would have been within the bounds of his guessing. But that so hair-raising a sight should come of it—the very bodies of the rabbits puffed up as though blown full with a breath, into shapes so horrid and strange—this he could never have foreseen.