Orange-crest stared at the array of herbs spread out before him. He lifted one paw, letting it slowly drift over to the shavings of Two-Shadowed Yew roots. His master's face was as inscrutable as an overcast sky, revealing nothing of the weather to come.

The paw returned to the table. Orange-crest already knew those were poisonous. They did have the correct sort of wood qi for the Jade Bone Elixirs, and they were the second least poisonous part of the tree, except for the wood itself. But they were clearly the wrong answer. There was no reason to add poison to a pill like this if he didn't have to.

"I'll not give you suggestions until you truly choose your ingredients." His master said, hardly looking up from where he was grinding some truly foul smelling leaves into a paste.

"But why? You always have suggestions."

"Because you won't truly be an alchemist until you don't need them. A tent of strategists can write a thousand brilliant battle plans, but a general chooses but one. So to is it with alchemists. True glory can only lie with the man who risks the cauldron explosion, or ingests the novel pill."

"But you're gonna give me suggestions anyway."

"You'll remember them better if I tell you that your choices would have killed your fellow disciples."

Orange-crest frowned at his master.

"My choices wouldn't be that bad."

"Poison is not the only way a faulty pill can kill. The battlefield is not a place that tolerates gastrointestinal distress, or sudden bouts of chills. Any elemental imbalance can be life threatening if the patient is weak, or the situation harsh. Alchemy is not an art in which 'good enough' is an acceptable standard of quality."

"Fine, fine." Orange-crest knew his master wouldn't budge on this. So he returned to his herbs. It was very stupid that pill formulas were not complete recipes. Most of them were incomplete to some degree. They listed a specific set of active ingredients, but they typically were not so specific about the secondary ones. Many herbs only grew in certain places, so the more complete a recipe was, the fewer people that would have all the herbs to hand to refine it. Instead, many of his master's books listed general categories of properties that each secondary ingredient needed to meet. Even these were not strict rules, according to his master. But orange-crest was not even close to the level of mastery required to substitute out entire sections of the recipe, subsuming one type of elemental qi to fill the place of another.

The monkey had enough humility to know that. He was smart enough to come up with his own recipes. But that was much easier than so thoroughly altering someone else's work. When he'd invented the Two-Worm Monkey Wine, or his yet unnamed centipede wine, he'd just followed the principles of nature. Find things that were good for him, and put them together in a way that was good for them.

But to change a pill like that, he had to understand not just nature, but the way the man inventing it had thought. And that was a lot more difficult.

Orange-crest stared back at the table, letting the rhythmic drone of his master's stone mill wash over him.

He had Bone-White Jade Grass. That was the active ingredient, the source of the earthen qi that would make the imbiber's bones as hard as his, at least for an hour or so. They were annoyingly spindly little things that grew alone in hard-packed earth, like little fragments of shattered bone poking up out of the ground. Orange-crest had seen them before on the mountain, even brought some back for his master. But he'd never seen a whole pile of them like this, dry and ready to be powdered. They were solitary plants in the wild.

He needed at least three other ingredients. Something of water, because bones were of water, and because earth restrained water, so you needed to support what was restrained to avoid an imbalance. By the same principle, he needed something of wood, to restrain the excesses of earth. To keep the qi from rioting, from making the flesh heavy or stiff.

He had those. Or, good options at least. Water was Dewcatch Lichen. He'd told his master to purchase that, because it was pretty cheap at two spirit stones a handful, and because he'd never seen any watercrest or lotuses on the Azure Mountain. It was probably too cold for them.

Wood was easy. Orange-crest had a good mixture of those, gathered by his own hand or picked from his master's garden. He wasn't using the Yew Shavings, but he felt like mixing three different vines and grasses would provide a good, non-toxic, blend of wood qi.

Orange-crest was pretty sure those three herbs made a valid pill. But a good one? One worthy of his companions trusting their lives to it? That he was not so sure about it. He had a lot of restraining, moderating, influences, and not a lot of make-bones-hard influences. Bone-White Jade Grass was much more expensive than Dewcatch Lichen, and his master had not brought home an excessive amount.

The pill would do what it was supposed to, but it would be... Weak.

That was the third thing. The thing he was lacking. He needed something to make the earth stronger. Fire, to feed it. Because the five element diagram said fire cooled to make earth. Or more earth, to pile the mountain of qi higher. But fire plants were rare, because plants were flammable. And so many of the cabinets that should have held good ones were empty, because his master had refined that Quaternary Heart-Fire Pill last year and never refilled them. And adding more earth was tricky, because it couldn't just be any earth. The active ingredient was Bone-White Jade Grass for a reason, not every earthen qi so easily lent itself to strengthening bones.

"It is harder, to make things for others." Orange-crest said eventually.

Li Xun looked up from where he was adding yet more awful smelling herbs to his mill.

"It is, isn't it?" He said, with a sad smile.

Orange-crest thought about Han Jian. About his flawed core, and the role his brother had played in forging it. He could hardly imagine how Li Xun tormented himself about that mistake. His new mind was capable of so much more shame and regret than his old one, he could hardly imagine just how fiercely his brother could have lashed himself across the lonely decades.

"How did you do it?" The monkey asked.

"Do what?"

"Make my bath."

There was so much unspoken, behind those three words. The comparisons, to Han Jian and Zhang De. The dark answer orange-crest already knew, the way his master had so often held his life in distracted fingers in those early days. Yet, thought he'd begun the process thinking of orange-crest as little more than a test subject, the monkey knew when he'd stepped into the cauldron; Li Xun had believed with all his heart that the process was as safe as he could possibly make it.

He'd been wrong. But orange-crest trusted he'd not been reckless.

"It was pride at first, that drove me to begin." Li Xun said slowly. "To disregard the difficulty, and the danger. But in the end, it was also pride that drove me to finish. To see what was with clear eyes, and to succeed all the same. Your heaven-defying stone helped. Earthen qi of that power and purity let me refrain from compromising the treatment's efficacy too much. Without it, you certainly would not have been able to trade blows with Disciple Yang, or take on a form of stone. But it would have worked. I may have taken Scouring Medicine as my daoist name, but even I know that sometimes true pride as an alchemist is knowing the limitations of your ingredients, and working within them."

Orange-crest hummed. Brother Li Xun could be a hypocrite sometimes, but even when he was, he was often right. It was a very annoying quality. The monkey sat for a time and thought, deciding which the virtues his master claimed he would seek to emulate.

Stolen novel; please report.

"I know me." The monkey eventually said. "Know what I can take. What I can eat. Is harder, with others."

"Is that it? Or do you just care about poisoning them more than you do poisoning yourself?"

"It's not poisoning if you're a monkey. Just bad fruit."

"Mmhm." Li Xun did not sound very convinced. Maybe orange-crest was a hypocrite too sometimes.

Orange-crest sighed. The he rose and began clearing away the many many herbs he had withdrawn from the cabinets. When he finished, there were only five ingredients left. He sat down and placed his paws on the table, awaiting judgement.

"Here. I have the recipe. Come give me your sage suggestions, Master Brother Daoist Scouring Medicine."

Li Xun hardly needed a moment. His gaze swept across the five herbs, taking them in.

"That will work. Be sure to rehydrate the lichen first. As the name suggests, it'll do better placed outside to catch dew than it will being placed in a bowl of water. You'll need every scrap of potency you can get with that many wood herbs. But it will work. And more importantly, it will be safe for even a mortal to take."

Orange-crest flashed his master a sharp-toothed smile.

"No. You're missing an ingredient."

Li Xun frowned.

"I only see five herbs on the table."

"We don't just make pills with plants."

His master's brow furrowed. He finally rose from his wheel, crossing the room to inspect the ingredients more closely.

"I don't see any spirit beast body parts or natural treasures either. Are you hiding another heaven-defying treasure in your palm? You haven't had time to mysteriously disappear on me for a while with all the training we've been putting you through."

"Nope. Not in my palm. Not hiding."

Orange-crest held his tongue until the moment he saw a flicker of recognition cross his master's face. Then he spoke before Li Xun could.

"Hair of a Stone Monkey. I have strong bones, and a body of earth. Two active ingredients."

Li Xun took a deep breath, then let it out slowly.

"That... So foolish it just might work. I suppose you are an alchemist after my own heart after all."

His master suddenly smiled. Orange-crest shivered. That was one of his master's wicked smiles.

"Let me find my tweezers. I don't have any charts for this. I'm still not entirely sure if Stone Monkeys are even a true species of spirit beast, or if you're just a unique existence. We're going to need a great many hairs. For proper testing."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This time, orange-crest was not asleep when someone knocked on the door. He was getting ready for bed though. For a heady week there, the monkey had thought he'd grown beyond the need for sleep. That through the crucible of cultivation, slumber had become something optional. Then the debt he'd incurred had caught up with him in a hurry. His cultivation allowed him to hold the call of dreams at bay for a time, but when sleep finally arrived, it was all the more implacable for the delay. After staying up cultivating and fighting for five days straight, it'd taken three days of retiring early and rising late before he really felt like himself again.

It left the monkey wondering how much of his frantic anxiety about the hierarchy of the world was something he'd realized and kept long buried, and how much of it was sleep deprivation. This new world had many wonders, but not all of it's dark corners were kind. Orange-crest did not like the idea of altered states of mind. Not in the abstract at least. He liked being drunk very much. But there was an idea there, something at the intersection of sleep deprivation and drunkenness. A question of identity. Were his sleep deprived fears really his? If he could only perform a technique will drunk, did he really know it? If he was a different monkey under different conditions, who really was orange-crest?

It was not something unknown to him on Mount Yuelu. Red-eyes was perhaps the most stark example in all the world of a monkey whose fundamental nature as a being changed drastically depending on how much pain he was in. But the old orange-crest had never really considered what that meant, about who red-eyes was. The potential terror in the idea of being someone inconstant.

He should learn the recipe for the Mind-Opening Pill. Collect a dozen hundred year old ginsengs. It did not seem fair, that of all his kind, only he had been granted this blessing.

Or, perhaps, this curse. Orange-crest froze, halfway out of his nest of robes. Was it his right, to do what had been done to him to others? Could they understand it well enough to choose? Could he have, if he'd been offered a choice?

He still wanted to know the recipe. To have the option. He'd ask his master tomorrow.

The knock repeated, and orange-crest shook away the dark thoughts and got up. Han Jian did not knock. It would be Yang Wei. Either something had changed, or it was time.

Orange-crest might not like caves, but it seemed he could not escape them. The treasures of nature and the secrets of men called him back, time and time again.

The monkey took a deep breath. Fearless. That was what he sought to be. If he was going to do something against his better judgement, he would not delve forth by half measures. Orange-crest filled his head with thoughts of treasure. A staff wrought by the hands of the Azure Mountain Patriarch, a column of formless quicksilver that would shift with his whims like Hu Weimin's Formless Blade. The inheritance of Grand Elder Shen, who had once born the name Daoist Endless Road. He didn't know what it would be, but a man who was said to have walked the very breadth of the world surely had left something amazing behind. Or perhaps all they would find would be a few cuttings of Nine-Breath Lingzhi, and orange-crest would have to console himself by splitting a mountain of spirit stones between himself and the four men.

Whatever would come, the monkey was excited. Orange-crest grabbed the door, and swung it all the way open, already looking up to meet Yang Wei's gaze.

"It is time. Xiao Wenchuan and the Seventh Prince are moving today or tomorrow."

Orange-crest stared at the figure standing in the downy shadows of the early evening. The man was bigger than he should be. Rounder. Less intimidating.

"You're supposed to be Yang Wei." Orange-crest told Wu Yingjie. "And I'm supposed to be waking you up to tell you that."

"Furry idiot." Wu Yingjie sighed. "You're not the only one who can make plans and talk to people. Some of us have not spent our entire initiate years training behind closed doors. I might not be a prodigy, but unlike you and Yang Wei, I do have friends. I found us a fifth. One who will make this mad venture something other than a convoluted suicide attempt."

Orange-crest stared at Wu Yingjie. He was dressed for an adventure, with leather armor added to his usual robe across his chest, and around his wrists and ankles.

"Is he any good?" The monkey asked, dubious.

"She," Wu Yingjie emphasized, "is better than either you or Disciple Yang in a fight. And more importantly, with her around, The Fathomless Lord won't just murder us and leave our bodies for the beasts of the depths."

"He wasn't gonna do that anyway."

"Forgive me if I do not revere your words as those of a deity. I already told Xiao Shulan about the plan. One way or another, if we're going, she's coming with us. If you have a problem with that, well..."

Wu Yingjie smiled, trying his best to look vicious and intimidating. It didn't really work. His face was far too soft and round, and he had no fangs.

"Then you can be the one to tell her no." He finished. "I'll happily watch, from a safe distance."

Orange-crest huffed. Yang Wei was going to be snooty about this. But orange-crest hadn't been told to invite Wu Yingjie, and he might be a hypocrite, but he wasn't that much of one.

"Fine." He said mulishly, acting more peeved than he really felt. "Made extra pills anyway. But no more."

"As if I would trust any pill that you handed me. You probably put your-" Wu Yingjie suddenly trailed off.

A shadow spread over orange-crest's shoulder, as his master stepped up to the threshold behind him. Li Xun had no doubt heard the entire conversation, but he was making orange-crest answer the door these days.

Wu Yingjie bowed, offering the monkey's master a martial salute.

"Daoist Scouring Medicine. This one is Outer Disciple Wu Yingjie."

"I have heard of you." Daoist Scouring Medicine said in a voice as cool as the evening air.

Wu Yingjie straightened a little more, and orange-crest pounced.

"Yingjie the Ogre was just saying he didn't want the pills we slaved over all day on. Is concerned, about the things I put in them."

"I said no such-"

"Shh." Orange-crest shushed. "No time, we must gather the allies! I am the fastest disciple, I'll do it! You can talk to my master. He can make you tea."

Wu Yingjie's eyes began to bulge visibly. Oh, he thought Li Xun was one of those humans. The serious-scary ones, who suffered no sleights, tolerated no disrespect. Wu Yingjie thought Daoist Scouring Medicine was... Respectable. He was, of course. Very worthy of respect. But that wasn't how men used that word. They meant demanding of respect, which somehow also meant either being very powerful, or never doing anything interesting.

Still, the idea of it almost brought a tear to a monkey's eye. Orange-crest might not cry like men did when overcome with emotion, but his face was so scrunched up from suppressing his laughter that he was all but squeezing the water out of his eyes.

Wu Yingjie sputtered, ineffectually protesting, seemingly torn between saying he'd get the others, and saying he'd make the tea.

"Fill my gourd with the bad-good wine!" Orange-crest shouted at his master as he rushed out the door. He doubted they were even in a hurry. Orange-crest would probably have plenty of time to review his equipment himself. They didn't want to leave at the same time Xiao Wenchuan and the Seventh Prince did anyway. They would need to give him some time to rile up and cut down everything in the shallower reaches of the under-sect. But seeing Wu Yingjie bowing his head and watching his tongue like this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

Orange-crest poured qi into his legs, relishing in the way his bare feet bit deep into the damp soil. He tore down the mountainside like a boulder on two feet, blasting his way through the foolish underbrush that dared stand between him and adventure.

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