An excerpt from the journal of Shuye Skullcrusher, Guardian of the Ancient Hill Forest:
This is a mess. I should be on vacation, tending to my newborn, but now I’m buried in a mountain of paperwork. The messengers who have to carry the sacks of scrolls to my house have joked about using a cart to carry all the messages. Every day my hands ache from writing hundreds of replies.
It all started when Baroness Violet gave me a small amount of spirit tea from her farm.
She apologized for the quality of the product and promised that she would be able to produce much better tea in a year or two.
The thing that kills me is that I believed her!
I’m not particularly fond of tea, so I gave most of it away. I should have known better. The people I gave it to either drank it or gave it away to someone else. Somehow, a small amount of tea found its way to the tea aficionados of the Wolf and Leopard clans.
Most of the tea drinkers said it was very ordinary spirit tea, but one person, a three-hundred-year-old member of the Wolf Clan who was born blind, fell into a coma when he drank it. Another, a respected scholar from the Leopard Clan, went into convulsions and then likewise fell unconscious. When they woke up around an hour later, they both claimed to have developed a new sense, as if they could now see the warmth emanating from living beings and objects, even in the darkest of nights. It was as though their eyes had become attuned to the unseen energies of the world, revealing secrets hidden from ordinary sight.
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My wife says this could all be a scam. The Wolf and Leopard clans could be making these claims to drive up the price of the tea that was gifted to them by a friend of a friend.
I drank the tea myself, as did dozens of others, and nothing happened to us, but now the wolves and leopards are all convinced they need to drink the tea to check if they can also acquire this strange new ability. Word spread swiftly to the other clans and now everyone wants it. The doctors, herbalists, and alchemists have been especially insistent about asking for samples to study.
The rice and vegetables from Emberstone Farm are in my care, but everyone knows that I’m merely the middleman for those items and that the choice of who to sell it to is out of my hands. The tea, on the other hand, was a personal gift, so people think I can get more of it without going through the White Tiger Clan.
Lady Violet promised to send me one more package of tea. Until then, I might just run away with my wife and baby to a faraway land to escape the endless sea of scrolls that's threatening to bury me alive.