The Codex felt like a bomb sitting in her satchel. Yet each time she tried to read it the letters slipped through her head. It was clear no work was getting done that night.

She couldn’t seem to stop smiling. She couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly be sad when the world was so bright, so various, so full of color. She smiled at a passing fly. She got lost in the swirling wood patterns of the floorboards. She flitted about weightless, a sprite of sunlight and fluff.

“I take it the date went well?” said Jin, passing her in the hall.

“Heh?” said Ruyi, who had been in the middle of deciding which flowers she’d use for the wedding. She always liked peonies.

Jin repeated his question and she giggled. “We’re getting married,” she informed him.

“…What?”

“Not yet. I mean, I haven’t asked her. But soon.”

“Uh,” said Jin. “Isn’t this a little fast? It was just one date—”

“Shut up, loverboy,” she snapped, flicking him up the nose. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“But… I do, though…”

“Not like this,” Ruyi insisted.

Jin opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and just sighed, defeated. “Well,” he said, smiling wearily. “I’m glad it went well.”

***

Ruyi walked without direction. She let the wind blow her wherever. Right now it was blowing her out the door and into the embrace of the darkening evening. The sky was a gradient of purple, shading to dusty gray at the edges.

There, in the yard, she passed a familiar face, a face she hadn’t seen in years—“Ling?”

The girl—woman now—looked up. Hardly anything about her looked the same; the years had added dead weight to her frame, cracked her skin, made a bird’s nest of her hair. Yet her eyes were still that striking color, like leaves in autumn.

“Hey!” Ruyi chirped. She felt weirdly bubbly. “Ling, wasn’t it? You’re back? It’s been so long!”

“Yeah,” said Ling. “Couldn’t make being an official work. So… yeah.” She blinked down at her gardening gloves.

“How’s your brother?”

Ling’s head snapped up. “You remember my brother?”

“His sickness is why you took this job, isn’t it? Is he doing okay?”

At that Ling’s face contorted in a guilty grimace. “He’s fine. Just fine. Excuse me, my lady.”

She tripped over herself to get away.

That was weird. Usually the servants tripped over themselves to do the opposite. And what was with that look? Ruyi passed over what she’d said but could find nothing too egregious.

The incident soon slipped out of her mind. Everything was slipping by today. It was nice.

***

Late at night, when she was on the verge of falling asleep, a thought pricked her euphoria the way a needle pricks a balloon.

She was thinking about what Jin had said his dream was. To start a bakery, to grow old with someone he loved…

What she’d liked so much about her relationship with Princess Song—‘please, call me Tingting,’ she’d whispered with their heads nuzzled together—on top of the many other little things—was how delightfully simple it was. It’d begun drunk, in a haze of joy, and there it lived now, untouched by the outside, their little private universe.

It was so easy to forget what Ruyi was.

Tingting was too kind to mention it. And Ruyi was too drunk to notice it. But it was there, hovering, a third thing which could only intrude after the kissing had ended and they’d waved their goodbyes and she lay swaddled in the dark, thinking.

Tingting was a Foundation level cultivator. She’d live well into her two hundreds, and when she reached Core she’d live far past three hundred. She had qi, the lifebreath of the Heavens, running through her.

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Ruyi was not even in Qi Condensation. She would be lucky to see a hundred.

Growing old had felt like an impossibility, something that happened to other people. But the future struck her then.

Frail, old, toothless, wheeled around by Tingting, still radiant and young and perfect. While beautiful young men and women sought Tingting’s hand and Ruyi batted them off with a cane, no longer attractive to her, no longer able to satisfy her. But Tingting wouldn’t complain, she wouldn’t falter or have an affair, she was too good for that. She would put on a brave face and try to love Ruyi ‘till the end, even as she secretly counted the days until she could be free and happy again.

Ruyi was trembling.

And she thought about when she’d read of babies with her condition, and how their families had tossed them from mountain-tops. She had thought it so horribly cruel; she hadn’t considered until now that it might be an act of mercy.

***

The next morning she planted herself in the library, cracked the Codex, and immediately realized she was in way over her head.

If it was hard, she could stomach it. Some reactions, especially the chained ones between highly volatile ingredients, could take days and hair-pulling and a not-insignificant amount of drugs to suss out. But this...

“What the Hell is a blue dragon’s tear?” There were no notes in the appendices. The tome simply listed it like it was common knowledge and breezed through. She found it featured in three other recipes and she supposed she could vaguely deduce its properties from observing its interactions, but it was all very hazy. And blue dragon’s tear was one of a dozen mystery ingredients.

When she first got the tome she’d expected a step-by-step ‘make yourself a demon’ manual. Instead the tome prattled on for half its length about long dead folk she had no interested in, chucked a bunch of inscrutable formulae at her in the second half, and threw up its hands.

Supposedly the first demon was born when a human took an elixir brewed nine times, made of nine rare ingredients.

Only Ruyi hadn’t heard of any of them, and none of them showed up in the annals of the Encyclopaedia Alchemica either. She’d checked the book in her mind, then checked the physical book too. Nope.

“You know who would know?” she said aloud after an afternoon of mostly metaphorically and a little physically banging her head against the wall. “Gao.”

Gao knew a frightening amount. Ruyi was honestly not sure why Gao was even a Master. If she tested for it Ruyi was certain the old woman could make Grandmaster. She hadn’t ever seen Gao stumped.

But one could not simply ask about the details of a forbidden long-lost text, surely. To do this Ruyi had to be clever.

***

“I am about to do something incredibly dangerous,” Ruyi announced as she strode into the lab. “Want to help make it less dangerous?”

“Fuck’s sake,” said Gao, glaring up from a scroll. “What is it?”

“First you have to promise me something. No tattling. Not to Mother, or Father, or to the Guild or the authorities.”

“No.”

“Then I’ll do it alone.”

A river of expletives left Gao’s mouth. “Fine! Idiot girl. What is it?”

“So I found this in the Emperor’s library...” She whipped out the Codex. “I think it’s a forgery, but it seems to be from a while ago. It has some interesting ideas. Worth studying.”

Gao snatched it from her hands. She began flipping through it, faster and faster, and the same transformation that hit Ruyi played across her face.

Finally, she nailed Ruyi with a glare. “Speak of this to no one.”

“What?” Ruyi snorted. “It’s not real.”

Gao hesitated.

“…Is it?”

“Can’t say,” muttered Gao, thumbing through the back pages. “I’ve seen formulations like this before in ancient texts, though only in fragments. Never in full, and never so well-preserved.”

“Wait. Are you serious?”

“Very,” said Gao. Then her face drooped and her eyes flashed and Ruyi recognized the oncoming of the ‘grave warning’ face. Every so often Gao would give of these. Ruyi listened to her about half the time. “Do not play with ancient magics, girl! I cannot overstate the dangers. It is not merely a matter of life and death. This concerns your soul! Promise me this.”

“Pshh. How dumb do you think I am? I’m not about to trust some untested recipe from some suspicious tome. There’s some neat ideas in here and I’m just curious, that’s all. Maybe I’ll play around with a few tests. Is that such a crime? Aren’t we researchers? Isn’t curiosity our job?”

“You are far too curious and far too flippant. You are not careful. I have not invested nearly a decade in you so you can blow yourself up chasing a ghost.”

Now Ruyi was actually starting to get annoyed. “I’m not eight anymore, if you haven’t noticed.”

“You act like a child when it concerns your core.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t pretend. We both know what this is about.” Gao slammed the tome shut.

“Oh, because you can see inside my head, is that it? You think I’m still some—some angry little girl who’s not gotten over the fact that she’s a cripple. You think this is all just silly Ruyi throwing her silly little tantrums.”

“Good. At least you’re self-aware.”

“Will you stop that!” she snarled. “You’re so patronizing! You never think I can do something ‘till I do it and shove it in your face. I hadn’t even been thinking about my core until you brought it up!”

“Calm down.”

“I’M NOT ANGRY!” Ruyi screamed. A few seconds passed filled only with her heavy breathing. “Okay. Fine. Maybe… maybe I’m a little angry.”

“I say your time is better spent on self-reflection. Get over it. Move on.”

“Well, I don’t care what you say.” Ruyi crossed her arms. “And I am over it. I haven’t thought about my core in ages. Are you going to help me or not?”

Gao buried her face in her palms. When she resurfaced she looked resigned. “What do you need?”

“Just properties and energy maps.” Ruyi handed her a list of foreign names. “I’ve never heard of any of these. Did they all go extinct?”

“No,” sighed Gao. “These are simply alternate names some alchemists used in the old days, before standardized naming conventions. ‘Blue dragon’s tears’ means blue lotus extract.”

Gao annotated the full list, one by one, grumbling as she went. But before she handed it over she said, “This is an academic study. Yes?”

“Who do you think I am?” She snatched it and strode off with her head held high. Seconds later the door clanged angrily open. A slash of sunlight fell across Gao’s face.

Gao watched her go, her sole eye narrowed.

In this light, from the right angle, her pupil almost seemed to glow red.