After leaving the shop I thought over everything I had consumed since entering the city. While I might have become infected by something at the beast merchant’s place, such as being exposed to something in a spirit beast’s feces, I use the cleansing technique often enough that it was unlikely that the source was a cross-contaminant I picked up there. Other than that all I had drunk was a bit of spirit water, some spirit tea, and the rainbow fruits. My limited diet last night should greatly narrow down the options, especially compared to the hundreds of things previously infected people had consumed which would have had to be checked.
The water and the fruit were the most likely in my opinion. The water for the tea had been heated to almost boiling, too hot for most lifeforms to survive, and the leaves would have been sterilized in that hot water. The spirit water, however, had just been pulled out of a well, and the fruit was brought in daily from an orchard outside the city wall as far as I knew, as the fruit merchant had told someone that as I waited in line.
Poisoning a common water source seemed the most likely, and the well behind the family estate was initial level three, so I returned to the family estate where I had gotten the water from a well, and drew up a bucket of water. Once I had it in my hands I improved all of my senses to their limit one at a time and examined it. While I couldn’t be sure, as I could only sense things as small as a normal human cell, I found no evidence of anything in the water that was dangerous, at most seeing a few varieties of algae. The family had managed to keep their well quite clean.
Could the source be the fruit? I didn’t know if the ambassador had eaten any of the fruit, or any fruit at all, since arriving in the city, but it was my best guess at this point. I pulled the fruit out of my bag and examined them. None of them seemed infected, though. Maybe I had gotten unlucky and eaten an infected one, but most of them were uninfected?
I went to the fruit merchant and started examining his produce. None of the rainbow fruit seemed infected though. Maybe the parasites were just too small, then? I looked over a few more fruits of various types, but didn’t see anything. When I noticed him looking at me, annoyed, I took ten more rainbow fruits and paid for them, then returned to the estate. Maybe I would need to hatch the eggs and let them grow to see the parasites? While my limited diet had greatly narrowed the options, I had essentially run out of those options.
Once at the estate I poured the spirit water into two bowls, then crushed one of the fruits I bought yesterday into one and one of the fruits from today into another, storing the pits after washing them. After all, these were level two plants seeds, so I would need to plant them once I was back on Earth.
I knew I would have to wait a few minutes or maybe even an hour before I would see anything, so I examined the bowls to make sure that nothing had happened yet, and went to get the tea pot. I hadn’t finished it last night, but the tea inside was cold now, so I would need to make more. I poured it into the sink and called to Jiang, asking if she had any more of the tea leaves, and she answered that she did. When I went to rinse out the pot, however, I saw several things that didn’t look like tea leaves stuck to the sides. I focused on them, only to see several barely alive parasites stuck to the sides of the pot.
As most of my evidence had just went down the sink, I asked Jiang to follow me and quickly went to ambassador’s room. He allowed me to enter. “Sir, you wouldn’t happen to have any tea left over from last night, would you?”
“Want to try some?” he asked. “Well, I didn’t finish the pot, and haven’t made any more yet, as I was waiting for Jiang to make it for me. I’m not very good at making it, after all. It’s cold but you can have it if you want.”
“Good.” I said, then went over to the pot and removed the lid. While it wasn’t very obvious, if you looked carefully you would occasionally see a one or two millimeter long creature swimming in what was left of it. The fact that the water and tea were both originally level three had likely allowed some of them to survive this long on the qi it contained.
I showed the tea to both the ambassador and Jiang, and, while Jiang had to amplify her sight to its limit just to see the detail, they both saw them too. “So, it looks like you found the source.” said the ambassador.
“One of them, at least.” I said. “Other sources may be infected as well. Still, I will need to borrow your tea pot. I need to show the alchemist what I found. Hopefully she can use her political connections to do something about it.”
He nodded and Jiang and I hurried to the shop. When we arrived, I immediately asked to see the alchemist. When she came to the front of the store, I showed her the pot. “I also saw some parasites in my own tea pot, though they were dead and I poured it down the sink before I realized what they were. We were drinking two different types of tea, though, Purple Cloud for him and Blood Marrow for me, so it isn’t just one variety that’s infected.”
She nodded and picked up a note jade. After touching it to her forehead for a few seconds she ordered her apprentice to run it to Physician Ye. She bowed and left, but I was confused. “How can you send a message directly to the councilor?” I asked. “Are you one of his informants in the city?”
She shook her head. “While anyone can officially send a message to any councilor, as they are supposed to represent the people’s interest as well, in practice only special people will actually have their messages read. I happen to be one of those people because he is the head of my family.” I was surprised by this statement. “You never asked my name, by the way. It’s Ye Jai. Physician Ye is my great grandfather.” I nodded in surprise. “It’s actually why I decided to become an alchemist. Though my family isn’t as obsessed with producing alchemists as the Ji family, most of us want to follow the patriarch’s path.”
We sat there for a few minutes talking before the door was pushed open and several level four people in armor and one level five old man in white robes stepped inside. Ye Jai immediately knelt, and I bowed to the man. “So, I hear you have evidence as to the source of this outbreak?” he asked, and Ye Jai nodded and grabbed the teapot.
“Yes sir,” she said, and showed it to him. “This man brought it this pot of tea. He and his master arrived in town yesterday and immediately became infected. We believe this is what infected his master, though he drank a different variety and was also infected.”
The Physician nodded and looked at me. “Is what she said true?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Yes, sir. I just realized the source a few minutes ago and immediately came here.”
He nodded. “And where did you get this tea?” he asked.
“The shop next door.” I said.
He nodded, then motioned towards his men. “Come with me.” he said, not addressing me directly, though I knew he was doing so. We went next door, where the guards quickly entered and surrounded the employees before stepping behind the counter to block them from the cabinets.
“By order of Physician Ye,” said the old man, “This establishment is hereby closed as a public health threat.”
The manager came out of the back room and stormed over to the councilor. “How dare you shut down my establishment for no reason!” he said. “Is this how a councilor is supposed to conduct themselves? I assume you are helping another tea house sully my reputation.”
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“You have been selling the people tea which is infected with a qi feeding parasite.” he said. The people of the city looked surprised, but also like they had suddenly realized something. Apparently, knowledge of the parasite’s existence wasn’t as limited as I thought. “Do you deny it?”
The manager looked surprised. “Of course I do.” he said. “It simply isn’t true, and you have no evidence that it is.”
The Physician motioned to me and asked me to tell my story. I told them how I had bought three verities of tea yesterday, made two of them, and both of them contained parasites.
“Purely circumstantial evidence.” said the manager. “They likely used a common water source and the source is contaminated.” he said.
“Perhaps.” said the physician, “but we are going to test that. Use the same water source you use to make tea in your shop. We will select three varieties of tea at random from your shelves, and you will make three pots of tea. If any of them are infected, then this is likely a source of the parasite, even if it isn’t the only one.” He pulled out two ten sided dice and rolled them three times, pulling tea from the three drawers the corresponded to those numbers. As there were one hundred and twenty shelves, this didn’t cover all of them, but it covered most of them.
The man pulled out enough leaves for a pot from each drawer and started making the tea in front of everyone. The physician knew that, in front of so many people who were watching him from every angle, he couldn’t alter the preparation to kill the eggs before they hatched, so he was willing to let the man make the pots of tea simply for dramatic reasons.
When the man was finished, he waved his hands at the pots. “See, no parasites. This is a clear abuse of your authority.”
The physician stepped forward and held his hands towards the pots, and they were surrounded in a qi aura. “We all know that the parasites grow exponentially faster with level five qi densities.” he said. A few suspenseful minutes later, he ended the technique. “Now, would anyone like to step forward and look into the pots?” Several people volunteered, and stepped towards the pots as a guard pulled the manager away from them so that he couldn’t sabotage anything.
The first man, in the middle of level two, looked into the three pots. “Well, I don’t see anything in those two, but this one has tiny black worms in it.”
“You simply don’t have good enough eyesight.” said the manager. “Those are black pollen from the tea tree. They help amplify the effects.”
Someone else in the late third level looked into them. “No, they are moving.” she said. “Pollen would only move with the current or maybe stretch or constrict with heating. These are almost swimming. And he simply missed the ones in the other pots, as the tea is too dark in one and too cloudy in the other.”
Several other level three and four cultivators, including me, took a look and verified what the woman had said. The physician approached the manager. “Do you still want to claim persecution?” he asked.
“No, clearly this is instead discrimination.” he said, apparently changing tactics. “You have a problem with spirit beasts owning businesses, because it means you have to treat us as equals and not servants or slaves. You obviously had someone poison my tea supply to frame me.”
“I don’t have a problem with spirit beasts.” the physician said. “I have a problem with people who sabotage their own business and infect their own customers. Do you mind telling us why you did it, so we don’t have to use unpleasant methods to acquire the knowledge?”
“So, not only did you destroy my business and poison my customers because you hate my kind, but now you are going to torture me to force a confession and cover up for your crimes?” he asked. While he sounded convincing, something told me that he was just making things up. As I watched he grew much larger, a full three meters tall, and his body shifted to take on the form of an ice wolf. “If you think you can take me down easily, then do your worst!” he growled in a deep voice, then howled before jumping at the nearest guard.
Physician Ye threw a few qi blasts at him, some sort of sleep spell as best I could tell from the qi’s energy, but it bounced harmlessly off of him. He must have some sort of barrier that can protect against level five attacks. He leapt off of the dead guard and at the Physician, and the physician was forced to dodge. The wolf managed to bite him a few times, as the Physician’s combat skills weren’t anywhere near as good as the manager’s, so he was only able to dodge around seventy percent of the time.
Eventually he managed to back away and throw eight giant thorns imbued with Wood qi at the beast, four from each hand. Five of them hit the barrier and fell to the ground, but three stuck into the barrier and continued to try to push their way through. I assumed it was something like the Flight or Improved Flight ability, but applied to a weapon, similar to how telekinesis was just Levitation applied to the object.
After a few seconds the three made it through the barrier and embedded themselves in his shoulder. Seeing that he was losing, the manager looked at the door. I realized that he was going to flee and used my lightning speed to reach the doorway first and block its path. The wolf had already leapt for the door by then, and hit me at full speed, knocking me backwards by five meters and landing on top of me, using me as a skateboard to slide that distance. He looked angry that I had slowed his escape and was about to bite off my head before running away, so I used the only thing I had that might be able to hurt it.
A large bolt of qi struck it as the qi rushed into the depleted area I created just behind it’s middle back, and it howled in pain. Some of the electricity went through me, as I was partially grounding the beast, but I was far more resistant to lightning than it, even being more than a minor realm lower, so I was able to resist the force.
I pulled several talismans from my bag and activated a stack of twenty, making him the target again. This time a bolt that was several times larger struck him, and the manager seized up, the electricity causing all of his muscles to tighten. The wolf fell to the side and I could smell burnt hair and flesh as it did so.
I got up and took several steps backwards. If I hadn’t activated the seal plate before entering the place, knowing that combat was likely, I would probably be dead right now, my head cracked open by the impact with the pavement, but as it was, I simply had several bruises and maybe a cracked rib, with the barrier having dropped to late level three. Apparently a late level four cultivator’s physical attack can’t be fully blocked by the early level four barrier.
“Are you alright?” asked the physician when he came outside. Four guards had run over to the fallen wolf and were tying its hands and feet together. The manager struggled to resist the arrest, but had lost much of its will to fight when I seriously wounded him. One guard looked at the wound and started treating it. While he didn’t have great medical skills or a large number of pills, he did have a basic medical kit which included a bottle of burn cream. The man applied about half of it to the wound and most of the manager’s pain seemed to go away.
I nodded. “Some bruising on my back and a cracked rib, but otherwise I’m fine. I was using a barrier device at the time, and it saved my life.” He nodded, then held his hand towards me. I was surrounded in a green light and all of my wounds quickly repaired themselves.
“Good thinking.” said the Physician. “Without a barrier, I doubt anything short of Spirit techniques could have saved your life.” He most likely meant dragging me back from the underworld or preventing me from going there, repairing my body, then forcing me back into it. While I had heard of such technique on earth, mostly as theoretical ways to raise the dead, I didn’t know that they existed on this world. “I am going to order that every food service establishment and food vendor in the city have their goods tested just to make sure that they aren’t also infecting the people. I will give special focus to the tea houses, as we know at least one was infected. While the people of this city, especially cultivators, love tea, I doubt only one tea house can infect virtually every level three, four and five in the city.”
I nodded. “Then good luck in your investigation.” I said, and bowed.
“You don’t wish to help?” he asked. “It pays well.”
I shook my head. “I believe I will be helping Ye Jai find a cure for it which doesn’t require one to decrease their cultivation to level two.”
He nodded. “Good thinking. We need a better way to restore the people of this city to full health. In that case, if she is willing to work for me doing research, I will pay both of you well.” Ye Jai heard us speaking and knelt again before thanking him for the opportunity.
One of the guards tried to lift the manager off of the ground, but he was too heavy to carry normally. The guard was forced to put the manager in a beast bag and carry him back to the guard station like that, so that his arrest could be officially processed and his wounds could be treated by the physician at the guard shack.
I said goodbye to the Councilor and returned to Ye Jai’s shop so that she, Jiang, and I could get to work. I suspected that the investigation would be much easier and likely less painful than finding a medical solution, as my role in this endeavor would most likely to play the role of a guinea pig due to my lack of alchemical knowledge.
