Xiu Mei's laboratory was a contained anarchy; a glorious riot of life and chaos struggling to break free from the walls of a godforsaken shack in the purulent heart of Golden Carp City. You didn't smell the air, you chewed it: a thick soup of damp earth, the sharp bite of spiritual ginger root, and the feverish sweetness of the Lunar Lotus Flowers that grew wild in the cracks of the floor, fed by a constant drip of Qi-infused water.
"No, no, no!" Xiu Mei shouted, throwing a gnarled root against the wall. It bounced with a dull thud and rolled into a corner. "Your vibration is off-key! You're singing in the tone of stubbornness, not strength!"
She danced through the cramped space, her three fiery red fox tails moving behind her like liquid flames. One moment, she would brush against a cauldron to adjust its temperature; the next, she would sweep away a pile of dry leaves with a gesture of impatience. Her hair, the same color as her tails, was a wild cascade held back by a mere leather tie. Her face, normally a sharp, almost feline beauty, was smudged with soot and fixed in a scowl of creative fury.
She was perfecting a Guts Potion for her network of street kids, the Rat Pack. It wasn't a powerful elixir, but it kept them warm on cold nights and gave them a bit of liquid courage to face a world that would rather they didn't exist. For Xiu Mei, this was no minor alchemy. It was a declaration of war.
"Boss!"
Sparrow, her thirteen-year-old lieutenant, appeared in the doorway with the subtlety of a switchblade flicking open in a dark alley. Her eyes, far too old for her dirty face, gleamed with a mix of alarm and greed.
"We've got a client. A weird one. The kind that smells like trouble and money."
Xiu Mei didn't even turn around.
"If he wants a love potion, tell him love is a poison I don't bother distilling. If he wants fortune, tell him to look for it at the bottom of a wine jug."
"He doesn't want any of that," Sparrow insisted, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "It's a custom order. And... he paid an advance."
The girl opened her small cloth pouch and emptied its contents onto Xiu Mei's workbench. The sound of five gold coins clattering on the wood was a dead, cold noise, completely out of place in the vibrant chaos of the lab.
Xiu Mei froze. She turned slowly. Her golden eyes, usually full of a wild spark, narrowed into two dangerous slits. Gold. The currency of the guilds, of the sects, of people who believed they could buy the world's soul.
"Who is he?" she hissed, her voice losing its warmth and becoming as sharp as ice.
"Don't know. Some skinny guy. Talks funny, uses words I don't get," Sparrow said, holding out a lacquered wooden box and a roll of high-quality paper. "He said this would explain everything."
"Out," Xiu Mei ordered. "I will analyze this... insolence."
Sparrow didn't need to be told twice. She vanished.
Alone, Xiu Mei stared at the gold coins with pure disdain. Did this fool believe that her art, the sacred dance of the Natural Dao, was a commodity? Rage, a bitter memory of her humiliation at the hands of the Alchemists' Guild, rose in her throat. She grabbed the scroll, intending to use it to light the fire under her main cauldron. It was expensive paper; it would burn well.
But as she brought it to the flame, her eyes caught the first line of text. She stopped.
"Request for Proposal (RFP) for the Creation of a Mid-Grade Constitutional Strengthening Agent."
"Request for... what?" she muttered, her anger momentarily replaced by complete and utter bewilderment.
She lowered the scroll and read on. Every word was a nail in the coffin of her fury and a brick in the palace of her fascination.
"Technical Requirement: The final product must act as a 'systemic heat sink,' increasing meridian elasticity and the Qi core's load capacity to manage a recent and rapid increase in power output. Objective: to resolve a fundamental hardware incompatibility in a high-potential biological asset."
Xiu Mei read the sentence three times. Biological asset. Hardware incompatibility. Heat sink. The language was so alien, so clinical, so utterly devoid of soul that it should have been an insult. But it wasn't. It was the most brilliant and precise diagnosis she had ever read. This stranger wasn't describing an illness; he was describing a system failure. A failure that she, intuitively, understood perfectly.
With trembling hands, she opened the wooden box. The scent that wafted out hit her like a wave: Glacial Soul Grass, pure and cold as a mountaintop, and a shard of Earth-Heart Crystal, vibrating with a dense, stable energy.
Then she returned to the parchment, reading the ingredient specifications.
"Spirit Wolf Blood: must be centrifuged..."
"Fire Rhino Horn Powder: must be ground with a river jade mortar to prevent elemental Qi dissonance..."
"Heresy!" she screamed into the silence of her lab. "No one speaks of nature's gifts like that! You don't 'centrifuge' blood, you sing to it so it yields its spirit! You don't avoid 'dissonance,' you seek harmony!"
This man—it had to be a man, no woman would be so obtuse—was an idiot. A genius, but an idiot. A being who understood the "what" with terrifying clarity, but had absolutely no idea of the "how." His logic was perfect and, at the same time, completely wrong.
A wild, dangerous laugh erupted from her chest. The insult had transformed into the most exciting challenge of her life. It was no longer about the gold. It was about pride. It was about proving to this mechanical, soulless mind that the true power of alchemy lay not in technical specifications, but in the dance, in the music, in the heart.
"You want a heat sink, you unfeeling golem?" she snapped at the scroll. "I'll give you a heat sink. I'll give you a symphony that will make your stupid metal soul weep. And I'll do it my way!"
For the next forty-eight hours, Xiu Mei's lab became a hurricane. She didn't follow the scroll's cold instructions. She used it as a treasure map to find a problem, then tossed it aside to invent her own solution.
She danced instead of measuring. She sang instead of calculating. She was guided by the color of the ingredients' aura instead of their weight. She held the Earth-Heart Crystal to her forehead, not to analyze it, but to "listen to its story," feeling its slow, patient vibration.
"Yes, yes, I understand you now," she whispered to the crystal. "You don't want to be mixed with the wolf's blood. You want to be the foundation, the anchor. You want to give the fire a place to rest."
She ground the Fire Rhino Horn not with a mortar, but between two flat stones, humming a lullaby to "calm its fury" and extract its heat without its aggression. She infused the Glacial Soul Grass not with water, but with her own icy breath, exhaling on it until every leaf shimmered with a frost of pure Yin Qi.
The process was a chaos of intuition and raw power. It was the antithesis of the client's method. It was wild art versus sterile science. And at the center of it all, she was the conductor, the shaman, the artist.
At dawn on the third day, the work was done. In the center of her table, floating a millimeter above the surface of a lotus leaf, was not a pill, but a jewel. A perfect, thumbnail-sized sphere of iridescent white that captured the light and broke it into a rainbow of colors. It wasn't an inert object; it pulsed gently with a slow, steady rhythm, like a miniature heart.
It didn't just strengthen the body. It didn't just dissipate heat. It harmonized. It balanced. It taught the body and Qi to dance together instead of fight. She called it the "Pill of the Jade Phoenix's Balance." It was, without a doubt, the greatest masterpiece she had ever created.
With the satisfied smile of a predator, she prepared for the meeting. For her disguise, she smudged soot on her cheek, put on a straw hat to hide her ears, and dressed in loose-fitting robes to conceal her tails and her figure. The genius disappeared, replaced by the "crazy old woman."
She called for Sparrow.
"The order is ready," she rasped in her disguised voice. "But there's been a change in terms."
The girl's eyes went wide. "A change?"
"The price has gone up," Xiu Mei said, a dangerous spark in her golden eyes. "I no longer want his gold."
She handed Sparrow a small silk box containing the pill.
"Give this to the client. Tell him the quality of the product speaks for itself. And tell him that if he wants more—if he wants to secure an exclusive production line for his 'biological asset'—the price is a meeting. Not with me. With the asset. I want to see the machine that needs a new soul with my own eyes. If he refuses, he can keep the pill as a free sample. But there will be no more."
Sparrow swallowed hard, nodding with a seriousness that belied her age. She understood perfectly. This was no longer a job. It was a negotiation, and her boss had just taken control of the table.
As the girl disappeared into the alleys, Xiu Mei stared out the window toward the distant, arrogant lights of the upper districts. The challenge had been answered. The prototype was ready. But mass production would require an investment that went beyond gold. It would require seeing if another's project was worthy of her genius, her Dao.
A crooked smile, full of an ancient foxy cunning, spread across her face. The next move belonged to the logical man. And Xiu Mei had the strange feeling that, for the first time in his life, he was about to face a variable he couldn't quantify on any of his stupid charts. He was about to face her.