Three months had passed since the Green Devil's gifts of poisoned hope. Wáng Shūfēn had worked with desperate intensity every waking hour, driven by knowledge that seventeen months had become fourteen, that time devoured her chances with each passing day.
Against all odds, she'd achieved the impossible.
Through creative financing—mortgaging her family's ancestral home, taking loans from three different merchant guilds, and convincing a wealthy patron moved by her passionate advocacy—she'd acquired the herbs. Fifty-nine thousand contribution points in Winter's Breath root and Frozen Soul petals, carefully processed into the precise 3:2 ratio the Devil had specified.
