Location:The Pavilion — The Workshop
Date/Time:12 Flamefade 9943 AZI, Restday, mid-morning to afternoon (outside) — her sixtieth to sixty-second day inside
Realm:Lower Realm
Lamp oil, and ink, and the cold, sharp smell of the paper the doctor used, which came from somewhere outside this world and did not smell like any paper Cangwei had ever handled.
And under all of it, the jar, which smelled of nothing.
Nobody had told her that. Cangwei had found it herself, the first evening, when nobody was in the room: picked the jar up and held it close and breathed in. Sealed glass, and beyond the glass three small bright things the color of a summer evening, and no smell at all. Everything in the world smelled of something. A thing that smelled of nothing had been made to.
Cangwei had put it at the far end of the bench, face down, so that the pills were against the wood and not looking at her, and had not touched it since.
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The file did not go end to end.
