Fat sheep—or a double act?
Zhong Shenxiu remained impassive. He merely uncorked the little black bottle and poured out a pinch of powder.
The peddler beside him spoke with such enthusiasm that spittle flew: "To tell you the truth, with this Mermaid Powder, all you need to do is take a bit about the size of a fingernail each time, swallow it with wine, and you'll be bursting with vigor for several hours..."
"What a marvelous thing! A marvelous thing!"
Qi Yuan nodded repeatedly. "A new girl recently arrived at Yixiang Tower. That waist, that figure... Simply incredible! With such a precious tonic, I'll definitely be able to make her kneel and beg for mercy..."
"If it were powder made from mermaid scales, then it might indeed be worth something..."
Zhong Shenxiu glanced at the nearly tearful pageboy and still said, "But yours... seems to be bone powder from a Sea Monkey."
"A Sea Monkey?"
The expressions of several onlookers nearby changed.
It was a demon from legend that lived in the sea. It liked dragging people into the water and drowning them alive before eating their brains raw.
"Sea Monkeys are also called 'kappa.' Although their bone powder has a potent aphrodisiac effect, it hacks away at one's source. Unlike Mermaid Powder, it doesn't strengthen yang while also consolidating one's true yang. In fact, if you take too much, you may even suffer the calamity of yang depletion... Its value drops considerably. This bottle is worth fifty copper coins at most."
Zhong Shenxiu shook his head.
He had learned this bit of knowledge from a handwritten copy of the Four Seas Strange Sutra.
Although its author had copied it in a scattered and fragmentary manner, with only two proper spells, it contained quite a lot of miscellaneous observations.
In