The Shrine's Strange Domain (Two Chapters in One)

The butter lamps in a Western Market tavern in Chang'an cast alternating bands of light and shadow across Li Ji's face. The thirty-seven-year-old illicit salt seller sat rigidly in the corner closest to the stable, like a reef battered ashore by a raging storm, weighing heavily on the mottled floor.

Cracks snaked across the earthen wall, cruelly splitting his hunched shadow into three pieces, like a miniature of his life: he had entered the Imperial Examination Hall seven times full of confidence, only to fail three times in disgrace. The oil lamp popped, blooming into a flower of flame. Sparks fell onto the opening page of his Imperial Examination Text, beside the policy question on On Salt and Iron that he had poured his heart and soul into. The two characters "reckless and rebellious," written in vermilion, were being rubbed over and over by his fingertips, rough with salt. The ink blurred, glaring like blood.

From the private room next door came the crisp sound of newly minted jinshi slicing open scarlet cherries with gold-inlaid knives, accompanied by the clear clink of glass cups. Someone loudly praised, "Vice Minister Zhou has an eye for talent and the discernment to recognize true worth..."

Li Ji's left hand suddenly spasmed. Vice Minister Zhou! He was the examiner who, three days ago in the examination hall, had lightly knocked Li Ji's paper into the dust with his cold silver pen.

Half a bowl of cheap, cold wine slid down his throat, scorching it with bitterness. It was the last half-string of cash he had spent on the meager brew. By contrast, the wine drifting from the private room was a thick, almost demonic sweetness: grape wine from the Western Regions.

In a daze, he seemed to hear his treatise on salt and iron