We spent the next few hours wandering through vendor stalls, picking up a few pieces of equipment for the hike up to Elysium cliffs. I bought a dagger and a walking stick with iron caps fastened to its ends. In another booth, Susie bought me a wide-brimmed black hat with a flat top to keep the sun off my head. For herself, she bought a starter bow, quiver, and arrows.
After that, Susie went to collect picnic supplies for the hike to Elysium Cliffs while I wandered into Huang's Inkwell for parchment.
Tattooists were best known for the permanent enhancements they could make to other characters, but their workaday magic was all done with special parchment. The tattooist would paint a character onto the parchment in a style reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy. Later, he could slap this parchment onto exposed flesh, branding the subject with a symbol that would effect them for a short time. Eventually, the symbol and its effects faded like temporary tattoos in the real world.
Truly great calligraphers could execute beautiful work that enhanced existing spells or created entirely new effects. These masters of the craft were called wenren, in homage to the ancient Chinese literati who perfected the brush-in-ink style.
I picked up a stack of paper and brought it to Mrs. Huang, a motherly Chinese woman in slippers and a silk wrap. Behind her hung several beautiful completed scrolls for sale.
"You like?" she said, glancing up as she wrapped my blank parchment in white paper and tied it up with string.
"Are those yours?" I asked, awed. In simple black ink, she had rendered different subjects on each: a diving tortoise, a stilt-legged crane, and a twisted pine growing out of rocks. The sweeping line work was exquisite.
She nodded, smiling. "You practice, you make some good like this. You smart boy, I can tell. Good hands for brush." She winked, handing me the parcel and taking my silver pieces.
As I handed her the silver, she looked at the inky tendril on the back of my hand and froze. Her smile faded. She took my wrist firmly, examined the mark, and looked over her reading glasses and straight into my eyes.
