Had this turned into a game now?
Yun Jieshi wore as confused of a face as anyone would have in the situation.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked.
The hag picked a cup and brought it to her nose. She gave a deep whiff and placed it down.
"Remember… Tea. Pick. One," she said.
Yun Jieshi scratched his furs. He still wasn't sure what she wanted. While the old woman couldn't speak very well, though, she could understand his more articulate sentences, so he decided to ask questions and give responses to them. The hag would decide which of both represented exactly what she wanted.
It hardly took two minutes for Yun Jieshi to grasp what she wanted done, what might have been the rules of a game.
'I have to identify which of these three is the same tea from yesterday just by the aroma,' he thought grimly and gulped.
Maybe it was just an unreasonable, explicable jab of discomfort, but for some reason, the skin under Yun Jieshi's furs crawled. It seemed to him that the hag suddenly began expelling a frightening pressure as she sat opposite him, waiting for him to pick. She regarded this affair with extreme measures of importance, it appeared.
Yun Jieshi was compelled to take it seriously. The impression that if he picked wrong, something very bad would happen to him seemed almost certain.
He picked the first cup, heart racing. He wished he could have discerned the contents simply by looking at the ingredients in the cup, but the color on the surface of the tea was so murky that even his eyes couldn't see past it. Could this have had to do with the richer water the hag had used this time around?
Even if the little monkey could see the look of the ingredients though, he wasn't sure that would have helped much. He hardly knew what some of them were by sight alone.
'Oh, well, let's see…'
After taking a deep breath, he took a whiff. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the aroma. The first smell that blasted him was something like boiled bamboo and then came the sharp scent of scallions and the distinct, dense scent of ginseng.
'This isn't it. Is it? That first smell... I didn't detect it last night. Well, I don't think I did,' Yun Jieshi thought. Honestly, the smell of the tea wasn't something he'd really noted yesterday. He was going of what he actually remembered: the taste.
While glancing at the hag, he placed down the first cup and grabbed another.
A powerful blast of the scallions made Yun Jieshi's eyes sting. Boiled scallions weren't likely to induce such a feeling, he knew, but they did anyway. It might have been some kind of super scallion or fat, somber onion used for this tea.
'This might be soup rather than tea at this point,' he thought, squinting.
It was hard to isolate everything else with the overpowering impression of the scallion, but Yun Jieshi thought he might have detected an earthy smell somewhere. He wasn't sure.
He went on to the third cup.
'Is that…cabbage? Damn it, even with my sharp nose this is really hard!' Yun Jieshi complained. Scallion seemed commonplace in all three cups, but the rest of the ingredients threw him off. If only he'd paid more attention to yesterday's tea rather than its effect on him.
"Pick," the hag said, starling the discount Sage. He had begun cycling between all three cups again.
"Er…" Yun Jieshi wished he had more time, but by the look the old woman was giving him beyond her swollen eyelids, he imagined that on this matter, she was quite impatient. The pressure she expelled seemed to worsen and something inside the little monkey warned him to make a choice quickly.
'Well, yesterday when I tasted the tea, I only detected scallion, some ginseng, and a vinegary aftertaste,' he thought, but then doubt pressed him. 'But I wasn't all there because of the pain from the pit. Maybe I missed something. No! Who would miss the smell or taste of bamboo or cabbage? It has to be the second cup! The scallion smell overwhelmed everything else! I'm sure there's some ginseng in there!'
When the hag cleared her throat, Yun Jieshi shuddered and then quickly placed his hand over the second cup.
"This one."
…
Looking apprehensively at the old woman, the little monkey awaited her reaction. When she lurched forth, he half-expected her to wallop him across the face, but she simply retrieved the other two cups and took them away.
"Huh?" Yun Jieshi watched as she went to the door and emptied the contents of both cups into the blizzard. She then sat back down across from him.
"Little Sage…" She gestured for him to finish the tea in the cup he had chosen.
"Did I choose correctly then?" the little monkey asked, but the hag only gestured for him to finish the tea.
Yun Jieshi gulped and tasted the tea, heart still racing.
He had been correct. Even though the smell of the scallions was overpowering, the taste of everything other than scallion was quite pronounced on his tongue. Oddly though, he couldn't taste anything other than scallions and ginseng. The rest seemed slightly bitter with the vinegary flavor.
The little monkey breathed a sigh of relief, but…
"I don't feel any different. Why am I still drinking this? The pain from the pit is mostly gone now," he asked the hag when he was halfway done with the tea. She merely gestured for him to finish it and as soon as he was done, she took his cup before he could examine the mix of ingredients within it.
Yun Jieshi sighed.
Would this old woman answer any of his real questions?
After cleaning the cups, the hag called Yun Jieshi over to help her with the boar. Together they untied the boar from the beam overhead and began preparing it for storage.
Yun Jieshi was the one who did most of the prepping and cooking when he and his father moved back to China. To deepen his connection with neighbors and strangers alike, he had taken to helping a few food stall owners run their businesses part-time. No one was more authentic than the heroes in the streets, some would say. That was how Yun Jieshi acquired the skill to swiftly dispatch and clean animals, as well as cook.
He wasn't an expert with a maxed-out skill with the knife though. He hadn't committed to the streets for long, opting to pursue his more… literature-based path.
He helped the hag eviscerate and skin the boar well enough. As it turned out, the hag's skill with this was passable at best, which came as a shock. He had thought for sure that he was under the tutelage of a master in every art.
'Hmmm. Strange.'
The hag conjured a lot of water for thoroughly cleaning the boar's flesh. As she and Yun Jieshi were finishing up, the little monkey looked at her and cleared his throat, before suddenly saying:
"Could I ask you a question?"
The hag didn't pause or respond.
Yun Jieshi decided to fire away regardless.
"Is…uh… Is your name Qui Tian?"
The little monkey shuddered when the hag's swollen eyelids parted to reveal gleaming hazel irises. What he had said finally brought her pause and she looked at him sharply. It was unclear what expression she made, or intended to make.
Yun Jieshi drew a sharp breath.
He didn't know if he was right on the money or close to it. A part of him was wholly convinced that he was right though.
Earlier, when he drew very close to the urn outside, Qui Tian's Reminder, the voices spilling from it, to him, had sounded an awful lot like the hag's.
They said similar, disjointed things to what he remembered vaguely hearing from them before when he had just appeared in the Lower Southern Plateau.
"Away…"
"Do not…"
"Stay… Root."
"Hate him."
"Death…"
And thus, slowly, but surely, a theory had started to form in Yun Jieshi's head.
Qui Tian had to be the hag's name, just like Da Ya was the name of someone else responsible for the coals.
…But the hag would neither confirm nor deny it. Her beautiful irises went back to being hidden by her swollen eyelids and she continued cleaning the meat.
Yun Jieshi frowned.
Of course, the hag wasn't going to answer. It upset him quite a bit. If only she was as willing to part with information as Hua Dongmei, he probably would have been able to understand everything by now.
Perhaps he could have found some closure with knowing what had happened to Feng Jie Hong.
Perhaps she knew stuff about the Imp King and where he could find him.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
As the duo hung the boar by the wall, where the breeze kept the meat frozen, he couldn't help but sigh.
He couldn't have known, but his chance to learn a great many things, mystical and mundane would soon rear its head.