The Scarlet Alchemist

Your ducks weren't rude to me. I don't want to eat them." "I do." Yufei whispered...

I am offended,"" he said, making a show of crossing his arms and turning away. ""I may forgive you if you kiss me, though.

Think about this. Abolishing gold will cost you the rich. Marrying me could cost you the poor as well." "Zilan," he said, taking my other hand. "I don't care if it costs me the world.

I am the night that birthed the world. I am the bones of all the planets. I am silence. I am the end.

Every day that the wealth gap yawned wider, I began to realize that evil was not found in the demons or spirits we could ward away with fragrant flowers, but in the men who thought that everything on earth could be bought.

No one had ever tried to look deeper. But here was someone who knew me the way the sailors knew the stars, charting each constellation with reverence, looking for my light when lost at sea".

No one truly believed in death until it happened to them.

I realized nothing in life is a promise, that everything good can simply stop existing one day, that the sun might not rise and the tides might lay still and the sky will go cold and dark. The world owed me nothing, and everything that I thought was mine could always be taken back.

It wasn’t a question of if they loved me, but of how much. Because at the end of the day, they had never asked for me.

Not all lies required words, and this one was painted all over my face.

The world owe me nothing, and everything that I thought was mine could always be taken back.

Desire was what pulled you deeper into the dark, bit into you like tiny hooks and lured you forward on a clear fishing line cast far across an ocean of night.

If you make a poor man's business a charity, within a week he'll have twice as many beggars and nothing left to give.

Ahead of us, a man was pulling a cart of cabbages out into the street. I grabbed three chunks of amethyst in one hand and slammed my other palm into the cart. It burst in to wood splinters, cabbage leaves flying up into the air and raining over the crowd, cabbage heads rolling into the street.

I couldn’t see anything at all, but it didn’t matter. This was not a place that you could navigate with a map. It was a place of endings—the last dead end in a winding, lightless labyrinth of caves. It was getting lost in the forest after dark, when the trees breathed you in and wouldn’t let you go. It was the heavy silence after a heart stops beating, when all you can hear is what was

Alchemists need to break themselves into pieces. They want to rebuild the world around them so desperately that they would give their blood, body or soul. But people in power cannot fathom breaking a world that already bows to them. Alchemists are forged from pain.

Uncle Fan had busied himself making lots of míngqì to bury them with—soft baby lambs and tiny ponies and wise teachers. They will be well taken care of, where they’re going, he’d said. My cousins grew smaller and smaller, skin tight across their bones, somehow looking younger even though their faces were wrinkled from thirst.