Viagra

The woman stood beneath the eaves and drew out a jade slip. She rubbed the surface with her sleeve, and when dust came away on the cloth she turned it over and wiped the inner face as well. Then she opened a sales post she had saved.

She checked the author's alias one more time.

"Half a year. Daoist Viagra."

She had been watching the courtyard when she caught sight of a man walking over. His bearing was far shabbier than she had imagined. Thrown off, she simply stood where she was for a moment. Then she stepped up to him and held out the sales post.

"Are you Daoist Viagra?"

"Haaah..."

I checked which companies had viewed me on the job site and dropped back into the application. Three years since I'd taken the master's. I had certainly carried grand ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠ambitions when I gave up on the doctorate and stepped out into the world.

"And the reality is, I'm a complete bum."

In the research-experience line I deleted "diverse." Then I rewrote it — not research into synthesizing a variety of drugs, but drug-synthesis research. Reading it over, something still felt thin, so I added that I had tuned reaction conditions and improved yields.

The problem was the field below that. Aspirations after hiring.

Aspirations... Does wanting a proper long-term lease, so I can stop scraping by month to month, even count?

I went back to the application, wrote one sentence, and erased it. The emptiness lingered, so my hand found the cup and I drank it off in a gulp. Instant coffee really was better once it had gone cold.

"Hah... Maybe I'll rest five minutes."

I opened my phone, launched the web-novel app, and went back to the xianxia story I'd been reading. The protagonist had just run into the young master of some clan. Told to clear the road, the young master flared up, demanded to know whether he realized who his grandfather was, and ordered him down on his knees. I dragged the blanket up over my stomach.

That bastard's about to die.

Sure enough, the protagonist sent the young master flying in one clean stroke. I had expected that much. I had not expected him to rifle through the man's pouch, pocket everything worth taking, and then go hunting the very clan the young master had bragged about — to exterminate all nine branches and leave no trouble behind.

"Okay, for real, that is terrifying."

Having finally wiped out the nine clans, the protagonist turned toward the clan's secret vault. I checked the time. The five minutes were long gone.

I still have to finish the application...

Of all places, the chapter ended just as he was about to open the vault door.

Could I just see what comes out of the vault?

I tapped the next chapter.

Half asleep, I groped for the blanket. My fingers scraped gritty soil. When I opened my eyes, an ant was crawling right beside my face.

"Wh— what the fuck?"

I shot upright. I was barefoot. The cuffs of my pants were frayed, and a long, healed scar ran across the back of my hand. I rubbed it with my thumb.

Wait... this is a web-novel transmigration. I've possessed someone in another world?

If the cliché held, this body's memories would come flooding in any second.

"Ghk— gaaaaah—!!"

They were real. Actually real. The work of pushing freight carts, and the fact that this body's owner had been a rogue cultivator scorned as Five-Element Spirit Root trash — all of it poured into my head at once.

"Status window! Status! Staaatus window!!"

I looked around in a panic. I waited a long while. Nothing appeared.

Then a setting I had seen in novels came back to me unbidden. Rogue cultivators were the sort of people no one would find strange if they dropped dead at any moment. With luck, you seized a fortuitous encounter and cut your way through the world. Without it, you could be stewed down in a cauldron and turned into a human pill.

First... first I need to get into a sect...

"A Five-Element Spirit Root."

The cultivator in charge of admissions examined my hand, then wrote my name along the bottom of the register.

"Go do menial work in the Pill Hall."

"Um, if it's menial work in the Pill Hall... could I learn pill refinement as well?"

"You. Where did you learn that a subordinate asks questions before his superior has even finished speaking? Live like that and you'll be found as an unidentified corpse before long, so mind yourself! Get out!"

"Yes, yes! I'll remember!"

I ducked my head and retreated at once. The way he tossed out unidentified corpses from nowhere, this did seem to be the xianxia world I knew. A place where you mishandled workplace life and were simply discovered as a body.

In the Pill Hall, I could learn alchemy. Of course, this place was full of lunatics too.

"Who told you to put those two together!"

I froze with the herb basket in my hands.

"I told you that if you set them beside herbs of strong fire nature, the medicinal properties spoil. Do you think your wages can cover that?"

"I'm sorry! I'll do better from now on!!"

"Get out of my sight this instant, you crazy maggot bastard!!"

The steward glared until I finished moving the basket. Even so, there were upsides. It was only a single room, but they gave me a place to eat and sleep, and when I went outside, showing the sect token kept anyone from blocking the road on a whim.

About two months after I joined, one of the fellows who had entered with me broke through.

"Congratulations, Daoist! What in the world is the secret?"

"Daoist? From now on you will call me senior!"

He laughed and shook an empty pill bottle.

"And between a wretch like you and this seat lies a gulf as wide as that between a mortal and a cultivator, so henceforth do not speak as if we still share the same station!"

"......"

I hadn't known he was that far gone. Climb a single realm and he starts throwing his weight around like that. Truly, the moral character of the cultivation world was something to behold.

That night I was reading a qi-circulation method when I opened the jade slip's other list of writings. The thing was an item the sect had handed out so we could read techniques and instructions. Pour spiritual energy into it, link your mind, and the text appeared — a tablet, more or less, connected through consciousness. At first I had taken it for something like an e-book. It was real-time. I could read what others had posted, and I could pin my own writing up as well. Scroll down past the sect notices and there were separate boards for cultivation questions, a marketplace, and idle talk.

I opened the chat board.

"Hm... They live for centuries, and they still can't wait out a measly three years."

Only after I had read the next comment did I remember what I had actually come to do. I moved over to the cultivation board and wrote down what I wanted to know.

Illiterates over here too.

"One pill costs as much as my monthly wage..."

It seemed I was going to have to find some way to make money myself. Combine what I knew of modern pharmaceutical compounding with alchemy, and I might be able to make something worth using.

I looked through the marketplace for the medicines that sold. Pills for cultivation. Salves for wounds. Antidotes, and the rest. Those were already being sold by people everywhere. Buyers searched for whatever they had taken before, and sellers bragged about how many years they had been selling their pills.

Hm... I'll have to aim for a gap in the market.

I scratched my chin, then stopped.

"Wait... what if I made Viagra here?"

Wouldn't that make me filthy rich? Even the ones who shut themselves away for years in the name of cultivation still picked up Dao companions right on schedule. Posts looking for a dual-cultivation partner went so far as to set conditions and then fight it out in the comments.

Crimson Yang Grass, which I had learned about in the Pill Hall — a spiritual herb that replenished yang energy. The day we handled it, the steward told us not to lick even the sap on our fingers, unless we wanted to clutch our lower halves and cry all night. At the time I had written the whole warning off as nonsense.

What if I extract only the active component?

I went straight to the market district and bought Crimson Yang Grass. Then I tried boiling it and tried pounding it, searching for a way to draw the component out. A few attempts gave me nothing but a fever. A few more, I managed to separate it only to burn the medicinal nature away while refining the pill. Even so, so long as I approached it scientifically, none of this was pure wasted effort. Strike the failed conditions off the variables and test only what remains, and sooner or later you get what you want.

And at last—

I... I did it!!!!!!!!!!

I finished circulating my energy and looked down. My head was clear. The heat that had been roasting my whole body was gone. But in the one place that actually mattered, the response was beyond any doubt.

"Ooh..."

I posted it and set the pill bottle down beside me.

Go on, try one. You won't regret it.

I read other sales posts while I waited. A little later, someone left a comment on mine.

Someone else cut in beneath that.

Sharp.

A reply stuck on at once.

It was the same man who had just asked what happened if something went wrong.

"It stings to give one away, but... you have to invest if you want to make money, don't you..."

I wrote the answer with a smile.

In the meantime, others left comments of their own.

Hm... but how do I actually make the trade? Meet them in person and, if I'm unlucky, I'll get ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠shaken down and found as a corpse...

I first replied to the three of them that I would send the pills. Then I looked into how the other sellers solved this problem.

"Oho..."

I had found something rather shocking. Every market district had a firm called the Thunderbolt Pavilion. Leave your goods with that trading house, and they shipped them by transmission formation — nothing less than rocket delivery.

Rocket delivery.

The next day, after work, I went to the Thunderbolt Pavilion. Inside, other cultivators were handing goods back and forth. I joined the line for transmissions with the wrapped pills held against my chest.

The man ahead of me carried a wooden box no bigger than his palm.

"Send it to the same place as last time."

The trading-house cultivator checked the jade slip the man held out and took the spirit stones first. Then he set the box on the round stone slab behind the counter. I leaned my head to the side for a better look. Eight small flags were planted around the rim of the slab. He swapped the places of two of them and set a finger on the spirit stone embedded in the center. When he murmured a short incantation, a stuffed pressure filled my ears. A moment later he lifted his hand from the empty slab.

...Okay. That is actually insane.

I rubbed my eyes and looked again. I had definitely watched him set the box down, and now there was nothing there.

"Next."

I took one step forward.

"I would like to send some goods."

"Put them out."

I produced three pills wrapped in paper. He moved to gather them into one lot, then stopped when he saw the destinations I had written down.

"All different places. Three spirit stones."

I drew the stones from my pouch and held them out. He took them, picked up one package, wrote the recipient's name on the wrapping, and set it on the slab. Unlike before, he aligned the flags to a different arrangement, then laid his hand on the spirit stone again. This time I watched from beginning to end. While he recited the incantation, his fingers traced the grooves in the slab, drawing a blue line along their path, and at the last he pressed the center with his palm. I clenched my teeth against the brief resonance. When I opened my eyes, the package I had wrapped was nowhere to be found.

He sent the remaining pills one after another. When the last transmission was finished, he held out a hand toward the person standing behind me.

"Next!"

I stepped aside and took out the jade slip. I left a reply for each of the three.

Beneath that, I added one more line.