Chapter 56: Third Time

For four days, Joe moved through Blackwood's medicine markets like someone preparing for winter.

He deliberately avoided buying everything from one seller.

A sack of dried redroot from one shop.

Bark from another.

Marrowseed from a warehouse merchant.

Bitter vine through a small stall near the eastern market.

Recovery herbs from guard supply up to his monthly limit.

More expensive ingredients through Mira's introduction where the price difference justified revealing his name.

Ordinary herbs required no identity.

Silver changed hands.

Goods changed hands.

Nobody cared.

The courtyard was transformed. Bundles hung beneath the eaves. Sliced roots dried on woven trays. Clay jars filled shelves along the storage wall. The air permanently smelled of earth, bitterness and smoke.

Simon stood in the doorway one evening.

"Are we living in a medicine shop?"

"No."

"There are herbs in my room."

"One bundle."

"It is above my bed."

"That space was empty."

Simon stared at him. Joe continued grinding bark. Simon sighed. Then held out a hand.

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"Do you have one of the recovery packets?"

Joe looked up.

"I thought the house smelled terrible."

"It does."

Joe gave him one.

Simon complained less afterward.

The money changed Skin III immediately, not by making the technique easier, but by reducing wasted recovery time.

Joe began keeping detailed notes.

Training region. Session duration.

Blood-energy depletion. Surface heat afterward.

Tenderness the following morning. Meal composition.

Medicine taken. Sleep quality.

He discovered quickly that stronger medicine was not automatically better. One overly concentrated packet left him hot, thirsty and restless until nearly dawn. Another reduced soreness beautifully but did almost nothing for the deeper exhaustion associated with blood-energy depletion.

Nourishment and healing remain separate restrictions. Some ingredients helped both. Most did not. Joe adjusted.

By late summer, his courtyard routine had become almost scientific.

Train. Eat. Record. Recover. Modify. Repeat.

The third tempering also changed how his body felt.

The second pass had removed obvious unevenness.

The third began addressing subtler differences.

When blood energy crossed from forearm to wrist, there was less sense of transition.

When he shifted it around the shoulder, the layer responded almost as one surface rather than separate trained regions.

Impact spread more evenly.

That did not make him invulnerable.

Daren could still bruise the muscle beneath Joe's skin during a sufficiently hard drill.

A sword would still be a sword.

A martial weapon backed by deeper cultivation remained extremely dangerous.

The skin itself, however, became increasingly reluctant to fail first.

Joe understood why repeated tempering could matter later.

If blood energy eventually had to pass through Skin to reach Muscle efficiently, a near-perfect outer layer would waste less of it.

He was not merely building armor. He was building infrastructure.

Autumn returned. Harvest wagons entered Blackwood from surrounding villages. The market was filled with grain sacks, dried fruit, smoked meat and new medicinal harvests. Leaves accumulated again along the forest road.

Joe realized he had been in Blackwood nearly a year. His letters to Merek had become less frequent.

Merek still answered when Joe wrote. Usually by criticizing something. One reply concerning recovery mixtures ended:

Stop assuming more ingredients means better medicine. Soup is not improved by throwing the entire garden into it.

Joe changed the recipe. Merek had been right.

Their correspondence was slowly becoming something different. Less teacher and student. More occasional exchange.

Joe did not mind. That was how growth should work.

As autumn cooled toward winter, Skin III approached completion. The improvements have become smaller. Harder to isolate. But they remained real.

Joe kept going.