That afternoon the great officers of the court all received the Immortal Dew the Xuan Emperor had granted them.

It very nearly gave a fair number of them heart failure.

Outside the great festivals His Majesty rarely granted wine... and when wine was granted, it was usually the poisoned cup.

Old General Chen had a whole jar. Every other prince and minister was granted only a flask.

More than a few ministers with guilty consciences heard that His Majesty had granted them a flask of wine and were frightened badly enough on the spot to wet a diaper.

They thought His Majesty was granting them death.

Once the reason was clear and they had tasted the nectar of the immortals, there was not one of them who was not astonished by it.

They caught hold of the eunuch who had brought the wine and asked where it came from.

The eunuch told them that Marquis Ning had found this Immortal Dew and presented it to His Majesty... and His Majesty had granted it to them in turn, so that prince and subject might enjoy it together.

Wine that both His Majesty and Marquis Ning had drunk and called good — how could it be anything but good?

And they had drunk it themselves. It was nectar of the immortals, no question.

So every prince and minister who had drunk the Immortal Dew gave orders to his servants at once: be at the Immortal Dew shop early tomorrow and wait, and the moment it opened, buy back as much Immortal Dew as they could.

The next day, in the morning.

To the sound of firecrackers, ten Immortal Dew shops opened at the same hour.

A notice hung at the door of every one of them, saying that the wine took more than ten kinds of grain and better than twenty separate steps to make, and that the output was very small.

Sales were therefore limited to a hundred jars a day.

Beside the notice, at every shop door, hung a poem.

The poem was called Forgetting Sorrow.

Beneath it, the signature:…