護花近衛 - 第77章 有殺氣的人 - 墨香閣

But what Wei Zhao wanted was Chinese herbal medicine, and few people bought that. He handed the list he had long since drawn up to the clerk, who wrote him out a slip and sent him to the cashier; his order ran to many items, so the weighing would take a while. Fortunately there were no other customers, and while the clerk weighed, Wei Zhao wandered idly about the shop.

"Gold-wound medicine." A voice caught Wei Zhao's attention.

Gold-wound medicine? Wei Zhao was startled. There was such a medicine?

Gold-wound medicine: "gold" meant metal objects such as blades, and in ancient times the weapon that wounded the most was the blade, so gold stood in for weaponry; "wound" meant injury. Gold-wound medicine, then, was the remedy for cuts and other hurts dealt by metal weapons, its properties being to stop bleeding, ease pain, and quell inflammation.

Only, gold-wound medicine was an ancient name and nothing more; surely no medicine went by it nowadays?

"There's none left. Sold out," the clerk answered the earlier speaker, face blank.

Wei Zhao glanced over. The one asking was a girl in black, a sailor's cap on her head pulled low over her brow, so that her face could not be made out. Given the clerk's reply that it was sold out, the girl said nothing and turned to leave, though her gait was a little faltering...

Suddenly Wei Zhao's gaze fixed on the ground beneath the girl. Along the floor where she had passed, a bright trail of blood was smeared, clearly having run down from the cuff of her trouser leg; yet amid the press of people in the pharmacy, it had drawn no one's notice, and the blood trail was quickly trodden out by passing feet.

Wei Zhao had marked the girl for two reasons. One, the gold-wound medicine on her lips had stirred his curiosity. Two, he had sensed in her a trace of something kindred: killing intent.

Killing intent is a very subtle thing. It is in essence a signal given off by animals when they attack one another, a signal that must be detected by a "sixth sense."

Someone once conducted this experiment. He put a wildcat from the forest and a mouse into a box, separated by two thin, soundproof boards set not far apart, then removed the smells and ensured that neither could see the other. The result was that the cat seemed to sense something and, as though it wanted to pass through the board, kept clawing at it with its paws, while the mouse huddled on the far side. One could see that the cat sensed the mouse was just next door, and the mouse sensed the cat; but how did cat and mouse sense each other?

The scientists' explanation: this is perhaps a sixth sense beyond the animals' five. That is to say, they do not detect one another through ears, nose, or eyes; by a sixth sense an animal can feel the signal given off by a natural enemy or by any other animal that means to attack it—a signal that may be explained as "killing intent."

In fact people have a sixth sense too; it is only that, long sundered from nature, we have let the faculty slowly waste away. Yet some whose senses are keener than others have kept it still—veteran soldiers on the battlefield, for instance, who can often feel whether an ambush lies ahead, or hunters who have spent their whole lives in the forest. Those who have long walked the line between life and death can gradually rouse this sense to life.

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