The Empress of Salt and Fortune

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and death by suicide.

Chih catalogs a cannister of sticks covered in fortune-telling runes. Rabbit teaches them how to read the runes, which are written in the northern dialect T’Lin. Although Chih does not know how to read this language, Rabbit gives them a linguistics lesson, and they are able to piece together some of the meanings based on their knowledge of other dialects. Chih reads the fortune that was kept in the cannister alongside the sticks and realizes that it is another code, this time spelling out the name of a famous general, Er Shi Kon.

Rabbit recalls that in the beginning, Thriving Fortune was like a prison, then it was a refuge, and in the end, it became In-Yo’s war camp. As In-Yo’s information network became increasingly effective, she was able to collect her fortune-tellers’ reports in plain sight of the court ladies, who were none the wiser to what was happening around them. One day, Sukai returned with his reports, masked as fortunes, indicating the viability of defeating three of In-Yo’s enemies. The first, a colonial general, would be easy to make disappear (which, Rabbit relates, he did shortly thereafter).