A short story-part 1

  Liang Kui sat in front of his hut, breathing in the cool autumn.  Fishing around in his threadbare robe, he produced a long bamboo pipe, and a pouch of seasoned tobacco, one of the few luxuries he allowed himself in his old age.  Deftly, he lit the pipe, letting his thoughts drift back as he took a long pull.  Exhaling, he watched the smoke drift lazily away through the mist choked bluffs.
  The past few years had been good to him, far from the stilted ceremony of the grand court.  Liang Kui was, much father's regret, dismissive of the intricate rituals and ceremony that bound together Chiatze society, dismissive indeed of the gods themselves.
  He still remembered the exact moment he had renounced the various ancestor spirits and deities, that moment of seething illumination.  Lady Gu had come to him, then a raw physician of some twenty-three seasons, claiming to have heard stories of his skill.  The Gu Household, once fabulously wealthy, was now nearly bankrupt, its wealth gambled away by the scion whose treatment Lady Gu was now seeking.  Liang Kui knew that his skills were all they could afford.  Disappointingly, he learned just how much they were worth, accepting the few taels she handed over while inwardly fuming.  The false flattery had almost been too much to bear, but this?  The cost of treatment would far exceed his meager compensation, but she knew it would be churlish of him to point this out.  And yet, her arrogance compelled him to work all the harder to save her worthless son.
  He spent many sleepless nights by Gu Dan's bedside, fighting a bout of consumption brought on by reckless living and frequent whoring.  He tried various concoctions with varying degrees of success, spending a small fortune on exotics: ground rhino horn, and iridescent algae harvested close to the springs around Mt. Karunat to the north.  And when he had brought Gu Dan back from the cusp of death, Lady Gu, no longer ingratiating smiles and honeyed words, had strutted in, thrown him a trinket worth no more than a few taels, and had her son, despite his reasoned protest, carried out in a palanquin.  The speed of his treatment had not been to her liking, but even the great Lord Bao himself could not have brought about instant recovery in such an advanced case.  He later heard that due to his non-existent pedigree, she had sacrificed at the local physician god's altar, hedging her bets with an expensive family heirloom.  The next day, her soon was going about his daily business, gambling away what little wealth they had left, and whoring as if the barbarian hordes were at the family threshold.  It had been a miracle, Lady Gu proclaimed, and the standing of the local physician deity, a recently deified man still in living memory, improved drastically.  The god's rank was promoted to imperial status, and his descendants became recipients of a sizable stipend, part of which found its way to the Gu Family coffers.
  Liang Kui swore at the memory, then let out a long puff, willing his anger away in the thin, curling smoke.  Life had served him well in the end, much better than Lady Gu anyway.  It was then that he noticed a sharp knock at the door.  His mood already soured, he flicked ash from his pipe and set it down, annoyed by the disturbance.