Qian Xiaotian stopped in front of the cart and hesitated.
Up close, he looked worse than he had from a distance. There were shadows under his eyes, and the hay in his hair had been there long enough to settle in. He held the cloth bundle against his chest with both arms, and he hadn’t let go of it since he’d entered the market.
“Uncle Hou,” he said.
“Xiaotian!” Qian Hou beamed at him. “The radish boy!”
“...Yes.” Qian Xiaotian smiled awkwardly.
“You paid me back a copper once. I tell that story often.”
“I know,” said Qian Xiaotian, in the voice of someone who had heard the story several times. “Uncle, does your stall buy embroidery?”
Qian Fan, sitting on his basket two steps away, did not look up. He picked a dried herb bundle off the cart and began rearranging it with great concentration.
His father scratched his head. “We sell bowls, mostly. And radishes.”
“Ah.” The boy’s shoulders dropped half an inch. “Then I’ll go to Third Lane. Thank you—”
“We buy embroidery.” Qian Fan said.
Both of them looked at him.
“We do?” Said his father.
“We’re expanding,” said Qian Fan.
* * *
The bundle held five pieces, wrapped in clean cloth inside a second, older cloth, because the outer one had already been patched twice and the inner one was protecting the work.
Qian Xiaotian unwrapped them on the cart’s flat edge with the careful movements of someone handling something that mattered.
Qian Fan looked down at them, and for a moment, he forgot the plan entirely.
The first was a river at dusk, stitched in five shades of blue, with a heron standing in the shallows. The bird’s feathers were done in thread so fine that the pattern changed as the light moved. The second was a branch of plum blossoms, each flower a slightly different size, the way real ones are. The third was a mountain in mist, and the mist was empty cloth, and somehow that made it mist.
Qian Fan had spent four years listening to people describe things they wanted over the phone. He had developed an ear for the difference between things that were expensive and things that were good.
And Qian Fan can say for sure that this is good. Shangguan Yue’s embroidery gives the feeling that the heron will fly out of the piece if you disturb it. He was certain that even in his previous world, where there were advanced machines to make the highest quality embroidery, only a few of those could possibly evoke the same feelings as even one of Madam Shangguan’s pieces. The level was only a step below national artists in his past life.
In other words, these were good.
Appraise them, he thought.
[Appraisal complete!]
[Item: Embroidery, five pieces, silk thread on plain cloth]
[Craftsmanship: Exceptional]
[Note: The technique is not local. 😊]
[Market Value in Wutong City: 25-30 coppers each]
[Market Value in a great clan’s city: 2-3 taels each]
Qian Fan kept his face perfectly still.
Two to three silver taels. Each. In a city with rich people in it.
“How much does Third Lane pay you?” he asked.
“Eight coppers,” Qian Xiaotian said. “Ten, if the shopkeeper’s wife is there.”
“I’ll pay fifteen.”
The boy’s head came up. His eyes narrowed immediately, and something in his face closed like a door.
“No,” he said.
* * *
[Host! He is refusing money! 😱]
I wouldn’t expect anything less from an egotistical protagonist.
[He is refusing more money in favor of less money!]
If Qian Xiaotian wasn’t like that, then he wouldn’t have to worry about where to get his mother’s medicine anymore.
“Fifteen is too much,” Qian Xiaotian said flatly. “The cloth shop pays eight. If you pay fifteen, you’re doing it because you were there last night. I don’t want that.”
“Who says that I’m doing this out of pity? I’m doing it because I can sell them for at least twenty-five coppers,” Qian Fan said.
“Then you’d only make ten.”
“Ten coppers a piece is a good margin.”
“Ten coppers a piece is a bad margin if you’ve never sold embroidery before,” Qian Xiaotian said, “and you’ve been selling bowls.”
Qian Fan opened his mouth, then closed it.
It was, he realized, a completely reasonable objection.
Behind him, his father had stopped pretending not to listen and was watching the exchange between the two youths with the delighted expression of a man at a puppet show.
“All right,” Qian Fan said. “Twelve.”
“Ten.”
“You are haggling downwards…”
“I’m haggling honestly,” said Qian Xiaotian. “Ten is fair. Ten is what a shop would pay someone they didn’t pity.”
“Ten is what a shop pays you when you’re gullible and have nowhere else to go,” Qian Fan said. “You have somewhere else to go. It’s four streets away, and it pays eight.”
The boy’s jaw tightened.
Qian Fan leaned forward and tapped the heron with one finger.
“This one,” he said. “Look at the water. There’s no outline. Every other embroiderer in this market draws and outlines the shape and fills it in. Whoever made this built the shape out of the color. I don’t know if you’re that oblivious to Madam Shangguan’s skill, but that’s not a skill that a common cloth shop has. That’s a skill people in other cities would scramble to acquire.
Qian Xiaotian said nothing.
“Thirteen,” Qian Fan said. “And I want five pieces a week, every week, for as long as she can make them. If she can’t, you tell me, and I won’t hold it against you. If I can’t sell them, I’ll come to you and renegotiate like a merchant, not like a charity. Deal?”
A long silence.
“Why five a week?” the boy asked, suspicious.
“Because only one a week isn’t worth the walk,” Qian Fan said. “And ten a week would be a lie.”
Something in Qian Xiaotian’s shoulders eased very slightly.
“Thirteen,” he said.
They shook on it.
* * *
Sixty-five copper coins changed hands.
Qian Fan counted them out twice, because he knew the boy would count them twice anyway, and it seemed only polite to make it easier.
Qian Xiaotian tied the coins into his cloth pouch. Then he stood very still for a moment with his hand pressed against it, and Qian Fan saw him do the arithmetic he had been doing every morning of his life.
Sixty-five coppers. Sixty-five plus seventeen. Pills, and how many?
“Thank you,” the boy said.
“It’s a purchase; there’s no need for thanks,” said Qian Fan. “Come back next Wednesday.”
[Host, your Quota Progress remains at 4%. 😊]
That wasn’t a sale. That was stocking up on supplies.
[Correct! It was also a very poor negotiation, Host. You were offering fifteen, and you paid thirteen when you could get it for eight.]
That’s right.
[Your roles during the negotiation were reversed.]
I know.
[Host, may I ask why you are smiling? 🤔]
When conducting business, if you are looking at the long-term, you are not just investing in their stocks but also in the person. A business partner that has integrity and also has excellent skills is hard to come by. And I just signed a supplier who argued me out of overpaying him, Qian Fan thought. That man will never cheat me. Not once. Not in thirty years.
Besides, it’s good to sell favor to a child of heaven, if you know what I mean.
* * *
There was one more thing, and it was the part he’d been dreading, because it was the part where his father usually ruined everything.
“Wait,” said Qian Hou.
Here we go, Qian Fan thought.
“Take a radish,” his father said, holding one out. “For the walk.”
Qian Xiaotian looked at it the way a cat looks at a bath.
“Two coppers,” Qian Fan said.
His father turned to stare at him, like a deeply wounded puppy.
Qian Xiaotian’s whole body relaxed. He paid the two coppers, took the radish, and bit into it right there, and for one second, before he remembered to be careful again, he looked exactly like a sixteen-year-old boy eating a radish.
“Where does she get the thread?” Qian Fan asked.
“The dye shop sells the ends of the spools. The lengths nobody wants.”
“How much?”
“Three coppers a bundle. It’s more than enough for one piece, if she’s careful. She’s always careful.”
Qian Fan did the math without meaning to. Three coppers of thread became thirteen coppers of embroidery in a woman’s hands, and twenty-five in a shop, and two silver taels in a city four days’ ride away.
“Tell her to buy better threads,” he said.
Qian Xiaotian’s eyes went flat and wary again. “Better threads cost more.”
“Better threads means I can charge more, which means I can pay you more,” Qian Fan said. “Sixteen coppers a piece if she uses the good spools. Bring me a sample first. If it isn’t better, we go back to thirteen, and I’m the one who’ll have wasted three coppers, not you.”
The boy considered this for a long, suspicious moment, hunting for the trick.
He didn’t find one, because for once there wasn’t one.
“I’ll tell her,” he said.
Then he added, as if it cost him something: “What’s your name?”
“Qian Fan.”
“Qian Fan,” the boy repeated and nodded, filing it away with the care of someone who keeps accounts. “Wednesday.”
Then he tied his empty bundle under his arm and left.
He didn’t look at the cart…
Qian Fan watched him go with a bundle of dried sage in one hand and a growing sense of professional embarrassment.
That was the flaw. That was the enormous, obvious flaw in the plan he had been so pleased with an hour ago. He had spent the afternoon arranging a trap that required a customer to browse, and then handed the customer sixty-five coppers and a reason to walk straight to the apothecary.
The manual sat on the edge of the cart, three coppers, rat-chewed, facing a boy’s retreating back.
Nobody browses a vegetable stall on the way back to buy medicine for their mother, Qian Fan thought. You stupid idiot…
[Host, shall I recommend the item to him? 😊]
No…
[He is walking away, Host. 🤔]
I know that he’s walking away…
[Your quest expires in four days. 😇]
I KNOW, SHUT UP!
* * *
Elder Qian Zhuo arrived at the tea stall across the lane at his usual hour, which was whichever hour he happened to feel like tea.
He sat down on the bench with a small grunt, arranged his three quilted robes around himself, and set his cabbage on the seat beside him like a companion.
Halfway up the lane, Qian Xiaotian stopped and bowed on reflex. Elders were elders, even when they were sitting on a bench with a cabbage as a companion.
The old man nodded back without much interest, then squinted at a group of clan youths swaggering past the stalls, all of them wearing the new sword tassels.
“Hmph,” said Elder Qian Zhuo, to nobody in particular. “Young people today.”
Qian Xiaotian paused politely, because you do not walk away while an elder is talking, even to himself.
“They look at what shines,” the old man said, shaking his head slowly. “They never look at what’s underneath. My master used to say: if you want to find something worth having, don’t look at the front of the shelf. Look closer.”
He sipped his tea.
“Then again,” he added, “my master also lost a cart at dice.”
He put the cup down and settled into his robes, evidently done.
Qian Xiaotian bowed again and turned away.
He had taken three steps before the words caught up with him.
Look closer.
* * *
From behind the cart, Qian Fan watched the whole thing without hearing a word of it.
He saw the boy stop. He saw him bow. He saw the old man say something over the rim of his teacup, wave one hand vaguely at the street, and go back to drinking.
He saw the boy bow again and start walking away.
Then he saw the boy stop dead in the middle of the lane, as if someone called his name.
And turned around, walking back to Qian Fan’s cart.
Qian Fan sat up very slowly, looking dumbfounded.
* * *
For Qian Xiaotian, it was the strangest moment of his life.
He was standing in a market he had walked through a thousand times. He had sixty-five coppers in his pouch, medicine to buy, chores waiting, and no reason at all to turn around.
But the old man had said it as if he meant it. And the old man had been looking at him when he said it, more or less, if you allowed for the fact that he might also have been looking at a group of boys with tassels, or at his tea.
Don’t look at the front of the shelf.
Qian Xiaotian turned around, feeling something scratching at his brain and beckoning him to go back to the Qian family’s cart.
The Qian family’s cart was, by any reasonable standard, the least promising thing in this market. Clay bowls. Radishes. A comb missing three teeth. A secondhand kettle with a dent in its side.
He wouldn’t be surprised if he found out that they were actually just randomly picking up something in their kitchen to sell for the day.
He walked back anyway, slowly, and let his eyes travel along the shelf.
Bowls. Herbs. Herbs. A small stack of paper talismans that were almost certainly worthless. Herbs.
And at the very edge, half hidden behind two bundles of dried sage, a thin book.
Its cover was cracked brown leather, stained dark at one corner where something had chewed it. Its pages were yellow. It had been shoved sideways, the way you shove something you don’t expect anyone to buy.
Qian Xiaotian stopped.
His mother had taught him to read when he was five, sitting up in bed on the days she could sit up. He had read every book in the clan’s public shelf twice, because books were the only thing in the compound nobody charged for.
He reached out and lifted the cover.
Inside, in faded characters. In a hand that had clearly been in a hurry, was a title.
Iron Hide Tempering Manual.
Behind the cart, sitting on an upturned basket with a bundle of sage still in his hand, Qian Fan did not look up, did not move, and did not breathe.
[Ding! 🎉]
Not now, Qian Fan thought.
[Host—]
Not. Now.
Qian Xiaotian turned a page.