The single most important rule of selling, in Qian Fan’s professional opinion, was this:
Never look at a customer who is already reading your product. Don’t ask them if they are looking for something or if they need anything, lest you scare them away. They are like delicate animals that should only be observed, unless they actually ask you for help.
So he looked at the sage.
He turned the bundle over in his hands. He examined a stem. He considered, with enormous interest, whether it might be slightly damp.
Four steps away, Qian Xiaotian turned another page.
[Host, his heart rate has increased. 🤭]
Shhh.
[He has read the first breathing diagram twice.]
I said Shhh.
“How much is this?”
THERE IT IS!!!
Qian Fan looked up with a mild, bored expression of a boy who had been thinking about sage.
“Hm? Oh. That old thing.” He shrugged. “Three coppers.”
* * *
It was the wrong answer.
He knew it the moment he said it, because Qian Xiaotian’s face did something complicated.
The boy looked down at the book. Then up at Qian Fan. Then back at the book.
“Three coppers?” he repeated.
“It’s a book.”
“It’s a cultivation manual.”
“It’s just a book that has a few exercises in it,” Qian Fan said with a bored look. “Half the junk in this market has exercises in it; many of them are pretending to be cultivation manuals. That stall over there sells a scroll about becoming immortal through correct breathing while standing on one leg.”
“That one’s a fraud. Everyone knows that one’s a fraud.”
“Then you see my point,” said Qian Fan. “I don’t see in any way possible that this book that looks like it has been gnawed by a rat would be legit.”
Qian Xiaotian did not see his point. He was standing very still, and his eyes had narrowed and were careful, and Qian Fan could actually watch as Qian Xiaotian’s gears were grinding in his brain, and the arithmetic in his head.
A complete Body Tempering Manual costs at least sixty silver at a Treasure House. This costs three coppers. Therefore, it is fake, or it is stolen, or something is wrong with it, or something is wrong with him.
This, Qian Fan thought with genuine professional admiration, is why you are going to be a problem for the rest of my life.
[Host, shall I lower the price? 😊]
Absolutely not. If I lower it, it’ll scare him away.
[But—]
Cheap is suspicious. Free is terrifying. The price isn’t the problem; the story is. Commerce isn’t just simply lowering or increasing the price; you also have to take into account the personality and habits of the consumer. That’s part of the reason why economics is a social science and not a hard science.
[Noted, Host! 😇]
* * *
“Where did it come from?” Qian Xiaotian asked.
And then the gods, who occasionally take pity on the souls of merchants, sent Qian Hou.
“Oh, that old thing?” his father said cheerfully, appearing at his elbow with a clay bowl in each hand. “That came out of the storeroom. My son cleaned it out last week. There was a whole crate of rubbish in there from my father’s time. Books, a broken abacus, some shoes.”
“Shoes,” Qian Xiaotian repeated.
“Terrible shoes,” Qian Hou agreed sadly.
Qian Fan said nothing at all. When your father is unwittingly doing the most convincing part of your sales pitch, the correct move is to just keep your mouth shut, stand there, and let him do the talking.
“My father bought things,” Qian Hou went on, warming to it. “He bought a great many things. He was very bad at it. My wife says that’s why we sell radishes now instead of running the pavilion on Third Lane.”
“So you don’t know what it is,” Qian Xiaotian said slowly.
“It’s a book,” said Qian Hou. “The kettle is twelve coppers, if you’re interested in it. Nothing wrong with the kettle. It just has a dent.”
Qian Xiaotian looked back at the manual in his hands.
And Qian Fan watched the suspicion drain away, one degree at a time, because the story was finally in the right direction. Not a merchant offering a treasure at a bargain. A family too ignorant to know what was sitting on their own cart.
This was the trope. He had read it a hundred times. The nameless vendor. The dusty stall. The priceless thing nobody would recognize except for the protagonist who happens to stumble upon it.
He had never considered, in all those hundred readings, how much work it would take to be the vendor.
* * *
“Can I read a page?”
“You’ve already read six…” Qian Fan said with a deadpan expression.
“Can I read a page properly?”
Qian Fan waved a hand, the way a bored boy would. Qian Xiaotian sat down cross-legged in the dirt beside the cart, which was not what anyone did in a market, and began to read.
Qian Fan went back to observing the sage.
Minutes passed. The tea seller across the lane laughed at something, a fat boy running away from a butcher talking about him being their father. Elder Qian Zhuo, still on his bench, fell asleep sitting up with his cabbage beside him, which Qian Fan watched out of the corner of his eye with an entirely unreasonable amount of suspicion.
He’s asleep, he told himself. He is simply an old man who is asleep.
Then the porter arrived.
It was the same broad-shouldered man from the first afternoon, rope coiled over one arm, and he was walking differently. Not like a question mark. Like an exclamation mark.
“You,” he said, pointing at Qian Fan. “Boy. That green muck.”
“The salve.”
“I slept,” the porter said, with the flat astonishment of someone reporting a miracle. “All night. My wife says I have been unbearable about it.” He pulled out a worn purse. “Two jars.”
“Thirty each.”
The porter looked into the purse, then at the sky, then back into the purse.
“One jar,” he said, “and don’t tell my wife what I paid.” He counted the coins out one at a time, then paused. “My brother carries rope in the east quarter. He walks like I used to. Will you have more next week?”
“I’ll have more supplies next week.”
[Sale complete! 🎉]
[Quota Progress: 5%]
[Note: Customer has generated a referral. 😊]
Qian Fan watched the man go with a strange warmth in his chest that had nothing to do with the quota bar.
That was the part they never wrote about in the novels, he thought. Nobody ever got a heaven-defying inheritance and then found out it helped a stranger sleep.
When Qian Fan finally allowed himself a glance, Qian Xiaotian’s hand was moving.
Not turning pages. Tracing.
He was following the lines of the first diagram with two fingers, over and over, and his lips were moving, and his breathing had changed. It had gone slow and even and deep, on a count that didn’t match any rhythm Qian Fan had ever heard in the training yard.
Then the boy’s fingers stopped.
He sat there for a long moment, staring at the page.
“This is real,” he said quietly.
“It’s three coppers,” said Qian Fan.
* * *
What followed was the strangest negotiation of Qian Fan’s two lives, and in his first life he had once spent forty minutes explaining to a man why he could not finance a boat with his library card.
“Two,” said Qian Xiaotian.
“Three.”
“Two. The cover is damaged.”
“The cover being damaged is why it’s three and not thirty.”
“Two, and I’ll take the talismans too.”
“The talismans are eight coppers, and they don’t even work.”
“Then two for the book.”
“Fine,” said Qian Fan. “Two.”
Qian Xiaotian’s eyes narrowed instantly.
Qian Fan had expected that, and had, in fact, been counting on it.
“Why did you agree so fast?” the boy demanded.
“Because it’s two coppers,” Qian Fan said, “and I’ve already been holding this sage for an hour, and I would like to stop.”
“You agreed too fast.”
“You are trying to trick me into arguing with you into charging you more.”
“I’m trying to understand what’s wrong with the book!”
“Nothing is wrong with the book!” Qian Fan said with the exasperated honesty of a man who was, for this one time, telling the exact truth and nothing but the truth. “If you ignore the fact that it’s old, a rat ate the corner, it’s been sitting under the sage where nobody could see it, and nobody in this market would have even picked it up anyway, because nobody in this market reads. Three coppers. Two coppers. It’s all the same; pick one and let me go back to work.”
There was a pause.
“Three,” said Qian Xiaotian.
Qian Fan stared at him.
“...Three?”
“If it’s real, three is already a theft,” the boy said, and the tips of his ears had gone slightly red. “I’m not going to steal from a stall that just paid me thirteen a piece.”
Qian Fan opened his mouth. He had a response ready. He had several.
He discovered that he didn’t want to use any of them.
“Three,” he nodded in agreement.
* * *
Three copper coins landed in Qian Fan’s palm, still warm from the pouch they’d been in for less than an hour.
[Ding!]
[Item transferred: Iron Hide Tempering Manual]
[Payment received: 3 coppers]
[Recorded as: Purchase of one used book]
[Contract status: Not yet active]
[Quota Progress: 5% — this sale will register when the contract activates! 😊]
Not yet?
[He has bought the object, Host! He has not yet used the product! 😊]
[The first three layers are open. The rest of the manual will not be available until he accepts the terms.]
So he reads it, he trains, he gets stronger, and then he hits a blank page.
[And then he will be offered full access! 🤗]
Qian Fan sat with that for a moment.
It was, he had to admit, elegant. He had spent four years selling people plans for things they already wanted. Nothing on earth made a man want a thing more than getting a taste of it and then being asked, politely, to pay for the rest.
Getting cockblocked by the system…
And if he never trains?
[Then he has a used book, and you will have three coppers! 😊]
Qian Fan looked at the boy, who was wrapping the manual up in the same clean inner cloth that had protected his mother’s embroideries, folding it twice, and tucking it against his chest exactly as he had carried the bundle in.
A boy with a sick mother, a three-year vow, and a technique in his hands.
He’ll train tonight, Qian Fan thought.
[Host, may I remind you that your quest expires in four days? 😊]
He’ll train tonight. I’m sure of it.
* * *
“Wednesday,” Qian Xiaotian said, tucking the last knot into place. “Five pieces. Better threads, if she agrees.”
“Wednesday,” Qian Fan nodded.
The boy hesitated. Then awkwardly, as though he’d been carrying the sentence around all afternoon looking for a place to set it down, he said:
“Thank you for today. For the—” He gestured vaguely at the cart, the coins, the whole transaction. “For treating it like business.”
“Business is business.”
“I know,” said Qian Xiaotian. “That’s why.”
He bowed briefly and properly, and walked off up the lane with a used book worth thirty silver taels pressed against his chest and seventy-seven coppers in his pouch.
Qian Fan sat back down on his upturned basket.
His father wandered over, looking pleased. “You sold the old book!”
“I sold the old book.”
“How much?”
“Three coppers.”
“Three coppers!” Qian Hou said happily. “See, this is what I’ve been telling you. Nothing on this cart is worthless. Everything finds its person eventually.”
Qian Fan watched the thin figure disappear into the crowd at the top of the market street.
“Yes,” he said. “Apparently so.”
[First Sale quest: 4 days remaining.]
[Status: Incomplete.]
Qian Fan looked at the message for a long moment.
Then he picked up the sage once again, because there was nothing else he could do, and because the one thing he could not do, not now, not ever, was tell that boy what he was actually holding.
He’d find out by himself.
Probably around the fourth layer.