Qian Fan cultivated every night after that, once the cart was packed away and the day’s coppers were safely put in his inventory.
By the third night, he already had a grasp on the cultivation habits needed for this method. Each cycle took a quarter of an hour if nobody interrupted him, and “somebody” (his father) always interrupted him. After a good day at the stall, he noticed that the thread came in thick and cold, with a clean copper taste on the tongue. After a slow one, it came in thin and tasted faintly of lead. On the morning after a night he’d been too tired to sit at all, he woke to find it waiting for him, full to the brim as a well nobody had drawn from.
Take the breath and spare the flesh, and the breath returns by morning. His coins had spent the night breathing in the dark, and not one of them was any smaller.
In the training yard, the air still gave him nothing. He held his horse stance anyway and let the instructor call him adequate.
On the second evening, while hauling the cart up the hill, he noticed that his back had stopped aching, and very nearly stopped in the road. His arms still ached exactly as much as they always had. When he sat at night, his hands stayed cold.
The 5th layer was no closer. He checked. He checked every night, the way you check a pocket for a coin you already know isn’t there.
[Host, your father has told three neighbors that you pray every night.]
What did they say?
[One asked what you prayed for.]
And?
[He said, “Radishes.” 😊]
* * *
Wednesday came.
Qian Xiaotian arrived at the cart at the usual hour with five pieces of embroidery wrapped in the good inner cloth, and something in his face that hadn’t been there a few days ago. He was still thin. He was still careful. But he stood like someone with a hint of pride and dignity.
“Five pieces,” he said. “She used the better thread. She said to tell you the blue came out wrong on the second one, and you should take four coppers off.”
Qian Fan unfolded the second piece. It was a kingfisher on a reed, and the blue was the blue of a kingfisher’s back when the sun catches it, and there was nothing wrong with it anywhere.
“Sixteen each,” he said. “For all five of them.”
“The blue—”
“Sixteen each.”
Qian Xiaotian accepted eighty coppers with the pained expression of a man being overpaid by four, tied them into his pouch, and then stood there instead of leaving.
Qian Fan waited.
“That book,” the boy said carefully.
“The old one? What about it?”
“It’s…” Qian Xiaotian stopped. Started again. “It was worth more than three coppers.”
“So? It was a book with a rat bite.”
“It was worth more than three coppers,” he repeated, and there was something stubborn in it, as if he had spent the whole walk deciding to say this. “I’ll pay you the difference. Not now, but when I can.”
Qian Fan opened his mouth to say something dismissive.
[Host, his outstanding balance is 30 silver taels over 104 weeks. 😊]
I am aware of his outstanding balance.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
Qian Xiaotian frowned, unsatisfied. Then he asked the question he had clearly been building toward the entire time.
“That crate,” he said. “From your grandfather. Is there anything else in it?”
Qian Fan considered with his chin on one hand, and the rest of him arranged the goods in his cart, very carefully, so that as little of it as possible was doing any work.
The honest answer was sitting in the System’s inventory: one gray lump that smelled of riverbanks. Putting it out properly would mean standing, crossing four paces of dirt to the crate under the awning, moving two bundles of sage, crouching, and pretending to dig. Five separate actions. Against that: one customer, one contract, thirty silver taels.
For thirty silver, I will crouch, he thought. But not today.
“Hmm. There might be,” he said.
Something went through Qian Xiaotian’s whole body, hopeful and quickly suppressed.
“I haven’t sorted through all of it,” Qian Fan went on, in the voice of a boy discussing chores. “It’s mostly shoes. If I find anything that isn’t shoes, I’ll put it out.”
“When?”
“When I sort it.”
“...When will you sort it?”
“Tomorrow,” said Qian Fan, “if the weather is bad and nobody buys anything.”
The boy looked at him for a long moment, the way he had looked at the three-copper book, hunting for the catch.
Then he nodded once and left.
[Host, the item is in your inventory. You could put it out now. 😊]
I know.
[He is right there.]
I know that too.
Qian Fan watched the thin figure disappear up the lane.
The only thing worse than a customer who won’t buy, he thought, is a customer who realizes you’ve been waiting for him.
* * *
The weather the next day was excellent, and the stall was busy.
So he waited another day. And then another.
On the third morning, when Qian Xiaotian came down the lane, there was a small clay dish sitting on the cart between the dried sage and the secondhand kettle, where nothing had been before.
In it was a lump.
“What is it?” Qian Xiaotian asked.
“I don’t know,” said Qian Fan, which was a lie in every way that mattered.
The Marrow Cleansing Pill sat in its dish, looking like something a dog had rejected: gray, lumpy, roughly the size of a lychee.
“Is it food?”
“I wouldn’t eat it.”
“Is it a pill?”
“Hmmm. It might be a pill,” Qian Fan said. “It might be a very old dumpling. My mother says to throw it away. My father says somebody might want it, because my father believes that about everything, including the comb.”
Qian Xiaotian picked it up, sniffed it, and recoiled.
“How much?”
“Five coppers.”
“Two.”
“Five.”
“It smells like a pond.”
“Ponds are five coppers,” said Qian Fan.
It cost him something to say it flatly. Everything in him wanted to sell: to lean in, to lower his voice, to say you’ll want to be sitting down when you eat that one, and let the boy’s own imagination do the pricing.
He kept his voice bored and his hands on the sage. It was, he thought, the most expensive silence of his life so far.
Qian Xiaotian looked at the gray lump for a long moment, with the expression of a man weighing the humiliation of being cheated against the much worse humiliation of walking away from something that turned out to matter.
He paid the five coppers.
[Ding! 🎉]
[Item Transferred: Marrow Cleansing Pill]
[Recorded as: Purchase of one unidentified object]
Qian Fan reached under the cart. “Here,” he said, tossing him a folded cloth. “Take this too.”
Qian Xiaotian caught it. It was a towel: white, thick, absurdly soft, with a tiny golden coin stitched into one corner.
“Why?”
“It came with the crate. Free.”
“Nothing is free.”
“Then it’s five coppers for the lump, and the towel comes with it, and you’re getting a towel for nothing, which will bother you all the way home.” Qian Fan went back to his sage. “Wednesday.”
The boy went, frowning at the towel.
On his first day, the System had told him he would understand the towel when he needed it. He understood it now. It just wasn’t him who would be needing it.
He valued it at nothing, and it left his storehouse without a ripple.
* * *
[Host.]
Mm.
[You could have sold that lump for fifteen coppers.]
I know.
[Twenty, to a stranger with a sense of destiny.]
I know.
[You told him it might be a dumpling.]
Qian Fan leaned back against the cart’s wheel and closed his eyes. The sun was warm. The market was slow. Three paces away, his father was explaining the history of a kettle to a woman who was only asking how much it cost.
That’s not a fat sheep, Qian Fan thought. That’s a contract with a hundred and four payments left on it. You don’t fleece a customer you plan to bill for two years.
[That’s a very good principle, Host! It also was not the reason why you did it.]
Qian Fan opened one eye.
[You smile at customers. You have never pitched one. Not the porter, not the old woman, not the boy with the pill. You sell people what they came for, and then you stop.]
I don’t need to pitch to sell salve to a man with a bad back.
[No,] the System agreed cheerfully. [You need one to sell a talisman to a man who doesn’t need it.]
Qian Fan said nothing for a while.
The truth, which he had no intention of explaining to a panel of glowing text, was that the pitch smelled a certain way—cheap carpet and burnt coffee. Fluorescent lights at two in the morning. Forty thousand calls, a headset that left a groove above his ear, and a life so thin that the only thing waiting for him at home had been a houseplant he kept forgetting to water.
Somewhere in the last three seconds of that life, he promised to himself that if there ever was anything after that, then he would not spend it apologizing to strangers in a bright, warm voice that wasn’t his.
The miserable thing was that it worked. He had been the best on his floor for eleven straight months and hated every single second of it. And here he was, in a world where young masters paid eighty silver for a sword because somebody else wanted it, with a mother who knew every coin she owned by name and a father who gave away radishes.
“Fine,” Qian Fan said aloud and at the same time very quietly.
[Fine? 🤔]
I’ll pitch. To these fat sheep. To people who come here to buy status and hidden treasures. To anyone who sneers at this cart before they even have a chance to look at it.
I’ll drain all of their money.
[Wonderful! That’s the spirit, Host! 😇]
But not to my parents. Not the regulars. Not anyone who comes to this cart because their life or someone else’s is on the line.
[...May I ask why not?]
Because I want to be able to tell the difference later on, Qian Fan thought. When a point comes where there’s more money.
[Noted! 😊]
* * *
Qian Xiaotian ate the pill that night, sitting in the yard, because he had decided that if it was poison, then he would rather be outside where his mother wouldn’t hear or see him.
It tasted the way it smelled.
He started counting to ten, then nothing happened.
Then his bones caught fire.
Not a real fire, no. Something much worse in its own way: a deep, crawling, burrowing heat that started in his arms and began to spread outwards, as though someone were scouring him from the inside with a stiff brush. His knees gave up, and he knelt in the dirt. His jaws locked. His skin ran hot, then cold, then hot again.
And then he began to leak.
It came out of his pores, black and thick, and had an unspeakable stink that was reminiscent of a drainage ditch in high summer. It ran down his arms in strings. It welled up on his chest. It got into his hair, which he would later decide was the worst part.
Impurities, he thought dizzily, with the small clear corner of his mind that had once read about this on the clan’s public shelf. It’s cleansing the marrow. It’s supposed to do this.
He crawled to the water bucket, and his hand closed on a folded towel: the one that the stall boy had thrown at him that morning, for no reason at all.
Qian Xiaotian looked at the towel.
Then at his arms.
Then, slowly, at the sky.
It took most of an hour to scrub until the black stopped coming. When it finally ended, he sat in the wet dirt with steam rising off his shoulders, feeling hollowed out and scoured and, strangely, remarkably light.
Then the words appeared.
[Congratulations on your progress! 🎉]
[Free portion complete: impurities purged from the arms, shoulders, and chest.]
[Full access: purge the entire body, including the spine, legs, and dantian.]
[Unlock full effect: 20 silver taels.]
[Option 1: Pay in Full: 18 silver taels. 😊]
[Option 2: Buy Now, Pay Later: nothing due today! 🎉]
He sat there, half-cleansed, covered in drying filth, in the dark, and dumbfounded, staring at the glowing letters in front of him.
“You,” he said, “are doing this now?”
The letters waited, patient and cheerful.
He looked down at himself. Arms, shoulders, chest: scoured, the skin faintly pink, the muscle underneath humming with something he could only call room. Legs: unchanged. He could feel the difference between the two halves of his own body, like a line drawn across his waist.
His body felt strange—it felt uneven.
Twenty silver taels.
Two hundred and eighty coppers a week, already owed. Another plan on top would be…He did the calculations twice already, because he didn’t trust the first answer, and a third time, because he didn’t like it.
Nearly five hundred coppers a week. Every week. For two years.
He thought about five pieces of embroidery. He thought about the rat bounties in the grain stores, two coppers a tail, which he might finally be able to take, now that his arms worked. He thought about his mother’s pill box, which for the first time in a month would not be empty.
Then he thought about a payment schedule on pattern paper, one-hundred-and-four lines long, and what would happen to the last third of those lines if he stacked another debt on top of it.
“No,” Qian Xiaotian said.
[Would you like to reconsider? Many customers find that—]
“No,” he said again. “I can’t afford it. Not yet.”
He wiped his hands on the ruined towel, folded it, and set it on his knees.
“When I can,” he said to nobody, to the air, to the thing that talked out of books and pills, “I’ll buy the rest. Not before. I don’t bite off more than what I can chew.”
The letters hung there for a moment.
[Understood! 😊]
[Free portion retained permanently. Thank you for your business!]
And then, after a pause that felt almost personal:
[You are a very unusual customer. 😊]
* * *
Across the compound, Qian Fan was cultivating, and it was going badly.
The gray lump was gone, and the storehouse knew. This morning it had been twenty silver in his inventory. Tonight it was five coppers in his pouch, and a towel the storehouse had never counted. The thread came in thin. The copper on his tongue had the flat taste reminiscent of lead from a bad coin. At this point, he was able to differentiate the taste of copper and might be qualified to be named a copper connoisseur.
He had helped someone today. It turned out even the act of helping had a price, and the price to be paid was exactly the currency he cultivated in.
He was halfway in the cycle when suddenly—
[Ding!]
[Customer Qian Xiaotian has declined full access to the Marrow Cleansing Pill.]
[Reason given: inability to pay.]
[Outstanding balance unchanged: 30 silver taels.]
The thread snapped. Begin again from the first coin.
Qian Fan read the message three times.
Then he laughed, quietly, in the dark.
[Host? This is a loss. We have lost twenty silver taels of revenue.]
We haven’t lost anything, Qian Fan thought. It’s only a matter of time before Qian Xiaotian proceeds to buy the whole thing. Besides, we’ve got a customer who counts to the end of the schedule before he even signs. Do you know how rare that is?
[...Yes. 😊]
Then stop complaining.
[He is also now half-cleansed, Host. His arms are clean, but his legs are not.]
Is that bad?
[It is uneven! 😊]
“That’s precisely why he’ll pay the rest,” Qian Fan said aloud, and was surprised by how certain he sounded. “Give him three months.”
The panel hesitated. Then it did something it had never done before and added a line to an account.
[Account note: customer reads terms. Customer declines upsells. Customer is…concerning. 😟]
And, underneath it, helpfully.
[Recommended add-on for this customer: Cleaning Talisman. “Frequently purchased immediately after a Marrow Cleansing Pill.”]
[Host stock: 0. 😔]
Qian Fan looked at the zero for a long time.
His salve was gone. His towel was gone. A porter’s brother in the east quarter was waiting for next week, and the only thing on his cart that anyone had asked for twice was something he no longer had.
The circle was broken anyway.
He opened the catalogue.