The catalogue was, in its own way, the finest book that Qian Fan had ever read.
He had only meant to buy a salve. Six jars, for a porter’s brother who carried rope in the east quarter. It should have only taken a minute.
It took most of the night.
Forty-one items glowed in two neat columns, each with a wholesale price, a suggested retail price, and a note from the System. Qian Fan read every one of them the way other boys his age read stories about immortals on flying swords.
[Iron Stomach Pill. Permits the eating of food that has turned. “Our most-purchased item in years of poor harvest.”]
[Sleepless Night Pill. Removes the need for sleep for one night. “The debt is repaid, with interest, the following night.”]
[Common Talisman (Functional). Blocks one strike that would break a rib. “These actually work. Most do not!” 🤓]
[Spirit Rat (live). 3 silver taels. Note: the Host is currently paid two coppers a tail to kill these. We sell them at three silver. We would like the Host to sit with that.]
He sat with it.
Then he scrolled to the bottom, where the System kept the things it could not classify, and found a single boot (“the other is not available. Even the System doesn’t know where it is.”), half a map, a sealed jar whose contents the System itself did not know, and a Mysterious Black Iron Ring at three silver taels (“Contains nothing. Has never contained anything. Customers purchase it regardless.”).
And, at two coppers:
[Comb, three teeth missing. “Sourced locally.”]
Qian Fan looked across the dark room to the corner where his father’s cart stood under its cloth, and the comb his father believed someone might want.
He decided not to ask.
* * *
He started with the question every merchant starts with, in every world: who is actually walking past my cart?
Porters with ruined backs and only ten coppers to spend. Hunters heading out of the city walls. Patrol men coming off the night shift. Old women buying one radish at a time. And, every now and then, a clan servant sent down to the market on an errand he considered beneath him.
Then the second question: what do they need that they can’t already get?
Salve, for their backs. He had sold four jars and been asked for more twice. Fire-Starting Talismans, for anyone who slept outside the walls. Insect-Repelling Talismans, which the System promised sold themselves in summer. Bruise Liniment, the cheap salve, for people who couldn’t afford the good one. Callus-Softening Balm, “for hands that have been holding a pole all day,” which described roughly half the city. Whetstones, which the System noted outsold every sword on the list.
Then the third question: How much should he charge them?
The System had suggestions. He checked them against the market instead. On his third day after the awakening, he had walked every lane of it with Appraisal running, and he still carried the prices in his head like the way other people carried their lists and songs. The apothecary by the east gate sold bone salve at thirty-five coppers, in a jar that was half the size of the System’s. The general store on Third Lane wanted twenty-five for fire tinder that went out in the rain.
So: the salve at thirty. Fire-Starting Talismans at twenty. A little under everyone else, and never so far under that anyone would wonder why. A cart was supposed to be cheaper than a shop. A cart that was much cheaper than a shop was a cart that somebody would want to look into. Especially when the cart’s goods were more effective and cheaper than what they sold in the shops.
And he would price everything to move. A jade-green pill he couldn’t sell had already taught him that goods sitting in his inventory breathed for him about as well as a brick. Coin was clean. Goods were a debt he owed his own storehouse until he sold them.
He stopped at the Hunger-Forgetting Pill.
[Suppresses hunger for a day. “Our best seller in poor districts. Does not contain food.”]
[An excellent choice for this location, Host! 😊]
Not that one.
[It is our best seller in poor districts!]
That’s precisely why, Qian Fan thought. A man buying that would not be buying anything else. He’s buying one more day. Sell it here, and within a month every porter on this street knows my cart as the place that sells hunger, and nobody buys salve from the hunger cart.
The System was quiet for a moment. Then it moved the pill to the bottom of the list, without comment.
The last question was the one no other merchant in Wutong City had to ask: what could a vegetable cart sell without anyone asking where it came from?
Anything in a tin, a paper wrapper, or a bundle of twine. Anything a wholesaler might possibly carry up from the coast. Nothing that glowed. Nothing with a name a clan elder would recognize.
The Storage Ring at thirty-five silver, which he wanted in a way that felt almost physical, would last about an hour on his father’s cart before someone asked where a radish seller’s son had found it, and about another hour before someone came to take it.
Somewhere in this city, he thought, there had to be a place where people sold the things they couldn’t explain. Every city had one. He didn’t know where Wutong City’s black market was yet.
He built the order.
[Bone-Strengthening Salve x6]
[Fire-Starting Talisman x10]
[Insect-Repelling Talisman x10]
[Bruise Liniment x6]
[Callus-Softening Balm x6]
[Whetstone x3]
[Cleaning Talisman x2]
[Clear-Eye Drops x2]
[Total: 538 coppers. Delivery: Stall Placement. Confirm? 😊]
He confirmed.
The copper taste on his tongue went flat and bitter, like a coin with lead under the plating, and stayed that way. Five hundred and thirty-eight coppers of clean coin had just become tins, paper, and twine, worth, tonight, to anyone but him, a good deal less than he had paid.
He sat to cultivate anyway. The thread came in thin.
Buying, it turned out, was a small wound. He was going to have to get used to bleeding a little.
* * *
The stock arrived the way everything from the System arrived: all at once, overnight, in the crate under the awning.
It was beautiful.
That was the problem.
The tins were lacquered a deep glossy red. The talismans were printed on a crisp cream paper that no talisman in Wutong City had ever been printed on. Every jar of salve had a tiny golden coin stamped on its lid. It looked less like market stock than like something a clan patriarch would give his favorite concubine.
Qian Fan got up before dawn, carried the whole crate behind the house, and ruined it.
Couldn’t you just send the stock directly into my Inventory?
[It’s possible, Host! You just need to tell me next time. 😇]
Qian Fan looked in front of him, not really looking at anything, with a deadpan expression.
After a while, he scuffed the tins with a handful of sand. He cut the silk ties off the talisman bundles and retied them with the cheap brown twine his father used for radishes. He rubbed a thumb of ash across every golden coin until it could have been anything, and laid the talismans out on the woodpile so the first sun could bleach the cream out of them.
[Host! That is premium packaging!]
That’s the problem…
[Customers deserve a premium experience! 😊]
Customers deserve not to get robbed on the way home, Qian Fan thought, and rubbed ash into the last lid.
By the time his father came out yawning, the crate looked as if it had been dragged behind a mule for a week, which was exactly the look Qian Fan had been going for.
Qian Hou stopped. Looked into the crate, then looked at his son.
“Where did all this come from?”
Qian Fan had prepared for this question while scuffing tins, and he answered it immediately, in the bored voice of a boy discussing chores.
“Old Zhou.”
“Who?”
“Zhou. A wholesaler, off the east road.” He picked a piece of twine off his sleeve. “It seems that he sold grandfather half the junk in that crate back then, and he feels bad about it. So now he brings us stock. We sell it. He takes seven parts in ten.”
His father’s face did several things at once, and settled on delight. “Three parts in ten! For standing here!”
“Just for standing here,” said Qian Fan.
Liu An had come to the door behind her husband with her arms folded. She looked at the crate for a long time.
“Zhou who?” she said.
“Just Zhou.”
“What does he look like?”
“Old,” said Qian Fan.
“Seven parts,” said Liu An, to nobody in particular, the way another woman might have said “thief”.
She looked at her son a moment longer, with the expression she used on coins she suspected of being light. Then she went back inside, and he heard her start counting something, and knew, with the certainty of a man who had once shared an office with an auditor, that this was not over yet.
[Host, who is Old Zhou? 🤔]
Nobody, Qian Fan thought. That’s the beauty of him.
[Noted! 😊]
* * *
The first fat sheep of Qian Fan’s second life arrived a little before noon.
He recognized the robe before the face: sea-blue silk, one of the matching robes that the Long Clan dressed its clerks in over at the store that smelled of sandalwood and money. The last time Qian Fan had walked into that store, a clerk in exactly this robe had looked him up and down, decided his robe wasn’t worth even a greeting, and turned away.
It was the same clerk.
He came down the market with his chin up, and his sleeves held carefully clear of the other stalls, the way a man walks when he is somewhere beneath him and would like everyone to know it. He stopped at the cart. He looked at the radishes. He looked at the scuffed tins.
“Vegetables,” he said, to nobody. “And junk.”
Then, much more quietly, as if the words cost him: “Someone said that there was a particularly effective salve being sold here.”
Oh, Qian Fan thought.
He was ashamed. That was all it was. A clerk of the Long Clan, on a clerk’s wage, with a clerk’s back, had come down to the vegetable market for the cheap salve because a porter had told somebody who told somebody, and he was sneering so that nobody would notice he was shopping.
A man who sneered at the cart before he looked at it. A fat sheep, in Qian Fan’s own definition.
And the voice came out of him like an old coat he had forgotten he owned.
“Salve,” he said, warm and easy and just a little sorry for the man. “Of course. Long day at the counter?”
The clerk blinked. “I—yes.”
“It’s the neck, isn’t it? From looking down all day.” Qian Fan was already reaching for the jar, and already observing the rest of him: the ink ground into the side of his right hand, the red at the rims of his eyes, the way he squinted at the price even in full sun. “Ledgers?”
“Inventory,” the clerk said, and then, because nobody had asked him about his work in a very long time: “They make us do it after closing. The house rations lamp oil.”
“Two jars,” said Qian Fan. “One for the neck, one for the shoulders. You’ll feel it by tonight.” He set them down, and then, as though it had only just occurred to him, reached into the crate for a small scuffed bottle and set it beside them, and said nothing about it at all.
The clerk looked at it. “What’s that?”
“Clear-Eye Drops. An hour of good sight in bad light.” Qian Fan shrugged. “The hunters buy them all the time. I don’t know if they’d help with inventory.”
He knew exactly what they’d do for inventory.
The clerk paid for the salve, and then, after a long moment in which Qian Fan let him believe it was entirely his own idea, for the drops. Fifty-five coppers for a bottle that cost him thirty. The clerk didn’t haggle. Men who sneered at carts never did; haggling would have meant admitting they were shopping somewhere they looked down upon.
[Ding! 🎉]
[Sale: Bone-Strengthening Salve x2. Clear-Eye Drops x1.]
[Quota Progress: +3%! 🎉🎉]
[Host! That was wonderful! That was the voice! 😭]
It was only the truth, Qian Fan thought. Every word.
[Yes! That is what made it wonderful!]
The clerk walked back up the market with his purchases held carefully clear of the other stalls. He did not look back at the cart. He would, Qian Fan judged, be back within the week, and he would sneer again, and he would buy more.
Qian Fan weighed the feeling the way he would have weighed a coin, and found it came to nothing in particular. The salve would help the man’s neck. The drops would help his eyes.
Nobody had lied. A proud man had been sold what he needed, in the only way a proud man could buy it, at a price that paid for three more jars.
In the call center, he had sold people things they didn’t need to meet a number that was never even his.
Here, the number was his. That was the whole difference, and it was enough.
* * *
The porter’s brother came the next morning: a big, slow man who carried rope in the east quarter and walked like a question mark. He bought two jars of salve and asked whether the talismans that lit fires were any good.
“This here is our steadiest seller,” said Qian Fan. “Which is why it’s surprising that no one even thought of writing songs about them.”
The man laughed and bought three.
The hunters found the Fire-Starting Talismans by the second day, and the Insect-Repelling ones by the afternoon. A patrolman bought all three whetstones and asked if there would be more. An old woman bought the Callus-Softening Balm and told him, as she paid, that he had an honest face, and the System made a small sound that might have been a giggle.
Qian Xiaotian walked past the cart on the second morning with his water pole across his shoulders. He was clean, very nearly. If you stood close enough and the wind was wrong, there was still something about him that smelled of a drainage ditch in high summer.
The two Cleaning Talismans sat in the crate a hand’s width from Qian Fan’s knee. A regular was not a fat sheep. Qian Fan didn’t pitch them, and Xiaotian didn’t ask.
[Host, “frequently purchased immediately after—”]
I know what it says.
By the third afternoon, the crate was empty, except for two Cleaning Talismans.
That night, Qian Fan sat on his thin mattress, straightened his spine, and counted. Five hundred and thirty-eight coppers had gone out as tins and twine. Nearly nine hundred had come back across the cart, coin by coin, from porters, hunters, and patrolmen, and one ashamed clerk in sea-blue silk. Three parts in ten had gone into his mother’s hiding places. Seven parts had gone to Old Zhou, which was to say, into Qian Fan’s inventory: everything he had spent, and a little over eighty coppers besides.
The thread came in thick and cold and walked the whole circle without stalling, and when it touched his tongue, it tasted like a new coin, bright and clean.
Buying was a small wound. Selling, it turned out, was the cure.
He was halfway through the cycle when the curtain moved.
“Son?” His father’s head appeared, beaming. “The crate’s nearly empty. Your mother says it’s the best three days we’ve had in a year.”
“Mm,” said Qian Fan, eyes closed, palms up.
“So I was thinking,” Qian Hou lowered his voice, as if sharing something wonderful. “When can we thank Old Zhou?”
The thread snapped.
Begin again from the first coin.