The bounty board for the grain stores hung on a nail right outside the steward’s office, where the steward could see who read it and decide how much he disliked them.
SPIRIT RATS — EAST GRANARY
Two coppers per tail.
No tail, no pay.
Body Tempering 4th layer and above.
Qian Xiaotian had broken into the 4th layer the night after the library, quietly, in the yard, the way he did everything. He read the board twice the next morning. Then he went to the vegetable cart at the bottom of the market and bought one handful of Cracked Millet for a single copper, from a stall boy who sold it to him with the complete indifference of a boy who did not care whether the rats lived or died.
“Is this good bait?” Xiaotian asked.
“It’s millet,” said Qian Fan with a bored expression. “And it’s cracked. What more could you possibly ask?”
That, it turned out, was all the endorsement it needed.
* * *
Spirit rats were not ordinary rats. They were the size of a cat, fast as a flicked coin, and their teeth went through sacking, planks, and the occasional careless ankle. The hunters called them a nuisance. The clan called them a bounty. The granary steward called them the reason he drank.
The spirit rats simply were not pests that ordinary farmers could deal with. They were rats that gained the ability to absorb qi and cultivate in their own way, turning into spirit beasts.
The east granary was one long, dark room that smelled of dust and old rice. Two rows of grain bins ran down its length, taller than a man, with a narrow aisle between them and a single roof beam running the whole way overhead. One high slat let in a stripe of moonlight across the floor. Everything else was black.
Xiaotian did not chase. Chasing was how the older boys lost their tempers and their ankles. He scattered a thin line of millet across the moonlit stripe, stepped back into the darkness between two bins, and sank into the Weighing-Scale Stance: knees soft, weight settling into his heels like a scale coming to rest, hands loose at his sides.
Then he waited.
An hour passed, and the moonlight crawled across the floor. His thighs began to burn. He let them. Two hundred and eighty coppers, due in twelve days. Eighty would come from Wednesday’s embroidery. The other two hundred was a hundred rats, and he had caught none.
Qian Xiaotian normally wouldn’t be able to get two hundred and eighty coppers for weeks, but with his cultivation rising and his capabilities improving with the Iron Hide cultivation technique and the Qian clan’s cultivation manual, he felt confident that he would be able to earn a copious amount of money by getting rid of pests that turned into spirit beasts. He had no choice but to feel confident.
The first rat came out of the dark at the far end of the aisle like a thrown shoe, stopped dead at the edge of the moonlight, and sat up.
He did not move.
It ate. It was gray and sleek, its tail twice the length of its own body. A second came behind it. Then a third came out of a gap under the nearest bin, so close to his foot that he could hear its claws on the boards.
Three at once.
The nearest rat lifted its head and looked straight at him.
He moved before he even realized. Coin-Edge Palm: the hand held flat; the qi drove down his arm and out to the edge until the edge was iron. One stroke across the back of its neck. The rat went down without a sound. Swift and smooth.
The other two did not run. They came at him.
One hit his shin, and its teeth sank into the flesh of his calf, and he felt the Iron Hide hold, the skin taking the bite the way a road takes a cartwheel: badly, painfully, and still there afterwards. The second went in for his face. He was already turning, weight shifting to his back heel, the stance swinging him like a scale tipping, and the rat’s claws raked the air where his eye had been and struck the bin behind him with a sound like gravel thrown to the ground.
The strike had cost more than he’d meant to spend. He could feel the hollowness in his arm where the qi had gone. The scale in his stance swung and settled, swung and settled, and he knew he had one more strike in him tonight before his hand turned into mere hands.
The rat on his calf let go, leaving his calf bleeding, and backed away, hissing, gathering itself, readying for a second strike.
The one on the bin crouched above his head.
Two rats. One strike.
He calculated it as he did everything, in a frugal manner in which he had to find a way to utilize his remaining qi in order to finish off the two rats. The one above him would jump first; the one on the floor would wait for the right opportunity to attack together with the former. So he did not look at the floor. He watched the bin, and when the spirit rat came off it, all teeth and claws, and the moonlight, he let his knees go soft, dropped under it, and put the edge of his hand into its neck on the way down.
It hit the boards and would forever not be able to get up.
The last rat looked at him, agitated. Qian Xiaotian looked at the last rat. Neither of them had energy left to spend. The last rat knew that it could still attack, but it would surely die if the boy was pushed to the corner even without any qi left.
It ran.
Xiaotian let it go, because chasing was how the older boys lost their temper and their ankles, and because his calf was bleeding into his sandal. He stood in the dark and breathed until the scale inside him came to rest.
Then he went back to the millet, and knelt, and waited for the next one while continuing to cultivate.
By dawn, he had four.
He had already read the free manual twice the night he got it, and he had been drilling the three forms at the kiln every night since then, until the edges of his palms were raw. He had expected them to be simple. They were indeed simple. But simple, done a thousand times, turned out to be something else: a strike that went exactly where it was sent and spent exactly as much as it needed to. Metal cuts, the manual said. Metal holds.
Tonight it had done both.
He carried all four to the steward’s window, and the steward looked at him the way people had looked at him for two years.
“Two of these have no tails,” the steward said.
Xiaotian looked down. Two of the tails had come off in his hand while he carried them, because a spirit rat’s tail, after its death, was attached with little hope.
“No tail,” said the steward, “no pay.”
Four coppers, not eight. He took them back without arguing, because arguing cost time, and time is something that he needed to spend efficiently and effectively. He walked back toward the stables with them in his fist.
Elder Qian Zhuo was sitting on the storeroom step, eating a steamed bun.
The old man looked at the dead rats swinging from Xiaotian’s hand, chewed thoughtfully, then said, “Rats are bad for grain.”
“Yes, Elder.”
The Elder took another bite. “Mind the tails,” he added, with his mouth full. “They come off.”
Xiaotian stopped walking.
He stood in the yard for a long time with two tailless rats in one hand and four coppers in the other, while the old man finished his bun, brushed the crumbs off his knees, and wandered away to find somewhere warmer to sit.
Mind the tails.
Not the rat itself. The tail. The tail was the pay. The rat was only the thing attached to it.
That night he stopped carrying rats by the tail. He carried them by the scruff, and cut the tails off himself, at the root, with the steward’s own rules kept in mind. He lost no more coppers after that, and worked more efficiently compared to his first night.
It did not occur to him to wonder how an old man simply eating a bun had known exactly which words he needed at that exact moment. It did not occur to him that the old man had simply said the first thing that popped into his mind when he saw him. He only bowed the next morning, when he passed by the storeroom step, and the Elder, who had no idea why, nodded back.
* * *
Ten nights. A hundred tails, give or take.
He kept the count on the back of a scrap of pattern paper, under the column of numbers that ran all the way down the page: Week 1: 280. Week 2: 280. One hundred and four lines.
A hundred tails made two hundred coppers. Wednesday’s embroidery made eighty more. The mending and the stipend were for the apothecary, and they went to the apothecary, and he did not touch them.
On the morning of the fifteenth day, two days before it was due, Qian Xiaotian sat on the log in the yard where he had first opened the Iron Hide Manual, and counted two hundred and eighty coppers out onto its cover, one at a time.
The book drank them.
There was no other word for it. The coins sat on the old leather for the space of a breath, and then they were simply gone, the way water goes into dry ground, and the cover was warm under his hand.
[Payment received: 280 coppers.]
[Installment 1 of 104. Paid early! 😊]
[Thank you for your business!]
He looked at the words for a while. Then he took out the pattern paper and made a very small mark beside Week 1.
Early was better than on time. On time was better than late. Late was how debts turned into something else. He had read clause six until he could recite it by heart.
* * *
Down at the market, Qian Fan was weighing radishes for a woman who wanted three and was prepared to argue about all of them.
[Ding!]
[Payment received from Customer Qian Xiaotian: 280 coppers.]
[Installment 1 of 104.]
A pause. Then, in a much smaller voice:
[Host…he paid early. ☹️]
Qian Fan handed the woman her radishes and took her coppers.
That’s good, isn’t it?
[It is two days early, Host.]
So it’s very good.
[Interest accrues daily. Two days of accrued interest have been lost. That is one copper and a fraction.] A long pause. [I have feelings about the fraction.]
He’s paying on time. Early. Do you know how many people in my last life paid early? Besides, early payment means I could utilize the money earlier, in which case I could use it to buy more stocks for the shop and sell them.
[Yes. 😕]
Qian Fan went back to his stool behind the cart and did not say anything else for a while, because he was thinking of something.
* * *
He worked it out that night, sitting cross-legged on his mattress in the dark, halfway through the cycle.
He was going through his coppers the way he did every night, the way his mother did, naming them. Thirty from the porter’s brother. Fifty-five from a proud clerk in sea-blue silk. And two hundred and eighty that had arrived just this morning from a boy who had killed a hundred rats to earn them.
The moment he named them, the thread came in thick.
Cold and heavy, and coppery, through the square below his navel, and down, and round, and it walked the rim faster than it had compared to the previous nights that week. He could feel the difference. Two hundred and eighty coppers of clean coin, sitting in his inventory, breathing.
And last night, those same two hundred and eighty coppers had been a line on a contract. Owed, not held. Merely a promise. And a promise, as the manual had told him on the very first night, was not silver.
A promise did not breathe.
Qian Fan opened his eyes.
Every week, that boy’s money stayed a promise; it did nothing for him. Every week it turned into coin; it went to work in his storehouse that same night. The System wanted the debt to last as long as possible, because the System wanted the debt to accrue interest. Qian Fan didn’t cultivate interest, although the returns would be huge if the customer didn’t pay on time; that would prevent him from squeezing out more from that particular customer in the future if he just left them to go broke. He can’t sell more to a person who goes broke compared to a customer who became richer. A richer customer would mean that they would have more money to spend at his shop. Besides, his method of cultivation is pegged to the money he currently holds.
What’s our early-settlement term? Qian Fan asked.
[Customers who settle their full balance early receive a discount of two parts in a hundred! It is extremely generous, Host! 😊]
It’s a bit insulting. Can I change it?
[The Host may offer promotions, funded from the Host’s share. Nobody ever does that. 😕]
Fifteen, said Qian Fan.
[...Fifteen what?]
Fifteen parts in a hundred off the remaining balance, any time he settles early. Any amount. Pay a hundred coppers of the balance ahead of schedule, and he only has to hand over eighty-five.
The System was silent for so long that Qian Fan thought it might have left him on mute.
[Host,] it said at last, very carefully, [that is a great deal of money to give away to a customer who is already paying diligently.]
I’m not giving it away. I’m buying it. Eighty-five coppers tonight is worth more to me than a hundred coppers in two years. Tonight’s coins breathe. Next year’s coins are a line on a page. And a customer who pays early doesn’t default, doesn’t hide, doesn’t make me come and collect.
Besides, the earlier he settles his payments, the more likely he is to buy from our shop. The more we sell him things, the more we earn money. It’s a way for him to become more capable, and at the same time, it also trickles down to us in the sense that he would be spending more in the long run for the mere price of fifteen percent off his total bill. What we’re doing is investing in his future, and that future would bring us a lot of money.
[Host…for once, you have actually made a decent argument, and I have been left with no choice but to remain speechless. I was about to mention that the more the interest accrues, the more we can squeeze from him, but I was thinking of the short term rather than the long term. I am a mere frog in a well that doesn’t know the existence of the ocean. 😮]
Exactly, Qian Fan thought. That’s why I’m not charging him any more of it than I have to. We can change the percentage later on for each individual if we see fit, especially if there’s an especially annoying customer later on.
The System made a sound like a ledger being closed hard.
[Promotion added. 😇]
* * *
Qian Xiaotian found it the next morning, when he opened the Iron Hide manual to the page where the terms lived, as he did every morning, in case they had changed.
They had.
There was a new line at the bottom of the contract, in the same polite characters as the rest:
[A message from your merchant: settle any part of your balance ahead of schedule, and receive fifteen parts in a hundred off every copper paid early. No conditions. 😊]
He read it three times.
Then he read the whole contract again, from the first line down to the last, looking for the clause that made the new line a trap. There wasn’t one. He read it once more anyway, slower, with his finger under each character.
There was no trap. It was the only line in a hundred and four weeks of terms that was written in his favor, and it had appeared overnight, and nobody had asked him to sign anything.
Qian Xiaotian sat on the log in the cold morning with the book on his knees and did the calculations.
If he paid ahead, every copper counted for more. If he killed more rats, the schedule got shorter. Two years might become something less than two years. Not much less. But less.
He didn’t understand why a merchant had sold him a thirty-silver book for only three copper coins. He didn’t understand why a book from a dead old man would suddenly come alive and ask for more payment for something he bought for cheap. He didn’t even know if the young merchant knew that all of these were happening; he wasn’t sure that he'd even believe him and just stare at him with the same bored face, but this time, he might look at him as if he were an idiot. He didn’t trust anything he didn’t understand. But he knew what a good deal looked like, and this was one, and you did not leave a good deal lying on the table because you couldn’t see the reason for it.
He closed the book, picked up his water pole, and went to find out whether the steward had any more rats for him to kill.
* * *
That night, Qian Fan opened the account and looked at it for a long time.
One customer. One contract. One payment, early, earned two coppers at a time. A boy who read the terms every morning in case they’d changed, and took the only good one he’d ever been offered straight back to the granary.
Qian Fan had worked tens of thousands of calls in his last life. In all of them, he had met perhaps three customers like that. He had lost all three to competitors who didn’t deserve them.
He added a line to the account, the kind that the System could see and nobody else ever would.
[Host note added: Priority Account.]
[Do not lose this one.]