The next two weeks were the kind nobody writes songs about, which suited Qian Fan perfectly. A calm and uneventful week was a good week.
* * *
The regulars came back.
That was the first thing, and the thing that mattered the most, because a customer who came once was luck, and a customer who came back was business. The porter came on the third day of every week for his jar, complained about the price, and paid it nevertheless. His brother, the rope carrier, came on the fifth. The old woman with the knee problem came whenever her knees told her to, which can be said was quite often, and told Qian Fan every single time that he had an honest face.
The Long Clan clerk came back on the eighth day, exactly as predicted. He walked the length of the market with his sleeves held clear of the other stalls, sneered at the radishes, and bought three jars and two bottles of drops. He said “Vegetables” on the way in and nothing at all on the way out. Qian Fan found that he was beginning to look forward to him.
[Host, the clerk’s account is showing excellent loyalty! 😊]
I guess you could say that. Although he sneers at the display, that is better than ordinary loyal customers because they want discounts. This one will never ask for one.
Every third night, Qian Fan opened the catalogue, restocked whatever had sold, and had it sent straight into his inventory, because he had learned that lesson on the first morning, with a handful of sand. Every third morning, before his parents woke up, he took the new stock out behind the house and ruined it a little. The System had stopped protesting about the packaging. It now simply sighed, audibly, whenever he reached for the sand.
The quota crept.
In his first month, every jar had moved it a whole part in a hundred, and it had climbed past the halfway mark almost before he even noticed. Now a jar moved it hardly at all. It took a full day of salve and talismans and a clerk’s bottle of drops to push it up a single part, and some days not even that. The regulars came back, and the regulars told other people, and the number went up anyway, slowly but surely, like a cart on a hill that kept getting steeper.
He assumed he was imagining the hill. He was a merchant; he knew what a slow week looked like. This didn’t feel like a slow week at all. It just felt like a target that had been moved.
* * *
The second thing was the points.
It started with Qian Tie, whose shoulder had stopped hurting two days after the salve and who had then told, by Qian Fan’s count, everyone. Within a week, there was a small, quiet traffic at the back of the cart that had nothing to do with radishes.
A girl with nineteen points and a younger brother with a fever. A boy with sixty points, no technique he could afford for another two years, and a father who needed a new hoe. A skinny cousin who had been saving since he was eight for a sword technique, and who had just done the sum for the first time and discovered he would be twenty-three before he could even buy it.
Points bought nothing outside of the clan. Coppers bought everything else. And Qian Fan, alone in the whole Qian clan, would take one for the other.
Four coppers a point, or five in goods. No questions. No records. Never more than thirty points from any one person, because thirty points was someone’s pocket money and a hundred points would turn into a story.
The points went to the clan apothecary, where they were worth five or six times as much.
His mother’s cough, which had lived in her chest all winter, was gone within ten days. The apothecary gave his father a plaster for his back that cost eight points and would have cost two hundred coppers in the city, and Qian Hou walked straight for the first time in a year and told the whole street that it was the God of Wealth who was answering his son’s prayers.
Qian Fan let him.
He did not spend a single point on himself. Points bought pills, and pills were merely borrowed qi, and borrowed qi was a debt his foundation would one day have to pay. The points went where his parents’ bodies were. Everything else was business.
* * *
The third thing was his mother.
Liu An had waited, in the patient way of a woman who knew every coin she owned by name, until the end of the month. Then, one evening, when the stall was packed away and while his father was out telling a neighbor about the plaster, she sat down across the table from her son with the household tally in front of her.
“Seven parts,” she said.
“Old Zhou’s terms,” said Qian Fan.
“Seven parts out of ten, for a man who brings tins.” She turned the tally toward him. “I sold those tins. Your father sold those tins. We stood in the rain with those tins. What does Zhou do?”
“He supplies them.”
“From where?”
“The east road.”
“Where on the east road?”
Qian Fan looked at his mother and understood, with the flat clarity of a man who had once been audited by a professional, that he was being audited by his mother—you could also say, interrogated.
“The far end,” he said.
Liu An looked at him for a very long time.
“I’d like to see his receipts,” she said.
That night Qian Fan wrote Old Zhou’s receipts beside the lamplight, left-handed, in the cramped, impatient characters of an old man who resented paper. Seven parts in ten, received, with thanks. He smudged them. He folded them twice. He left one out in the rain on the woodpile for an hour. Then he brought it in and dried it by the stove.
[Host,] said the System, [this is forgery.]
It’s a receipt from a man who doesn’t exist, for money that went into my own pocket. Who exactly is being defrauded? I’m Old Zhou.
The System considered this for some time.
[I will need to consult the Terms and Conditions. 😊]
His mother read the receipts the next morning without comment, turned them over, held one up to the light, and put them all in the tin where she kept the things she intended to think about later.
Qian Fan decided it was going to be a very long year.
* * *
Qian Xiaotian paid early every week.
Two days early, then three, then four, with a little extra on top that the new promotion counted as fifteen percent off. The coins arrived on the Iron Hide manual in the yard at dawn; the book drank them, and in Qian Fan’s head the System made a small, wounded sound.
[He has paid ahead again, Host. 🙁]
Good.
[The fraction keeps getting larger.]
Good. He’s paying us early so he can pay us more later. You’ll see.
What had stopped climbing was the boy.
Qian Fan checked him every few days with Credit Check, the way you’d check a crop. Body Tempering 6th layer. Then 6th layer. Then 6th layer again. The boy had gone up the middle tier like water up a well rope, three layers in a month, and now the rope had stopped.
Qian Fan knew that shape. Every new product did it. A fast climb at the start, while the market caught up with the thing it had always wanted, and then a flattening, when you’d already sold to everyone who was waiting and had to start selling to people who weren’t interested in the first place. Eight years of carrying water had tempered that boy’s body far past the layer that the clan had written down for him, and the layers had come up to meet it all at once. Now they had caught up. From here, every layer would cost him an honest price.
He found he respected that about the boy’s cultivation. It was the only thing in the Qian clan that charged everyone the same.
* * *
The fourth thing was a rumor, though nobody who told it thought of it as one.
The porter told him, on the third day of the second week, while he was counting his thirty coppers.
“You know the old forest?” he said. “Past the fields?”
Qian Fan knew of the old forest the way every child in Wutong City did: as somewhere you were told to never go, by people who never said why. He said, “Mm.”
“Gone quiet again,” said the porter. “My cousin cuts reeds down by the ditch. Says there are no birds. None. Not going in, not coming out. And the dogs won’t even go near it. His dog stood at the edge of the grass and howled till he dragged it home.” He handed over the coins. “Not all old places do that, my mother used to say. Go quiet, sometimes. Then you stay away. The old wood is a real danger, and not just some old myth. I think.”
“Sound advice,” said Qian Fan, and handed him his jar.
He thought no more about it. There were many tall tales in a market, and most of them were told by men who wanted a discount; they kept your mind busy and interested. He filed it in the drawer in his head where he kept the things that didn’t matter yet.
* * *
The fifth thing came from a rogue cultivator.
A big, quiet man with a gray wolf’s head stitched on his shoulder, one of the hunting teams that worked outside the walls, bought all three whetstones Qian Fan had put out that morning. He turned the last one over in his hands before he paid, and looked at the cart, and at Qian Fan, and said mildly:
“These are better than they look.”
“We keep the good ones scuffed,” said Qian Fan. “People trust scuffs. Too clean and it makes it seem fake, especially when you sell it alongside vegetable carts.”
The rogue nearly smiled. “You’d do well at the riverbed.”
“The riverbed?”
“Below the east gate. Where the river used to run, before they moved it.” The man tucked the whetstones away. “Some nights, an hour before dawn, people set out lanterns down there with the shutters half closed and sell things you couldn’t sell up here in daylight. Nobody asks where anything came from.” He paid, nodded, and turned to go. “Nobody asks who’s selling, either. That’s the only rule. By daylight, all of it disappears without a single trace, which is why it’s called the Ghost Market.”
Qian Fan watched him walk away up the market.
On the night he first read the catalogue, he had thought that somewhere in this city there had to be a place where people sold things they couldn’t explain. Every city had one. He hadn’t known where Wutong City’s was.
Now he did.
Every novel that Qian Fan had ever read had a black market. In Wutong City, it seemed, they called it the Ghost Market.
[Host? Your heart rate—]
I’m fine. I’m just thinking about lanterns.
* * *
The sixth thing wasn’t even a thing at all, which was how Qian Fan preferred his hobbies.
He had not forgotten the Clan’s free cultivation manual. He simply hadn’t practiced from it, because practicing was work. What he had done, in the slow hours behind the cart while his father told customers the life story of a kettle, was read it.
Three forms, a handful of pages, and he read them the way he’d once read competitors’ product sheets: not to learn the product per se, but to find out what it was for and what was special about it.
Weighing-Scale Stance was a scale. That was not a metaphor at all. The feet were the base, the spine was the beam, and the whole art of it was finding the point where the load, whatever it was, came to rest. He tried it one slow afternoon behind the cart, knees soft, weight in his heels, and found that he could shift a full crate of radishes from one hip to the other without his back complaining at all. He did not try it again for three whole days. It had worked too well, and something that worked well was going to want you to invest in more practice.
Coin-Edge Palm was a coin standing on its edge. The rim did all the work. A coin laid flat was something you paid with; a coin standing on its edge was something that cut.
And Steelyard Sword, Three Cuts, was a steelyard: a beam, a hook, and a sliding weight. Three cuts, because a steelyard weighed three ways: light, heavy, and exact.
He sat behind the cart with the book open on his knee and his chin on his hand, and it occurred to him that the man who had written these forms had not been a swordsman or a boxer at all. He had been a merchant, looking at the tools on his counter, and asking what else they could do.
Qian Fan closed the book, very pleased, and did absolutely nothing about it.
It was a good idea. It could wait. Good ideas, in his experience, kept better than coins.
* * *
On the last evening of the second week, the stray cat came back.
It had been sitting on the crates at the end of the market on his second day in this world, skinny and gray, licking its paw, and the System had informed him with great enthusiasm that it was the future contracted spirit beast of a Beast-Taming Protagonist and qualified for a starter loan.
He had not seen it since.
It was sitting on the same crates now, licking the same paw. It was noticeably bigger. It looked at Qian Fan, yawned, and went on licking.
[It still qualifies for a starter loan! 😊]
It’s just a cat…
* * *
That night, he sat on his thin mattress and counted.
He had more than he had ever had in both of his lives combined. Eight silver taels and change in his inventory. The clerk’s coins and the porter’s coins and the rope carrier’s coins, the boy’s early payments breathing clean in the dark, and the coppers the points trade had left him after his mother’s breath and his father’s straightened back had been paid for. He named every one of them. The thread came in thick and cold and walked the whole circle without stalling, down to the root, up the spine, over the crown, down the front, and settled into the storehouse like a coin on a stack.
It had been more than a month since he’d first sat like this, with five silver and a towel.
And he was still at the 4th layer.
He sat with that for a long time. His well was deeper. His back hadn’t ached in weeks. The qi came in thicker after every good day, and settled every night, and the 5th layer’s gate stood exactly where it had stood on the first night: full, patient, and closed.
He looked down at his hands, lying palms up on his knees in the dark.
They were cold. They had been cold every night for a month.
Qian Fan was a merchant, and a merchant knew that when the numbers went up and the results didn’t, then it wasn’t the numbers that were wrong, but something else.
He was starting to suspect why.