The night after Qian Fan broke through the 5th layer, he went shopping.
Not for the cart, no. For the dark.
He had never sold in a market that he couldn’t see, and a merchant who walks into a new market with the wrong kind of stock deserves whatever happens to him. So he lay on his mattress with the catalogue open and asked himself the questions he always asked, adjusted for the lanterns.
Who walks through a riverbed an hour before dawn? People who can’t buy in daylight.
What do they want? He didn’t know yet. That was what the first night was for: market research and testing the waters.
So he would bring one thing he believed would sell in an environment like that, and one thing he didn’t really need, and watch which one moved.
First, though, he asked the System for the one number he couldn’t count for himself.
[Host Status 😊]
[Merchant Rank: Beggar]
[Quota Progress: 62% to Street Peddler]
[Funds: 9 silver taels, 312 coppers]
[Stock on hand, at cost: 1 silver tael, 840 coppers]
[Note: promotion requirements rise with progress. The last tenth is the hardest! 😇]
The funds and the stock he already knew, to the copper; he had named every one of them the night before. It was the quota he wanted. The first half of it had come in a month: a porter, a boy, an old woman, a clerk who sneered on the way in, a percent for every jar. The next tenth had taken three weeks of selling every single day, and the number had barely moved.
They moved the target, Qian Fan thought. Of course they moved the target. Two lives, and somebody always moves the goalpost.
Beggar stock moved the number a little at a time, and the little was getting smaller.
A man who wanted to be a Street Peddler before the year was out needed to sell something bigger than salve.
The thing he believed in had been sitting in the clearance bin for six weeks.
[Mysterious Black Iron Ring. 3 silver taels. “Contains nothing. Has never contained anything. Customers purchase it regardless. It looks cool and mysterious.”]
He had looked at it every few nights, the way you would look at a coin on the far side of a gutter. A plain black band, heavier than it should be, with no markings, no inscription, and a description that was, as far as he could tell, the only completely honest product note he had ever read in two lives. Nobody in Wutong City would buy a black iron ring from a vegetable cart. But someone who’d read too many stories and think things too much might buy one in the dark.
The thing he didn’t believe in was a bundle of Insect-Repelling Talismans, ten of them, one of his best sellers in daylight. A control sample.
Then he turned to the part of the catalogue he had never needed before.
[Common Talisman (Functional). 52 coppers. One charge; blocks a strike that would break a rib. “Surprisingly, these actually work. Most do not! 😊”]
He bought one.
[May I also recommend the Heavenly Guard Talisman, Host? Genuine! Blocks one strike from any cultivator below Foundation Establishment! Only 28 silver! 😊]
Qian Fan laughed so suddenly that he had to put his hand over his mouth so his parents wouldn’t hear.
[It is excellent value!]
It’s nearly three times everything I own…
[Protection is priceless, Host! 😇]
Protection has a price, Qian Fan thought. It’s printed right there. And besides, no one would buy something like that from a vegetable cart; even I would think it’s a scam if I ever saw one being sold from our cart. The first day is testing the waters. If I see that things like that actually sell there, then I might buy it. For now, it’s not worth it.
He scrolled past the Wind-Walking Talisman, one charge of great speed for two silver, looked at it, and kept scrolling. Two silver was most of the price of the ring. He would have to run on his own feet.
And then, because a boy who could only defend himself was a boy who would eventually run out of defending, he looked for something that bit.
The System, it turned out, sold plenty of things that bit. That was the point of a talisman: the paper did the work, so it didn’t matter whose hand threw it. Even the dumbest lackey of the villain can use it. A Body Tempering boy could throw a fire that no Body Tempering boy could make, as long as he could pay for it. That’s the power of money.
[Flame Burst Talisman. 1 silver 200. A fist of fire, thrown. “Do not use indoors. Do not use near your eyebrows.”]
[Thunderclap Talisman. 40 coppers. One crack loud enough to stop a charging boar. “Startles. Does not harm…usually. Customers report this is usually enough.”]
[Binding Thread Talisman. 1 silver. Silk that wraps the legs of whoever it touches for three breaths. “Three breaths is a long time, if you are running. Unusually strong.”]
He read them all twice, priced them against what he had, and against the thing he could least afford, which was attention. Fire in a dark lane would light up half the east quarter. A thunderclap would wake the other half.
[Hunting Knife. 35 coppers. “Skinning, bounty work, and one memorable court case.”]
He bought it, very nearly for the description.
[Iron Needle Talisman. 45 coppers. Fires three iron needles a short distance. “Stings. Rarely kills. Makes a point.”]
He bought two.
The copper on his tongue went sour and stayed that way. Three silver for the ring, a little under two hundred coppers on knives, needles, and papers, and eighty for the bundle of insect talismans he didn’t expect to sell. Nine silver had become six. And somewhere under the taste of lead, a thought he didn’t quite let himself finish: every copper he spent on protection was a copper less behind his own hand.
[Your purchases are very sensible, Host! 😊]
Of course you’d say that, Qian Fan thought. You want me spending money; you’re a merchant yourself. Besides, you sell protection to people who don’t even know what they’ve got.
He didn’t know why he’d thought that. He shrugged it off and closed the catalogue.
* * *
The disguise cost less than the knife.
A cloak, secondhand, dark brown, with a hood deep enough to hide a face, from a rag stall at the far end of the market that sold to people who didn’t want to be seen buying cloaks. A mask, from the festival-goods seller who had a crate of them left over from the spring parade: lacquered wood, painted to look like an old man with a long white beard, smiling. It was the cheapest one he had. It seems nobody wanted to look like an old man.
Qian Fan rather liked him.
The rest was free. He had been an old man before, after all, on paper, that is, in the left-handed receipts he’d forged for his mother. He knew how Old Zhou stood: bent a little at the shoulders, as if he’d carried crates for sixty years and resented every one. He knew how Old Zhou talked: short, dry, and impatient with paper.
The System did the rest.
[Passive Concealment is active, Host. Anyone who examines you will see an unremarkable Body Tempering Realm cultivator with no soul signature of note. 😇]
Unremarkable is my natural state.
[Active Concealment available for your departure. It will burn your fullness. Please use it wisely! 😊]
He slipped out of the house an hour and a half before dawn with nothing in his hands, nothing in his pockets, and everything he owned in his inventory, a place no one could reach. The streets were black and empty. He used Concealment down the long road to the eastern gate, because a vegetable seller’s son walking out of the compound at that hour was a question someone might ask, and he felt it drain out of him the whole way, like water out of a cracked jar.
By the time he reached the gate, his well was already half-empty.
It was worth it, he thought, and went down the bank into the riverbed.
* * *
The river had been moved two generations ago, when the clans dug out the new canal, and it had left behind a long, dry bed of round gray stones running out from under the city wall into the dark.
An hour before dawn, it was a thriving market.
There were no stalls. There were lanterns: dozens of them, set on the stones at intervals of ten or fifteen steps, every one with its shutter drawn almost closed, so that each threw only a thin blade of yellow light across a blanket, or a crate, or a cloth spread out on the ground. Beside each lantern, a shape. Nobody spoke above a murmur. The only sounds audible were boots on stone, the tick of a lantern shutter, and every now and then, the soft clink of coins.
Qian Fan walked the line with Old Zhou’s resentful stoop and looked.
The first lantern lit a woman selling small clay bottles that she swore held fog from the summit of a mountain nobody had ever climbed. The second lit pills: neat rows of them in wax-paper twists, red and green and a sullen purple no honest pill had ever been, and one squat bottle of Spirit Gathering Pills with the seal of a sect obviously scraped off the side with a knife. The seller didn’t call out prices. He didn’t have to.
The third lantern’s owner sold nothing like a pill at all. Small twists of dark resin, laid out in a careful row. Dream Lotus, said the card. A pinch under the tongue, and for one night you would feel the whole of the Qi Condensation realm open in front of you like a door; but for a month afterwards, the man beside it was explaining in a murmur to a hollow-eyed boy, you would not be able to find your own dantian at all. Beside the resin sat a single paper packet of something gray. Blood-Burning Powder. Ten days of your life, it said, for one hour at the layer above you. The boy was looking at the gray packet, not the resin. He had the face of somebody who was desperate enough to shake hands with the devil.
Qian Fan kept walking.
Further down, under a tarp weighted with stones, something hit the bars of a cage hard enough to make the whole riverbed flinch.
The seller pulled the tarp back a hand’s width so the customers could see. Inside the iron cage was a weasel the size of a dog, as red as a burning coal, its fur standing up in spikes that smoked faintly where they touched the bars. It looked at the lantern light and threw itself at the front of the cage again, and the iron rang, and the bars glowed dull red where it struck. The seller hit the cage with a stick. The weasel didn’t stop, obviously afraid, but the fear made it more desperate to escape its prison. Behind it, in the dark of the same cart, a sealed jar wrapped in three talismans rocked slowly back and forth on its own, and something within it hissed.
“Fire-weasel,” the seller told a man with a ledger under his arm. “Young. Will bond, if you’ve got the stomach. If you don’t, the pelt’s worth eight silver. If you’re looking for something cheaper, I have some wares at the back that you might want to see.”
The vendor signaled to the man and looked at the back of the stall, hidden by cloth; in there, something that looked like it was resting was lying down. It cannot be known whether it was merely resting or already dead; the creature, which looked like a lion cub, was covered in deep wounds.
The weasel looked straight at Qian Fan through the bars. Its eyes were the same color as its fur. It was, he thought, the only thing in the whole market that wasn’t pretending to be anything else. It wasn’t pretending to be anything other than a trapped spirit beast that desperately wanted to escape.
It was at this moment that Qian Fan realized that the world wasn’t as nice as it seemed; that the cultivation world is a dog-eat-dog kind of world, a world where you only have freedom if you are strong enough or you have the capability to be free. As much as Qian Fan wanted to save them, he didn’t have the qualifications to do so.
Then the rare things and the strange ones appeared. A spirit-beast core, the size of a plum, glowing a faint, uneven blue under its owner’s cupped hands. A row of corked vials of beast blood, dark and thick, each tied with a scrap of label in a hunter’s scrawl. A single pale feather lying on black silk, which the seller swore had never once touched the ground. A sword unsheathed on cloth beside a card that read: Has killed exactly one person. Will not say who. A man with no visible face was selling talismans with the seals of three different sects, two of which Qian Fan was fairly sure had been painted the week before. A very old man selling eggs the size of a fist, faintly warm, who would not say what kind of eggs they were either.
And at the very end of the line, on a square of sacking with nothing else beside it, a single twig. It was a twig as long as a hand, and gray, and it caught the lantern light like a blade, because it was not wood at all. It was metal, grown in the shape of a branch, down to the knots. The card beside it said only: Do not ask.
Nobody was asking.
Qian Fan didn’t either. He filed it, the way he filed everything, in the drawer in his head with the porter’s cousin and the dogs, and went back down the line.
Every one of these buyers had a reason not to buy in daylight. Every seller also had a reason not to sell there. Pills with the seals scratched off, drugs that burned your life away a day at a time, beasts that wanted to kill whoever bought them, and every person in the riverbed desperate in a way they would never admit in the light.
It was, Qian Fan thought, the most honest place in Wutong City.
[Host? Your heart rate—]
I’m fine. I’m home.
He found an empty space between a fog seller and a man who sold maps of places that might not even exist, set down his cheap lantern, drew the shutters to a slit, and spread a square of black cloth on the stones. He took out the bundle of Insect-Repelling Talismans and laid it on the left. He took out the ring and laid it in the middle, in the blade of light.
Then Old Zhou sat down on a stone, folded his hands, and waited.
* * *
Nobody looked at the talismans, not even a single glance.
That was the first lesson, and he learned it in a quarter of an hour. People stopped, glanced at the neat bundle of paper, recognized it for exactly what it was, and moved on without a flicker. In daylight, that bundle sold itself. Down here it was invisible, as if it didn’t even exist. Nobody came to the riverbed an hour before dawn to be safe from mosquitoes.
In daylight, people bought what they needed. In the dark, they bought what they hoped for. They bought what they couldn’t find in the light.
He slid the bundle back into his sleeves and into nothing, and left the ring alone on the cloth.
It took the better part of an hour.
Then a young man in a fine gray hood stopped. He had soft hands, and a sword at his hip with a jade tassel, and he crouched beside the cloth and looked at the ring for a long time without as much as touching it.
“What is it?” he said quietly.
“A black iron ring,” said Old Zhou. “It contains nothing. It has never contained anything. A simple black iron ring.”
The young man went very still.
Qian Fan watched the thought arrive on his face, a whole story at once, the way it had arrived on the faces of a thousand customers in his last life when he told them, honestly, that a product had no hidden fees. A black iron ring. Heavier than it should be. Sold in the dark by an old man who said, with a perfectly straight face, that it contained nothing.
Exactly what someone would say, the young man thought, if it contained an old master’s inheritance.
“How much?” said the young man, a little too quickly.
“Five silver.”
“Six,” said a voice from the dark.
A heavy man in a merchant’s padded coat came forward into the lantern light and looked down at the ring with an expression of great wisdom.
“Contains nothing, eh?” he said, and chuckled. “That’s what they always say.”
“It contains nothing,” Old Zhou repeated patiently. “It has never contained anything.”
“Seven,” said the young man.
“Eight,” the merchant counteroffered.
Qian Fan said nothing at all. He had learned, in four years of selling through the telephone, that there was a point in every sale where the most powerful thing a seller could do was just shut up and stop talking. He sat on his stone with his hands folded, a mysterious old man looking at the situation calmly without a single hint of reaction, and let them do the talking with each other.
At ten silver, the young man hesitated. At eleven, the merchant laughed and said something about young people and their allowances. At twelve, the young man touched his jade tassel, looked at it for a long moment, and paid.
He slid the ring onto his finger and waited.
Nothing happened. It contained nothing. It had never contained anything.
The young man’s face did not change. He nodded slowly, as if the ring’s silence were the first test of a great master, and walked away into the dark with his hand pressed to his chest.
[Ding! 🎉]
[Sale: Mysterious Black Iron Ring. 12 silver taels. Cost: 3.]
[Quota Progress: 70% to Street Peddler (+8%) 🎉]
[Funds: 18 silver taels, 30 coppers]
[Host…I have never seen anyone sell the clearance bin before. I’m proud of you. 😭😭]
Eight percent out of a hundred, in one sale, before the sun came up. The ten before it had taken three weeks of salve.
And eighteen silver: twice what he’d had before he went shopping, sitting in his inventory where nobody could reach it, breathing.
Twelve silver for a ring that contained nothing at all, and he had not even told a single lie.
He folded the black cloth, closed the lantern, and stood up with Old Zhou’s resentful stoop.
And at the edge of the lantern light, where the blades of yellow gave out and the dark began, he saw two men who had not bought a single thing all night.
They were watching him.