Morning cultivation was exactly as exciting as Qian Fan remembered.
Fifty side-branch children stood in rows in a dusty training yard, holding horse stances while an instructor with a bamboo cane walked between them and explained, at great length, why they were all disappointments.
Qian Fan held his stance perfectly. Not too well. Not too badly. His thighs burned at exactly the same rate as everyone else’s.
[Host, you could hold this stance much longer if you used a Bone-Strengthening Salve! 😊]
No.
[It’s only a few dozen coppers!]
It’s a few dozen coppers I don’t have.
[Host Balance: 0 coppers. 😊]
Thanks for reminding me that I’m poor…
[You’re welcome, Host! 😇]
The cane tapped his shoulder as the instructor passed.
“Qian Fan. Adequate.”
Qian Fan bowed.
“Thank you, Instructor.”
It was, he thought, the nicest thing anyone could have said to him.
“Listen up,” the instructor said. “Next week, the Martial Library Hall will open up for the newly awakened. This is your reminder that this is your last week to save up some more contribution points to get Cultivation Manuals of your choice; if you don’t have enough contribution points, you are still eligible for the Qian Clan cultivation manual. Qian Duoduo, you’ll be the one telling the ungraded clan members.”
One student was missing from the rows.
Qian Fan spotted him on the way out of the yard. Beyond the fence, near the clan stables, Qian Xiaotian was carrying two buckets of water on a shoulder pole. Ungraded students weren’t given a place in morning cultivation. They were given chores.
His sleeves were rolled up. His arms were shaking. He didn’t stop.
Two of Qian Wudi’s lackeys leaned against the stable door, watching him.
“Careful, stable boy,” one of them called.
“Don’t spill. That’s the most valuable thing you’ll ever carry.”
The other laughed. Qian Xiaotian kept walking, set the buckets down by the trough, and went back for more.
A small golden number floated at the edge of Qian Fan’s vision.
[First Sale quest: 6 days remaining! 😊]
I know, Qian Fan thought.
He watched his cousin disappear behind the stable wall with the empty buckets. Then he turned and walked toward the market.
Not yet.
* * *
Wutong City’s market woke up at noon.
It stretched down both sides of a long, winding street shaded by old wutong trees, their broad leaves turning the noon sun into soft green shade. The air smelled of roasted chestnuts, incense, and something faintly electric. Spirit herbs glowed in woven baskets. A talisman seller fanned paper charms that crackled with tiny sparks. A beast tamer led a cart pulled by a horse with a single silver horn, and every child on the street stopped to stare.
At the top of the street, where the road widened into a stone plaza, stood the great clans’ shops. Three stories of red lacquer and gold trim belonged to the Long Clan. The Mu Clan’s pawnhouse had a doorway shaped like a smiling mouth. The Su Clan’s hall of white stone was so quiet and elegant that most people were afraid to walk in. Even the Wang Clan had a proud building with a banner so large it blocked the sun for the shop next door.
And squeezed between the Long Clan’s gold trim and the Mu Clan’s grinning doorway stood the Qian Family Treasure House.
The clan elders liked to say that it had once been the finest shop in Wutong City. The Qian Clan had been traders long before it produced cultivators, and in its golden days, merchants had come from three cities away to buy from it. The clan had even owned a small spirit stone vein in the hills outside town.
Then Qian Lingyun vanished, and within a year, the vein was gone.
The Treasure House was still three stories tall, and its sign was still gold. But the paint was peeling, half the lanterns were dark, and most of the customers who passed its doors turned left and walked into the Long Clan’s store instead.
The main branch ran the Treasure House. Qian Wanjin ran the main branch.
The side branches got whatever was left.
His own family’s stall was at the very bottom of the street, in a spot the main branch rented to them for twelve coppers a day.
It was a wooden cart with one wobbly wheel, a faded canvas awning, and a selection of goods that Liu An described as “useful” and Qian Fan privately described as “whatever was in the house.” Clay bowls. Radishes. Bundles of dried herbs. A secondhand kettle. A wooden comb with three teeth missing.
“Twelve coppers to stand on a piece of road,” Liu An muttered as she tied on her apron. “The main branch should charge the road.” She sighed and straightened the cart.
“Remember, the stock is set out by quality. Good things in front. Radishes in the middle. The comb in the back.”
“Why do we sell a comb with three teeth missing?”
“Because someone might have three fewer hairs.”
Qian Fan decided not to argue with that.
While his mother went to buy thread and his father went to chat with the tea seller across the lane, Qian Fan carefully added his own stock to the cart.
Three little wooden jars of greenish Bone-Strengthening Salve.
Five small brown Lesser Body Tempering Pills in a paper packet.
He tucked them between the dried herbs, where they looked like they had always belonged there. The Iron Hide Tempering Manual and the Marrow Cleansing Pill stayed hidden in his Inventory.
Those, he thought, were only for a special customer.
When Liu An came back, she frowned at the jars.
“Where did these come from?”
“I cleaned the storeroom,” Qian Fan said. “Found some old things.”
“We have a storeroom?”
“The kitchen.”
His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the jars. Then she shrugged because in a family where the comb had three teeth missing, a few mysterious jars of salve were hardly worth a question.
“Price them sensibly,” she said.
[Host, may I suggest a very sensible price? 😊]
No.
* * *
The first customer arrived an hour later.
He was a porter, a broad-shouldered man with a coil of rope over one arm and the careful walk of someone whose back hurts every time he took a step. He stopped at the stall, looked at the radishes, looked at the clay bowls, and sighed like a man who had not expected the day to get any better.
Qian Fan smiled.
It was a professional smile, polished by forty thousand phone calls. Warm. Friendly. Just a little concerned.
“Long day, uncle?” he said.
“Long year,” the porter grunted.
“Back?”
The man blinked. “How did you know?”
Because you’re walking like a question mark, Qian Fan thought.
“Looks like you carry a lot,” he said instead, and picked up a jar of salve.
“This is for sore muscles. Rub it in before you sleep. Thirty coppers.”
The porter hesitated. Thirty coppers was not nothing. But he took the jar, sniffed it, and a strange look crossed his face. The sharp, cool smell of the salve seemed to go straight to his spine
“Thirty,” he said slowly.
[Host! Upsell opportunity! He has a wife, three children, and a brother who also carries rope! 😊]
And how do you know that?
[Credit Check is very thorough! 😇]
Qian Fan kept smiling.
“If it works, uncle, come back. I’ll save you another jar.”
The porter paid. Thirty copper coins clinked into Qian Fan’s hand. They were warm from the man’s pocket.
“Don’t forget to tell your friends!”
[Sale complete! 🎉]
[Host Balance: 30 coppers]
[Quota Progress: 1%]
One percent.
Qian Fan looked at the number and felt something he had never felt in an entire lifetime selling other people’s products.
It was his,
* * *
The rest of the afternoon was a slow and strange education.
A skinny Body Tempering boy from a poor family bought a Lesser Body Tempering Pill afte counting out twenty-five coppers one by one, then ran off looking as if he’d been handed a sword.
[Sale complete! 🎉]
[Quota Progress: 2%]
An old woman paid thirty coppers for a jar of salve for her knees and told Qian Fan he had “an honest face.” The System made a small sound that might have been a giggle.
[Sale complete! 🎉]
[Quota Progress: 3%]
Between customers, Qian Fan learned that selling in a market was nothing like selling on a phone. On the phone, he had scripts. Here, he had eyes. A tired farmer walked differently from a young cultivator. A mother who counted coins before looking at the goods needed a different smile than a guard who looked at the goods and never checked his purse.
He started to enjoy it.
Then his father came back.
“Son!” Qian Hou called cheerfully, holding the hand of a little girl with a runny nose.
“This young lady wants a radish.”
The little girl held up two coppers.
“Radishes are four coppers,” Qian Fan said.
“She only has two,” Qian Hou said.
“Then she can buy half a radish.”
Qian Hou looked at him as if he had suggested cutting the little girl in half. He picked the biggest radish on the cart, placed it in her hands, and waved away the coins.
“For free,” he said. “Grow up strong.”
The little girl beamed and ran off. Qian Fan watched four coppers skip away down the street.
[Host, your father has given away 4 coppers of inventory! 😮]
I know…
[Would you like me to begin collections?]
He’s my father…
[Noted! 😊]
“She’ll remember this stall,” Qian Hou said happily, sitting down on his little stool. “That’s good business.”
“She’s five.”
“Five-year-olds grow up. And they buy radishes.”
Qian Fan opened his mouth, closed it, and realized that he could not actually prove his father wrong.
Ten minutes later, Qian Hou tried to give a jar of salve to the tea seller’s cousin “because his shoulder looked sad.” Qian Fan intercepted the jar so quickly that his father blinked in surprise.
“That one’s reserved,” Qian Fan said.
“For who?”
“For someone whose shoulder is sadder.”
* * *
By late afternoon, the market had settled into a lazy hum.
Qian Fan sat on an upturned basket and watched the crowd. His balance stood at eighty-five coppers. It was twice what the family stall had made the day before, and nobody but him knew it.
[Host, your Protagonist Scanner is detecting something nearby! 🎉]
Qian Fan sat up straight.
A thin golden line appeared, stretching from his vision toward the alley behind the tea stall.
His heart jumped. Already?
He followed the line with his eyes.
At the end of it, sitting on a pile of crates, was a skinny gray cat licking its paw.
…That’s a cat.
[Correct!]
You said “protagonist.”
[This cat is the future contracted spirit beast of a Beast-Taming Protagonist! It has excellent potential! It also qualifies for a starter loan! 😊]
It’s a cat.
[It’s a journey, Host!]
The cat looked at Qian Fan, yawned, and went back to licking its paw.
Qian Fan decided to never mention this to anyone, including himself.
* * *
The sun had just begun to sink behind the wutong trees when the market went quiet.
Not all at once. It started at the top of the street, near the great clans’ shops. The noise of haggling faded. Heads turned. Then the silence rolled down the road like a wave, and one by one, the stall keepers stopped talking and looked up.
The sound of hooves came next.
A carriage rolled into the market.
It was carved from pale jade, so white it seemed to glow in the evening light. Four snow-white horses pulled it, their manes drifting like mist, and each hoofbeat left a faint ring of frost on the stones. Silver bells hung from the corners of the roof and chimed with a sound as cold and clear as ice cracking on a winter lake.
On its door was a crest: a single snowflake over a sword.
The crowd parted without being asked.
“The Su Clan,” someone whispered.
“That’s the young miss’s carriage.”
“Su Qingxue came herself?!”
A girl at the next stall gasped. A merchant dropped a scroll. Somewhere up the street, a chorus of people sucked in a breath of cold air, and for once, Qian Fan thought they had a good reason to. The air near the carriage really was colder.
Liu An gripped Qian Fan’s arm.
“They’re heading toward our clan’s compound,” she whispered.
Qian Fan watched the carriage glide past the Qian family stall, past the radishes and the clay bowls and the comb with three missing teeth, and turn toward the road that led home.
Trash-talent fiancé. Proud fiancée. A public visit the day after a humiliating ceremony.
In his head, he looked down at his bingo card.
[Engagement annulment.] Empty.
Not for long, he thought.
[Host! 🎉]
What?
[Our data shows that customers are most receptive after public humiliation! 😊]
Qian Fan watched the jade carriage disappear toward the Qian Clan’s gates and did not answer.
For once, he was afraid the system was right.