The problem, Qian Fan decided over breakfast, was not the product.
The product was perfect. The Iron Hide Tempering Manual was a complete Body Tempering technique that would take a stagnant body and push it up the layers like a boat on a rising river. It was worth thirty silver taels. Even if it looked like something even a rat rejected…
The problem was the customer itself.
Qian Xiaotian had seventeen copper coins, a bedridden mother, and a personality made entirely of pride and arithmetic. He would not accept a gift. He would not accept charity dressed as a gift. He had just refused three spirit stones in front of half the city, which meant he would absolutely not accept a mysterious manual from a cousin he couldn’t even name.
“You’re staring at your porridge,” Liu An said.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’ve been thinking since yesterday.”
“It was an eventful yesterday.”
His mother sniffed and went back to sorting threads. His father was outside, cheerfully repairing the stall’s wobbly wheel in a way that would guarantee it stayed wobbly.
Qian Fan ate his porridge and opened a panel only he could see.
Show me the Contract Builder.
* * *
[Contract Builder]
[Item: Iron Hide Tempering Manual]
[Market Value: 30 silver taels]
[Step 1: Set sale price]
[Step 2: Set payment terms]
[Step 3: Set interest rate (within permitted range)]
[Step 4: Choose delivery method]
It was, Qian Fan thought, almost exactly the internal ordering system he had used at EasyNow Financial, except that system had crashed twice a week and this one had emojis.
He started with delivery.
[Delivery methods available at your rank:]
[Stall Placement — available! 😊]
[Location Placement (caves, cliffs, ruins, riverbanks) — requires rank: Street Peddler]
[Ring Grandpa Deployment — requires rank: Stall Keeper]
[Dream Inheritance — requires rank: Shop Owner]
Qian Fan looked at the third option for a long moment.
Ring Grandpa?
[Ring Grandpa, Host! 😊]
You mean I can put old men inside a ring? A real one?
[We can put an old man in a ring! 😇]
What do you mean by that…
[Details available at a higher rank! 😊]
He decided he would think about that later, preferably never.
So, Stall Placement. That meant the manual had to be bought from a stall, in person, by a customer who would pick it up, look at it, and decide whether it was worth his coppers.
Which brought him back to the real problem.
Qian Xiaotian did not have any coppers to spare. And if Qian Fan simply handed him the manual, or sold it for a suspiciously low price, the boy would smell charity and refuse.
And besides, Qian Fan might be traced back as the one responsible for this. He knew that he needed to conceal his golden finger.
For now, Qian Fan needed the boy to come to the stall with money in his hand.
Not money he’d been given.
Money he’d earned.
Qian Fan tapped his spoon against his bowl and thought about embroidery.
* * *
If I were Qian Xiaotian, what would my golden finger be?
That was the thought that kept Qian Fan up last night. To unseal whatever was sealed inside Qian Xiaotian, something needed to happen—some event that pushed him toward finding his golden finger on his own in his original destiny.
That would be the trigger that broke his fate as Qian Wudi’s stress relief and led him to pursue the path of immortality. The first step toward making everyone yesterday pay back what he was owed. With interest…
Qian Fan decided he’d have to scour Wutong City for clues on what the golden finger could possibly be by looking at the items for sale in the market street, whether Qian Xiaotian had already stumbled onto it without knowing, and what exactly needed to happen to crack the seal on Qian Xiaotian’s heart based on his original destiny.
The plan then was simple enough: wander the market for anything remotely out of place, and while he was at it, get a read on prices—so he’d know how much to charge Qian Xiaotian for the First Sale quest given by the system.
And before he could build a plan on how to go with the sale, Qian Fan did what any competent merchant would do.
He went scavenging for items at his competitors.
Qian Fan walked around the marketplace with a goal in mind.
[Appraisal Complete!]
[Slightly bent crude iron sword]
[Grade: Common]
[Market Value: 20 copper coins]
[Rusted bronze ring]
[Dusty iron cauldron]
.
.
.
Qian Fan looked around shops with no customers, those with strange and seemingly mysterious vendors, but it seemed like they were really just ordinary sellers with mundane items on display. The rings that might have grandpas in them were actually just normal bronze or silver rings; the legendary pill furnace that he saw and thought was the secret to becoming an immortal pill master was just a dilapidated, dusty cauldron.
He kept looking around the small mom-and-pop shops but to no avail and proceeded to the stores of the Huge clans for market research
The Long Clan’s store smelled of sandalwood and money. Its shelves were lacquered. Its clerks wore matching robes. A Body Tempering technique manual sat in a glass case near the front, bound in blue silk, with a little gold card beside it.
[Iron Bone Tempering Manual. Mortal Grade, High 80 silver taels]
Eighty.
Qian Fan kept his face politely blank while a clerk looked him up and down, decided his robe wasn’t worth a greeting, and turned away.
Appraise it.
[Appraisal Complete!]
[Iron Bone Tempering Manual]
[Grade: Mortal Grade, Low]
[Market Value: 22 silver taels]
[Note: The silk binding costs 2 silver. 😊]
Qian Fan almost choked.
They were selling a Middle-grade manual for nearly four times its value, in a pretty box, to people who didn’t know the difference.
He looked around the beautiful, sandalwood-scented store with new eyes.
These people weren’t competitors.
They were an opportunity.
Across the plaza, the Qian Family Treasure House was quieter. Its shelves were half empty, and a bored clerk was asleep behind the counter with his cheek on an abacus. A similar manual sat on a dusty shelf, priced at sixty silver taels, with a handwritten card that said: “RARE”.
Appraise.
[Market Value: 19 silver taels]
[Note: This item has been on the shelf for 4 years. 😊]
Qian Fan stood in his family’s failing shop and felt something he hadn’t expected.
Not contempt.
Hunger.
The Qian Clan had been traders once. Somewhere in this building, there had been people who knew how to price a thing, how to move it, how to make a customer feel lucky. All that was left now was a sleeping clerk, a dusty shelf, and a card that said RARE in a hopeful hand.
Give me te—no, five years, Qian Fan thought. I will make the Qian Family the greatest merchants in Wutong City.
[Host, your Quota Progress is 3% 😊]
Give me ten years…
* * *
He got back to the stall an hour before the afternoon rush, and while his father haggled joyfully with a neighbor over a kettle, Qian Fan ran the numbers.
Thirty silver taels for the manual was the market value. But the market value assumed a buyer who had thirty silver taels.
[Suggested price for Customer Qian Xiaotian: 30 silver taels]
[Suggested plan: 52 weekly payments]
[Suggested interest rate: Maximum permitted for his credit tier! 😊]
No.
[Host—]
Minimum rate.
[Host, his risk rating is VERY LOW! We could charge him almost nothing and still—]
Minimum rate.
[...Setting minimum rate. Projected profit: Pitiful. 😞]
Qian Fan ignored the sad face and kept building.
Thirty silver taels over a year was a little under three silver taels a month. That was too much. That was exactly his mother’s medicine.
He stretched the terms. Two years. Thirty silver in payments, plus the minimum interest, spread across a hundred and four weeks.
Two hundred and eighty coppers a week.
Still too much for a boy who earned two hundred coppers a month mending clothes.
Qian Fan sat back and rubbed his eyes.
Then he thought about what the manual would actually do to a Body Tempering 2nd-layer boy with an unbreakable work ethic.
Higher layers. Better chores. Clan rewards for progress. Access to the outer sect examinations. Bounties on low-grade spirit beasts outside the city walls.
The manual wasn’t a cost.
The manual was income.
He set the first payment for two weeks out.
By then, Qian Fan thought, the boy would be at the 4th layer and earning more. That’s what a lender does. You don’t price what the customer has. You price what the customer will have.
[Host! That is exactly what our training manual says! ☺️]
Qian Fan paused with his hand on the cart’s edge and felt a small, cold draft blow through his soul.
Yes, the thought. I know.
* * *
Before he closed the panel, he tested the Credit Check function on the people around him. Purely for research.
[Credit Check: Qian Hou]
[Assets: One stall. One wobbly wheel.]
[Income: Modest]
[Repayment Behavior: Unknown — subject has never borrowed anything]
[Risk Rating: EXTREME]
[Reason: Subject gives merchandise away to children, widows, and anyone who looks sad. 😊]
[Recommendation: Do not extend credit. Possibly hide the inventory.]
Qian Fan looked at his father, who at that moment was handing a free radish to a neighbor’s grandson.
Accurate.
[Credit Check: Liu An]
[Assets: 2 silver taels, 400 coppers]
[Note: Subject keeps money in four separate hiding places. Two are unknown to this System.]
[Risk rating: Very low]
[Recommendation: Learn from this woman.]
Qian Fan blinked.
Two are unknown to you?
[She is very good, Host. 😊]
Probably to hide it from my father, lest he give it away to someone with a sad toenail.
* * *
One more piece of research, and it was the one he couldn’t do with a System panel.
“Mother,” Qian Fan said, while Liu An counted thread. “Who buys embroidery in this market?”
“Why?”
“Research.”
His mother gave him the look she gave him whenever he said a word she felt was too big for a stall. “The cloth shop on Third Lane buys it. Eight coppers a piece. Sometimes ten.”
“And what does the cloth shop sell it for?”
“Twenty-five. Thirty, if the buyer is from out of town.”
Qian Fan nodded slowly. “And if someone’s work is very good?”
“Then the cloth shop still pays eight coppers,” Liu An said dryly, “because the seller has no other buyer.”
There it was.
A monopoly on embroidery.
Qian Fan had heard that sentence in a hundred different forms in his last life, usually from a manager explaining why a fee was reasonable. The seller has no other buyer. That was the whole trick. Not skill, not quality. Just who had somewhere else to go.
“How good is Madam Shangguan’s work?” he asked.
Liu An’s hands stopped moving.
“She embroiders like a woman from a great family,” she said quietly. “Because she is one. Every cloth shop in the city knows it, and every one of them pays her eight coppers, because they know she can’t carry the pieces around herself, and the boy can’t leave his chores long enough to argue.”
Qian Fan looked at the wobbly cart, the dried herbs, the comb with three teeth missing.
We could pay fifteen, he thought. Buy at fifteen, sell at twenty-five, and the stall still makes money on every piece.
And it would nearly double what that household earns in a month.
[Host, that is a 40% margin. 😊]
I know.
[We could pay ten.]
We could, Qian Fan agreed. But would a person who has so little be able to spend money on other things besides his mother's medicine? Then he will be less inclined to buy from us. Then again, if we price it at ten, he'll think that it's already charity with extra steps, and he'd know and never take a copper from us again.
If we charge him more, then he'll only sell to us if I can convince him we're just valuing his goods at a fair price. Even if he doesn't like charity, he still has to find a way to fund his mother's medicine, and selling it for fifteen would be better than breaking his back with more work after he sells the embroidery for 8. Also, fifteen is just a fair price for the quality of work that Madam Shangguan produces.
He looked down the street, past the stalls, toward the cracked corner of the compound where a woman lay coughing under two coats and a blanket.
Fifteen, he thought. Fair price. Real money. No pity.
That was how you got a cheapskate who had a lot of pride to walk up to your cart.
* * *
The plan, when he finished it, was three lines long.
One: buy the mother’s embroidery at a fair price. Not a generous one. A fair one, the kind of a stall keeper would pay if he thought he could resell it. That put real coppers in Qian Xiaotian’s hand, earned honestly, with no charity attached.
Two: put the manual on the stall as junk. Three coppers. Buried among the dried herbs, the way every worthless old book in the world was buried.
Three: let the boy find it himself.
That was the part that mattered. Qian Fan wouldn’t recommend it. He wouldn’t point at it. He wouldn’t say a single word about it.
Because a cheapskate never trusts a thing he’s offered.
A cheapskate only trusts a thing he discovers.
[Host, would you like to tag the item for Stall Placement? 😊]
Not yet, Qian Fan thought. Tomorrow.
[First Sale quest: 4 days remaining! 😊]
Plenty of time left.
He looked out at the market street, at the slow river of people moving between the stalls, and let himself feel just a little bit pleased.
Then, from the top of the street, somebody began to shout.
It was not an ordinary shout. It had rhythm. It had discipline. It had, Qian Fan realized with a sinking feeling, choreography.
“YOUNG MASTER WUDI IS INVINCIBLE!”
Half of the market turned to look.
And from the bottom of the street, near the fish sellers, a second voice answered at once, louder, and backed by what sounded like six men instead of four.
“YOUNG MASTER BATIAN IS PEERLESS UNDER HEAVEN!”
The vendors at the tea stall began quietly packing away their cups.
“Oh no,” Qian Hou said, with the weary expression of a man who had seen this before. “Not again.”
Qian Fan looked from one end of the street to the other, where two extremely well-dressed young men were walking toward each other at exactly the same speed.
“Does this happen often?”
“Once a month,” his father said. “Last time they broke a fruit cart.
[Host! 🎉]
What?
[Two potential customers detected!]
Qian Fan closed his eyes.
Of course there were two.