In the morning, Li Yuguo went to the market with Guan Yunfan to find Shi Dacheng.
He had slept perhaps two hours. His eyes felt gritty and his head ached, and every time he closed them he saw a cloaked figure crossing a moonlit garden with her shoulders hunched. The small gold window had faded from the corner of his vision hours ago. He did not need to see it again. He knew what it said.
Four hundred points.
He found the fat merchant outside his red tent, supervising a pair of porters loading crates onto a mule, and shouted a greeting from across the square.
"Brother Dacheng!"
Shi Dacheng turned. His round pink face lit up. He came waddling over with his arms spread wide, rings flashing, and clapped Li Yuguo on both shoulders.
"Brother Yuguo! Brother Yunfan! Good morning, good morning!"
Li Yuguo looked at him.
He looked at the fat hands on his shoulders—the same hands, he knew now, that had squeezed his wife's bare ass in a little red room six hours ago—and he smiled.
"Brother Dacheng," he said warmly, "how about showing me around the market today? There are a few things I want to buy."
And in Shi Dacheng's small eyes, for just an instant, he saw it: a flicker of something proud and pleased and secretly, enormously amused. The look of a man looking at a fool. What an idiot, that look said. He doesn't even know what I did with his wife last night. The fat lips curled into a slow, creepy smile.
"Why not, brother!" said Shi Dacheng. "Why not!"
Enjoy it, Li Yuguo thought pleasantly, while it lasts.
They walked together through the crowded square, Guan Yunfan a silent shadow a step behind.
"The magic tools on the market are only so-so, to be honest," Shi Dacheng said, steering them between the stalls. "Average quality. There are some useful ones, of course. And if Brother Yuguo wants to buy one just to play with—" he waved a ringed hand— "then for you, it's free, eh? My gift." He lowered his voice and nudged Li Yuguo with an elbow. "But the caravan from the capital that came in yesterday—now that's worth a look. They've brought a lot of slaves."
"Servants?"
"Yes, yes. All of them half-orcs. Beastfolk." The merchant's smile grew wider and wetter. "I'm telling you, brother, there's a fox demon in there that would make your soul fly out of your body. Many rich men like to buy these good-looking beastfolk as maids, you know. And at night… hehe." His smile was especially wretched.
Li Yuguo knew exactly what he meant.
He kept his face mild and curious, and asked, as if out of idle interest: "Buying and selling living people—doesn't anyone in authority care?"
"Ah, brother, you don't understand." Shi Dacheng shook his head indulgently. "In fact, this business is tacitly approved. After all, our Haotian Kingdom is a human country. And these half-orcs are all evil and crooked creatures. Normally, if you run into one of them out in the wilds, you just kill it on the spot. Selling them is practically a mercy."
Li Yuguo said nothing.
He was the author. He knew this setting. He had made it—had invented the half-orcs and the beastfolk and the demon villages in the deep forests, and given humanity its cruel contempt for them, because he had wanted to show the vast gulf between the strong and the weak in his world. It had seemed like good worldbuilding at the time. Dark. Gritty. Realistic.
Looking at it now, from the inside, walking toward a row of cages under a hot morning sun, he understood that it had been an inhumane thing to write. Find the original chapter at g.com.
And yet—when he thought about it carefully—wasn't it how ancient societies had truly been? In the glory days of the Tang Dynasty, rich households had bought dark-skinned "Kunlun slaves" from across the seas as guards and porters. In the oldest days of the Xia and the Shang, when one tribe defeated another, the men were put to the sword and the women carried off as spoils. Every civilization had stood on someone's neck. Slavery had been a stage of history everywhere. It was only when a civilization grew old enough, and comfortable enough, that it began to look back and ask questions about equality.
This world had not grown old enough yet.
I didn't give it time to, he thought.
They pushed through the crowd together toward the far end of the square, where the great caravan from the capital had made its camp.
Sure enough, there were cages.
Dozens of them, stacked around the horse lines and the parked wagons—cages of thick wooden bars, cages of iron, some no bigger than a dog kennel, some as large as a cart. And in them, crammed together in the heat and the flies, were people. Strange people. A huge gray-skinned man with tusks jutting from his lower jaw, sitting hunched with his knees against his chest. A family of small furred figures with round ears and frightened yellow eyes. A woman with long silver fox-ears and three bushy tails, curled in the back of an iron cage with her face hidden. More of them were being unloaded from the backs of covered wagons even as he watched.
Guan Yunfan had stopped walking.
Li Yuguo glanced back at him. The King of Thieves was standing very still beside a cage of small furred children, and his one eye had gone flat and dark, the way it had gone in the ring with Zhang Wu and Zhao Liu just before the air changed. His right hand hung loose at his side, the fingers slightly curled. Not reaching for his sword. Not yet.
"Brother," Li Yuguo said quietly.
The big man's jaw worked. "I've robbed caravans like this before," he said, very low, so that Shi Dacheng, chattering ahead of them, would not hear. "Out on the southern roads. Opened the cages in the night and let them run." His voice was rough. "There are always more cages."
"I know," said Li Yuguo.
He did know. That was the worst of it. He had written the cages, and the hunting teams, and the demon villages burning in the deep forest, and he had written them so well that there would always, always be more. One thief opening cages in the night could not empty them. Neither could one transmigrated author with a shopping app.
Not yet, he thought. Not with what I have now.
"Not today," he said aloud. "Today, we're shopping. Trust me."
Guan Yunfan looked at him for a long moment. Then the dark, dangerous stillness went out of his shoulders, and he nodded once, and fell back into step.
Nalan City was a very good transit station. A crossroads. A watering hole for merchants of every kind, honest and otherwise.
Li Yuguo's eyes moved over the wagons, and the banners hanging from their poles, and found the characters painted on them in red.
Zhou Ji Trading Company. Capital.
His breath caught.
The Zhouji caravan.
He remembered now. This was it. This was the convoy from the capital where, in the original story, Ye Qiong had picked up one of the biggest leaks of his early career. Not on purpose. Ye Qiong had not been looking for treasure. He had simply been walking past the cages, and seen something that moved his heart, and done a kind thing out of pure mercy—and stumbled, by accident, into a fortune.
And Ye Qiong isn't here.
So I'll take it. Get faster updates on g.com.
"Brother Yuguo?" Shi Dacheng was looking at him in confusion. "Didn't you want to buy magic tools? What are we doing here?"
"Wait for me here a moment," Li Yuguo said. "I want to go and see if there's anything good among the slaves."
"Oh? Okay, okay, take your time." The merchant gave him a knowing look and a wink. "I'll show Brother Yunfan around in the meantime."
He seemed in a very good mood. Buying those outfits had made him feel very good indeed.
The shopkeeper of the Zhouji caravan saw Li Yuguo coming from twenty paces away, and his face rearranged itself instantly into a broad, flattering, oily smile.
He was a lean, sharp-featured man of about forty, with a thin mustache, a silk cap, and quick, greedy, calculating eyes. Li Yuguo recognized him at once. He had written him. Zhou Papi, the readers had called him—Zhou the Scoundrel—a man who would sell his own mother by the pound and haggle over the weight.
"Ah! It turns out to be Mr. Li!" Zhou Papi bowed so low that his cap nearly fell off. "You've honored us with a visit! I wonder how this humble one can help you?"
A man like this could not be handled with simple means. Li Yuguo knew that.
So he put his hands on his hips, lifted his chin, and let the face of the old Li Yuguo settle over his own—the lazy, sulky, arrogant face of the King of Soft Rice.
"I'm in a bad mood today," he announced. "I want to buy a live target. Something to practice my hands on." He strolled past the shopkeeper toward the temporary warehouse at the back of the camp without waiting to be invited. "It doesn't matter to you what I do with it, does it? So—have any new goods come in recently?"
The shopkeeper hurried after him, rubbing his hands.
"Business in slaves has been very hot these past few days, Mr. Li, very hot! The hunting teams have swept through a great many demon villages and caught a great many slaves. The strong ones have mostly been bought up for the mines. And some of the half-orcs—catgirls and the like, the pretty ones—were bought by the rich as playthings." He smiled ingratiatingly. "This new batch hasn't fully arrived yet; the rest will be here tomorrow. But if the young master only wants a living target, just pick whatever you like! Men, women, old, young, no problem at all!"
Li Yuguo glanced sideways at him and smiled thinly.
"Don't try to fool me."
"No, no! I wouldn't dare!" Sweat had broken out across the shopkeeper's forehead. "Everyone knows your name, young master! Even the disciples from the great sects—even they don't dare provoke you in Nalan City! How would a small merchant like me dare?"
Li Yuguo let the silence stretch, just long enough to make the man sweat a little more.
This, too, was a rhetorical method. He had used it in a hundred scenes. Apply psychological pressure. Make the other side afraid. Only then could you squeeze the most out of them.
They walked down the long row of cages toward the back of the warehouse. The smell grew worse as they went—unwashed bodies, sickness, rot. The cages grew smaller and darker. And at the very end of the row, in an inconspicuous corner where the light barely reached, Li Yuguo stopped.
His breathing quickened.
In the last cage, on a bed of filthy straw, a girl lay curled on her side.
She looked about fifteen or sixteen years old. She was so thin that her bones showed through her skin—the knobs of her spine, the wings of her shoulder blades, the sharp points of her knees drawn up against her chest. She wore a single ragged shift, stiff with dried blood and filth. Her bare arms and legs were covered in welts and half-healed cuts and bruises gone yellow and black. She was breathing, but only just; her ribs rose and fell in short, shallow, rattling breaths.
And her hair was white.