At midnight, the Shadow-Market Exchange was quieter than it had been in a month.
Avatar Zero stood behind the Void-Star Pavilion’s stall in his pitch-black robe and silver mask, a single vial resting on the velvet before him. Four buyers lingered at the edge of the cavern. Two of them were looking across the aisle.
The Gilded-Crow’s stall blazed with lanterns. A new banner hung above it in gold thread: Supreme-Grade Foundation-Building Pills. One hundred and fifty stones a vial. Triple-Halo purity guaranteed.
A hundred and fifty. A tiny fraction of what the Pavilion’s vials had once sold for, and well under the cost of the herbs.
"They’re losing money on every vial," a buyer whispered nearby. "Why would they do that?"
"To bleed the Void-Star dry," his friend said. "A price war. The Crow can afford it. Who can afford to fight the Crow?"
Avatar Zero’s silver mask did not move. Behind it, Adam studied the vials on the Gilded-Crow’s counter with the cold attention he usually reserved for puzzles.
The Pill Halos were wrong.
A real Triple-Halo shone from inside the pill, in three clean rings that pulsed with its purity. These rings sat on the surface like paint, glossy and flat. They were painted-halo pills, glazed with an array and filled with sediment-clogged essence that would hold up for a month before it began to crack the meridians of anyone who swallowed it.
’Fakes,’ Adam thought. ’And they’re selling them at a loss to flood the market before anyone checks.’
It was an elegant attack. The Crow didn’t need the fakes to be good. It only needed the Pavilion to look overpriced for a month, long enough for the Pavilion’s buyers to drift away. By the time the first disciple’s meridians cracked, the Void-Star’s name would be tainted by association with all vials sold under it.
Avatar Zero closed his stall at the second bell, earlier than usual.
One shadow among the pillars peeled away from the wall and followed him out.
Adam felt the tail at once. A thin man in a dark robe, a gold-ringed crow pinned inside his collar, keeping forty paces behind. He wasn’t skilled. He was simply patient.
’The same feather,’ Adam thought. ’The same hand.’
He could have killed the man in the tunnels, and he did not. He led him instead through the sect’s back roads, up the stairs of the central plaza, and out through the western gate, as if he were a merchant on his way to a late errand. And then, as the gate’s lanterns fell behind, he slipped into the Shadow-Stealth Movement Technique and let the tail pass him by.
The scout never noticed.
Beyond the western gate, in a hollow where an old pine had split in half long ago, two men stood waiting.
The first was Elder Ye Zhen.
Adam had never seen him, but he knew the face at once. It was Ye’s face thirty years older, gaunt and hawk-nosed, wrapped in a gray robe without a sect crest. His eyes burned with the same bloodshot hatred Ye had worn in the arena. He gave off the pressure of a Late Foundation Establishment cultivator, the highest he would ever reach in this life.
The second man was taller. His robe was the color of old rust, and a dozen blood-red feathers hung from a cord around his neck. Adam felt a pressure roll off him like heat off a forge: a Golden Core, early stage, stained red.
"Gao Mo," Ye Zhen said, bowing slightly. "Third Elder of the Blood-Feather Sect. They call you the Crimson Vulture."
"They do," the tall man said. His voice was soft, almost kind. "And you are the grandfather of the boy who died on the Zenith Arena. The one who insulted the wrong man."
Ye Zhen’s jaw tightened. "Forty thousand low-tier spirit stones. Half now, half when I see his head. And his sword."
"Forty thousand is a generous sum for a boy who barely has a core." The Crimson Vulture tilted his head. "But I’ve seen what your Crow spies saw in the Desolate Ghost Valley. A hundred-foot domain, ten thousand blades. Impressive." He smiled. "For ten breaths. Then the boy was on his knees, bleeding from the nose, fighting a pack of Grave-Hounds with a sword like a Foundation disciple."
"So you understand the weakness."
"I understand everything. A weapon that dies in ten breaths is a weapon you can wait out." He chuckled. "Where?"
Ye Zhen drew a jade slip from his sleeve. "The notice of contract transfer reached my peak this morning. Flame-Dragon Peak has allowed him three days in the Heavenfall Pool, starting the night after next. When he leaves, he must cross the iron chain bridge between Flame-Dragon and Ghost-Sword Peak. That bridge has a blind spot in the Law Enforcement array. I can have it go dark for an hour."
"An hour is plenty," the Crimson Vulture said softly.
They spoke for a few more minutes about stones and routes. Adam listened to every word through the thread of soul-sense that ran back from Avatar Zero to his body in the cavern under Ghost-Sword Peak, three hundred feet below the earth.
Then the two men parted, and the hollow was silent again.
Back in the cavern beneath Ghost-Sword Peak, Adam opened his eyes.
There was no fear in them. There was something closer to satisfaction.
’The contract notice,’ he thought. ’Every transfer of a Sun-Fire Peak contract has to be reported to the original signer. I knew Ye Zhen would learn where I’d be the moment I named the pool.’
He had not asked for the Heavenfall Pool by accident. He had asked for it so the old man would know exactly where to wait.
A place. A day. A blind spot in the array. A hired Golden Core who believed he knew precisely how long Adam’s sword could burn.
"Ten breaths," Adam murmured, and a thin smile touched his lips. "Let him keep believing that number."
Outside, the iron swords hummed in the wind, and the stars wheeled toward dawn.