The knocking came again, louder this time. The oak door shook in its frame.
"Old Man Ling! I can hear you breathing in there!"
Adam looked at the brass bolt, and at the three shadows moving across the crack beneath the door. Then he smoothed the front of his gray cloak, pulled his hood forward, and lowered his shoulders into the slight, apologetic stoop of a poor scholar.
He drew the bolt and opened the door a hand’s width.
"Yes?"
Three men filled the doorway. The one in front was thick as a barrel, with iron studs on his knuckles and a scar across his chin. A tiger’s head was stitched in red thread on his collar. Behind him stood two younger men with cudgels, both smelling of cheap wine and old sweat.
"Who the hell are you?" the big man demanded.
"The new owner," Adam said mildly. "I bought the shop from Mister Ling tonight. He has gone to live with relatives."
The big man blinked. Then he laughed, and the other two joined him.
"Bought it. With what, scholar? Your ink?" He leaned closer. "Fine. Then you have inherited his debts. Two hundred stones in arrears and fifty for this month. Two hundred and fifty, and it’s due now."
"A lawful sale transfers the property," Adam said, as if quoting from a book. "It does not transfer a previous owner’s private obligations."
"Law." The big man spat on the step. "This is the Slum Ring, little brother. The Iron-Tiger Gang is the law here, and I’m Hu Bao, who keeps it."
He gave off the steady pressure of a Foundation Establishment cultivator, second layer, with his Qi stirred up and swaggering. Under Adam’s veiling cloak, Adam registered to him as a trembling Qi Condensation scholar of the third layer. Hu Bao’s eyes lingered on his hands, looking for rings, and found none.
Adam did not look at Hu Bao’s face. He looked at the collar.
Under the red tiger’s head, half-hidden by the stitching, a small gold-ringed pin in the shape of a crow was fastened to the cloth. Adam’s Eyes of Divine Insight caught a thread of Qi coming off it, faint and cold. He had seen that same thread on a black feather in the Desolate Ghost Valley.
’The Iron-Tiger Gang is a Gilded-Crow limb,’ Adam thought. ’Even down here, in the dust. Every stone these men collect goes up a chain, and the chain ends in the Ye clan’s main house.’
He could have broken Hu Bao’s spine without leaving the doorway. He did not move.
A man who killed the first gangster he met in the Imperial Capital would be a headline by morning. A man who paid two hundred and fifty stones and complained about it would be forgotten by noon, and the gang’s tithe would keep running upward, straight to the people he wanted to find.
He sighed, took a silk pouch from his sleeve, and counted out two hundred and fifty low-tier spirit stones, one coin at a time, as slowly as a man handing over his life’s savings.
Hu Bao snatched the pouch and weighed it. His grin widened.
"Not bad, scholar. Not bad at all. A poor man doesn’t carry this much." He tossed it to one of his men. "Since you’re so eager to be a good citizen, the fee is eighty a month from now on. The shop has a tenant, and tenants pay more."
"Eighty," Adam said faintly.
"And try not to run off like the old man." Hu Bao stepped close and tapped the center of Adam’s chest with one studded knuckle. "I’d hate to have to come looking."
Adam bowed his head. "I will remember it."
The three men swaggered into the dark. Hu Bao stopped to carve a deep tiger-claw mark across the oak door with his knuckle, and then they were gone, their laughter rolling away down the alley.
Adam shut the door and slid the bolt home.
The stoop left his shoulders. His voice, when he spoke, was perfectly flat.
"Hu Bao. The Iron-Tiger Gang." He turned the name over like a coin. "Eighty stones a month is a very cheap price for a map."
He lit a small spirit lantern and walked to the back of the shop, where a trapdoor in the floor led down a flight of stone steps. The subterranean lease. The old man had called it an exhausted vein.
The cellar was a long, low chamber carved from gray rock, empty except for a cracked altar and a century of dust. Adam laid his palm against the wall and let his Eyes of Divine Insight open.
The vein was exhausted, but not dead. A pale thread of old spirit Qi still pulsed deep in the stone, like the last ember in a burned-out hearth.
’A Heaven-Grade Spirit-Gathering Array could wake that,’ he thought. ’Enough to run a furnace room. Enough to hide an alchemy lab under a scrap shop in the Slum Ring, where no one is looking.’
He knelt, drew a stick of silver chalk from his sleeve, and began to trace the first lines of the array across the floor.
Above him, in the quiet shop, a fine layer of dust settled on the carved tiger claw. In the morning, the Slum Ring would see a poor scholar, a bolted door, and nothing else.
Adam did not mind. He had come to the Imperial City to cut a root, and the first thing to do with a root was find out how deep it ran.