The outer wall of Xian Yu was less a wall than an apology.
A row of cracked stones barely reached a man’s shoulder, with weeds growing from the gaps like broken teeth.
Yuan stood in a long line, breathing in the smell of cattle, sweat, and wilted vegetables.
Merchants carried baskets, farmers dragged carts behind them, and the gray dawn dried the night’s dew from the stones.
Two guards stood at the gate, looking at faces with about as much attention as a man gave to documents he could not read.
Yuan passed through as though he were not there.
There was nothing worth searching: torn clothes, a half-empty bag, and a body that was not worth bribing over.
In this world, poverty was the best travel identity.
Beyond the wall stretched a district of mud huts and crowded markets, vendors shouting, barefoot children running through the streets, and smoke rising from a thousand small stoves.
For the first time in seven years, Yuan was not the poorest person in the place.
There were countless faces like his.
People with no pathways, or pathways so weak they would never cross the first threshold.
They worked in fields, markets, and the cellars of the great families’ estates.
Hands without names.
He stopped beside a small cart that smelled of steaming soup.
An old man stirred the pot while looking at it rather than at his customers.
Yuan spent his last copper coin on a bowl.
“New here?” the old man asked without looking up.
“I am now.”
“No one becomes one of us by choice, boy.”
The old man gave a dry laugh filled with years.
“Either you were born here, or the world rejected you somewhere else and threw you into our hands.”
It was the first hot food to enter Yuan’s stomach in two weeks.
He tried not to let it show on his face.
He drank the soup slowly, listening to the noise of the district the way a doctor listened to a patient’s chest.
Who lent money to whom.
Where the guards passed, and when.
What the embroidered, brightly colored clothes and their insignia meant as their wearers moved along the main street toward the inner walls.
“Seven walls,” Yuan said casually, as though asking about the weather.
“Why seven?”
The old man looked at him with amused surprise.
“You really are from outside.
One wall for each level, boy.
Here, we’re at the bottom of the bottom.
Those whose pathways haven’t opened, or those whose pathways opened but never advanced.
Beyond us is Essence Refinement, then Soul Core.
Then…”
He stopped and pointed his ladle upward twice, then three times.
“That’s where people who aren’t like us begin.
Higher and higher, all the way to the palace.
Anyone beyond the fourth wall doesn’t look at us any more than we look at flies.”
“What is beyond the fourth?”
“I don’t know.”
The old man lowered his ladle.
“And I don’t want to.”
⸻
Yuan slept for two nights beneath an overturned cart, listening to the guards’ footsteps overhead and counting them.
On the third day, while searching for any kind of work, even carrying grain sacks, he heard shouting from an alley.
He approached quietly.
Not out of curiosity.
Every problem in a city like this was information, and every piece of information could become a tool.
Inside the alley, a young man dressed in black silk embroidered with golden thread was kicking an old man lying on the ground.
The insignia on his sleeve was a golden balance with two pans.
The Ming Family, one of the two families that divided the city between them.
On the young man’s chest was a small, gleaming golden dragon pin.
It was not a family insignia at all.
Personal arrogance.
A young man trying to look greater than he was.
Two guards stood behind him, watching with boredom, as though they were observing two chickens fighting.
“I told you to pay the tax before the end of last week, you old dog!”
Another kick struck the old man’s ribs, drawing a muffled groan.
“You think your land belongs to you because you plow it?
Every inch of this district belongs to the Ming Family!”
A few onlookers gathered at a safe distance.
No one intervened.
Yuan stood among them, still.
There was nothing unusual about the scene.
He had seen dozens like it in his village.
The strong crushed the weak, and the weak swallowed it.
It was a law as natural as rain.
Nothing worth getting angry over.
But a mind that never stopped calculating saw something else.
Fine silk, but no family ring.
Two guards with no rank.
A trivial tax-collecting assignment, usually given to someone the family wanted out of the way.
This young man was being punished, whether he knew it or not.
Or perhaps he knew and hated it.
And anyone who hated his punishment would pay for someone who promised to free him from it.
An opportunity, the merchant said inside Yuan, in the tone of someone looking at an open purse.
Yuan stepped forward calmly and knelt beside the old man, as though examining his injuries.
“What are you doing, you filthy rat?”
The young man raised an eyebrow.
“Want your share of the beating?”
Yuan raised his eyes and looked at him.
There was no anger, fear, or challenge in his gaze.
Only coldness.
The look of a butcher weighing a piece of meat.
The young man stopped.
He did not know why.
“He can’t pay,” Yuan said in a low voice, carrying neither pleading nor hostility.
“Beating him won’t pull money from an empty pocket.”
“And what does that have to do with you?
Who do you think you are, you pathway-less rat?”
“No one.”
Yuan waited a moment.
“But I can find you this old man’s tax, and the taxes of ten others like him, if you’re looking for results instead of entertainment.”
The young man fell silent.
The two guards exchanged a glance.
Even the old man on the ground raised his eyes, astonished by the stranger who had intervened, then even more astonished by the offer he had made.
That was exactly what Yuan wanted.
Curiosity instead of hostility.
⸻
In a quiet corner of the market, away from prying eyes, Yuan spent an hour explaining his idea.
He learned the young man’s name from a fawning guard.
Ming Hao.
A distant relative of the family head, sent to the outer district because his uncle could think of no cheaper punishment.
He sat on the edge of his chair as though he might stand at any moment to show how busy he was.
“Instead of beating everyone who falls behind,” Yuan said, drawing circles on the table with his finger, “you need intermediaries from the district itself.
People who know who has money and who doesn’t.
Random beatings lose you people’s loyalty without increasing what you collect.”
“The intermediary knows his neighbors.
He knows where pressure will work, and where mercy will bring profit.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Ming Hao narrowed his eyes.
“Who are you to have a plan like this?”
“Because I want a place.”
Yuan’s voice remained calm.
“Not silk clothes.
Not a title.
A foothold.
Make me one of your intermediaries, and I’ll double what you collect from this district within a month.”
Ming Hao chewed on the idea like an apple whose ripeness he could not determine.
Simple calculations turned in his head.
If it worked, he could claim the credit before the elders and perhaps have his punishment lifted.
If it failed, it was only an outer-district rat.
He could throw him outside the city.
“One month.”
He said it with the tone of a man granting charity.
“If I don’t see results, I’ll make sure my guards throw you out of the entire city.”
“Understood.”
Yuan gave a small smile.
The other man mistook it for gratitude.
Well done, the merchant whispered inside his head.
You made the snake believe it was the one that tamed you.
Yuan did not answer.
As he left the market, he raised his eyes toward the distant inner walls, where rooftops gleamed with stones that reflected the afternoon light.
He would not enter through the front door.
No pathways.
No bloodline.
No master.
He would enter through the cracks, like a tiny worm living beneath the roots, ignored because no one bothered watching the ground while they were busy guarding the great gates.
On the way to the shabby hut he had rented with the last of his saved bread crumbs, Yuan thought for a moment that he was being watched.
He turned.
There was only a miserable market.
Vendors.
A woman in a simple gray dress buying a bundle of radishes from a cart, asking about the price as though she did not care.
Yuan looked at her for a moment, then continued on.
He did not notice that the radishes remained in her hand without her paying for them.
Nor did he notice that, while pretending to turn the bundle over, her eyes never left him until he disappeared into the alley.