Shi Dacheng heaved himself up off his cushion with a grunt, his belly swaying, his rings flashing in the lamplight that filtered through the red canvas.
"So it's Brother Li Yuguo!" he said, and if he had heard the name before—and in Nalan City, everyone had heard the name—his round pink face showed nothing but delight. A merchant's face. It had long ago learned to wear whatever expression the deal required. "Good, good. Then look here, Brother Li." He swept a fat hand toward the shelves that lined the back of the tent. "These are just some little gadgets. Odds and ends picked up on the road. If anything catches your eye, pick one at random. Take it as a greeting gift from me." He winked. "Since we're going to keep cooperating in the future, isn't that right?"
Fishing, Li Yuguo thought. He wants to see what I value. Wants to see if I'm a fool.
He rose, smoothed his robe, and strolled toward the shelves with his hands clasped behind his back, the way he imagined a bored young lord might stroll through a shop he could buy ten times over.
The shelves were crowded. Inlaid boxes. Little bronze incense burners shaped like crouching qilin. Snuff bottles of carved agate. A lacquered fan painted with cranes. A string of prayer beads that smelled of old temple smoke. A jade cicada. A rusted dagger with a turquoise hilt. Most of it was what Shi Dacheng had said: odds and ends. Pretty things for rich men's studies, bought cheap in one province and sold dear in another.
He let his eyes drift over all of it with polite boredom.
And then, on the top shelf, half hidden behind a cracked porcelain vase, they stopped.
It was a bottle. A small, squat bottle of cloudy green glass, stoppered with wax, no bigger than his fist. There was nothing remarkable about it at all, except that through the murky glass he could see what was inside: a handful of tiny seeds, flat and teardrop-shaped, each no larger than a grain of rice.
And on every one of them, faint as frost on a windowpane, there was a pattern of silver lines.
His heart gave a single hard kick against his ribs.
He knew those seeds. He had invented them. He had described them in a paragraph so obscure that he doubted ten readers remembered it, in an arc so far into the story that Ye Qiong had already been an inner disciple for a year before he stumbled across them in a ruined garden. Liu Mang had needed a cheap, rare cultivation aid that a poor protagonist could plausibly get his hands on, and so he had made them look like weeds and given them a tell that only someone who knew what to look for would recognize.
Silver veins on the seed coat.
He kept his face perfectly still. It took every ounce of self-control he had.
"What's in this bottle?" he asked lightly, pointing.
Shi Dacheng squinted up at it. "That? Ah—some kind of seeds. To tell the truth, I don't really know what they are. Got them thrown in with a lot of herbs from a mountain village down south." He waved a dismissive hand. "Flower seeds, probably. Nothing valuable. If you like them, they're yours." Then his little eyes crinkled up in their folds of flesh, and a sly, knowing grin spread across his face. "Hehe. I think Brother Li must have a sweetheart, eh? Isn't that right? All women like flowers…"
Li Yuguo laughed.
"Brother Shi," he said, "you know me best. Then I'll accept it!"
He reached up and took the bottle off the shelf himself, before Shi Dacheng could change his mind, and tucked it into his sleeve. Through the silk, the glass was cool against his wrist. It felt like carrying a winning lottery ticket.
They exchanged the usual courtesies—come by any time, Brother Li; of course, Brother Shi, we'll do great things together—and the merchant walked him to the tent flap with an arm around his shoulders like an old friend. Then the red canvas fell closed behind him, and Li Yuguo was back out in the white glare of the market with two hundred taels of silver and a bottle of seeds that nobody in Nalan City but him knew the value of.
He walked thirty paces before he let himself smile.
Seeds of victory, he thought. Literally.
He ducked into the shade of a half-collapsed awning on the far side of the square and, almost from habit, called up the panel.
"System."
The pale gold light bloomed in front of his eyes, cool and familiar, and the cheerful Alimama banner unrolled across the top. His balance glowed in the corner. He had barely glanced at it when the whole panel flickered—and a new window popped up over the middle of it, edged in a brighter, almost festive gold, with a little shower of light-sparks fizzing at its corners.
> [ CONGRATULATIONS! ]
>
> Condition met: Holder possesses 100 taels of silver.
> You may now unlock your first Author Skill.
>
> Unlock?
> [ YES ] [ NO ]
Li Yuguo stared at it.
A hundred taels.
That was it? That was the unlock condition? Not some impossible quest—not defeat the protagonist or survive a heavenly tribulation—just money in his pocket? He had been holding the merchant's silver for all of a hundred breaths, and the system had noticed.
Relief broke over him like cool water. He had spent the whole afternoon trying not to think about that one flat gray word—Locked—sitting in the middle of his status page. His trump card. His one real edge. And now here it was, being offered to him on a plate.
At least I'll have something to rely on.
He jabbed YES without a second thought.
> [ Thank you for your purchase! ]
He glanced quickly at his balance. It had not changed. The skill had not cost him a single coin; the silver had only needed to be there, as if the system had wanted to see that he could earn it. A new line glowed into existence on his status page, gold on gold:
> Author Skill 1: "Tell Me Your Secret!"
Li Yuguo read the name. Then he read it again.
"What," he said flatly, "is this useless trash?"
He had been hoping for something grand. Rewrite Fate. Edit Heaven. The Author's Pen. Something with a little dignity. Instead it sounded like a cheap party game. With a sigh, he tapped it anyway.
> [ Skill: "Tell Me Your Secret!" ]
>
> Description: The user may view the secret of a targeted person.
That was all.
He stood there under the ragged awning and turned it over in his mind, and slowly, his irritation began to change into something else.
The secret of a targeted person.
Not their stats. Not their cultivation level. Their secret. The thing they hid. The thing they would never say aloud. In a world where half the people around him were lying about who they were—where the hypocrites wore good reputations and the villains smiled at you over cups of tea—a skill that could peel back the mask and show him the truth underneath…
Well.
It wasn't Rewrite Fate. But it was a very good way to get dirt on people.
He smiled to himself and closed the panel.
He was still smiling when he saw the man in the cloak.
At first he was just another refugee—one more ragged shape at the edge of the square, sitting on his heels in the dust with something long laid across his knees. But Li Yuguo's eyes snagged on him and would not let go, the way your eye snags on a familiar face in a crowd before your mind has caught up.
He was big. Even crouching, the breadth of his shoulders under the threadbare cloak was obvious. His hair was cropped short and rough, as if he had hacked it off himself with a knife. One of his eyes was gone; a strip of dark cloth was tied over the socket. And across his forehead, livid against his sun-darkened skin, ran a scar—not one scar but two, crossing each other in a deep, puckered X, as if someone had once tried very hard to split his skull open and failed twice.
He did not look like a refugee. Refugees looked at the ground. This man looked at everything, slowly and calmly, with his one remaining eye, and every person his gaze passed over unconsciously stepped a little farther away.
A one-eyed dragon, Li Yuguo thought. Cloak. Cross scar on the forehead.
His breath caught.
It can't be. How can I meet him here?
The man rose to his feet. Unwrapped from its rags, the thing across his knees was a sword—a long, straight blade in a plain black scabbard, its hilt wrapped in sweat-darkened leather. He held it up, horizontal, in both hands, the way a man presents an offering at a shrine.
"Selling a blade," he said. His voice was deep and rough, but it carried. "Selling a blade here."
A few heads turned.
"My family's treasured sword," the man went on. "It cuts iron like mud. I'm in need of money, so I'm selling it here today. Is anyone interested?"
Li Yuguo watched from beneath the awning as people began, slowly, to gather. The crowd in the market had little enough to amuse it, and a big scarred stranger selling a sword was more entertaining than cabbages. A ring formed around the man, three and four deep. Porters. Idlers. A few of the beggars. A merchant's guard, leaning on his spear, eyeing the blade with professional interest.
Then the ring parted, and two men shouldered their way through to the front.
Li Yuguo knew them too. Not from his novel—they had never been important enough for that—but from this body's memory, which offered them up at once with a sour little twist of distaste. Two of the most famous liuzi in Nalan City: street toughs, hustlers, petty racketeers who lived by shaking down stallholders and bullying anyone weaker than themselves.
Zhang Wu was the one in front. He was squat and thick-necked, with a pocked face and a mouth full of crooked brown teeth, and he swaggered as he walked, rolling his shoulders. Zhao Liu came one step behind him, thinner, sharper, with narrow eyes that never stopped moving.
"Good man," Zhang Wu said, planting himself in front of the one-eyed stranger with his thumbs hooked in his belt. "How much are you selling this knife for?"
"It's a family heirloom sword," the man said evenly. "Eighty taels of silver."
Zhao Liu barked a laugh. He sidled forward, peering at the scabbard with exaggerated disdain. "I say—a broken old knife like this, and you want eighty taels for it? You're trying to cheat people! I think eight taels is about right."
"Not for sale," said the man, and drew the sword back against his chest.
"Now, now." Zhang Wu moved closer, his voice turning oily and reasonable. "How about this. You sell it to me for ten taels. I can see you need the money in a hurry, eh? Ten taels is ten taels. It's better than nothing."
"I said I won't sell it!" The man's single eye flashed. "Eighty taels is already far too cheap. This is my family's treasure. If it weren't for my wife's illness, I would never have brought it here at all."
His wife.
Li Yuguo's fingers tightened on the edge of the awning.
The two liuzi exchanged a look, and something passed between them that Li Yuguo had seen on the faces of a thousand villains in a thousand web novels: the bright, greedy, satisfied look of men who have just smelled fat meat. They could see the sword was a real treasure. Anyone with eyes could see it. And the man holding it was a stranger, alone, desperate, with a sick wife somewhere and no friends in this city.
They moved without seeming to move—Zhang Wu drifting a step to the left, Zhao Liu a step to the right—until they stood on either side of him.
The man saw it. He set his jaw and turned to go.
Zhang Wu stepped into his path.
"Hey, hey, where are you going?" He spread his hands, all innocent outrage. "You said you were selling, didn't you? Everybody heard you. How can you just walk off like this? I say, you're not a very honest businessman." His voice dropped, and the oil went out of it. "Today, you're leaving that knife behind whether you like it or not."
"What," said the man, very quietly, "you're going to rob me?"
The air in the ring changed.
Li Yuguo felt it. It was like the moment before a storm breaks, when the pressure drops and the hair on your arms stands up. The man had not moved. He had not reached for the hilt. But his shoulders had settled, and his feet had shifted by a fraction on the dust, and something in his one dark eye had gone very still and very cold. The crowd felt it too; the front row shuffled back half a step without knowing why.
Zhang Wu and Zhao Liu, being idiots, did not feel it at all.
They're about to die, Li Yuguo thought, with total certainty. And in about five minutes, that man is going to be wanted for murder in Nalan City, and he'll have to run, and his wife—
He was moving before he had finished the thought.
"All right, all right!" He pushed his way through the ring with both hands raised, smiling broadly. "Let's all calm down. Let it go, let it go. Everyone go home!"
There was a beat of silence.
Then somebody in the crowd let out a delighted whoop.
"It's the King of Soft Rice! Ha! The King of Soft Rice is here!"
"Aiya, it really is him. Look, look, the soft rice eater, tsk tsk tsk—here to stick his nose in again?"
"Come to buy the sword with his wife's money?"