The next morning I wrapped the boar pill and headed to the market.
The first vendor I tried was a mid-sized stall near the east gate. I'd never sold to him before but he dealt in pills and medicines. I placed the pill on the counter. He picked it up, turned it over once, looked at me, and closed the shutters without saying a word.
I stood there for a moment. Then I moved on.
The second vendor did the same thing. So did the third. The fourth didn't even pick it up — he saw the color and shook his head before I could open my mouth.
I tried lowering the price. Fifty silver instead of seventy. Then forty. Then thirty — barely above what the materials had cost. Didn't matter. The reaction was always the same. Some closed their stalls, some waved me off, one turned his back and started rearranging his shelves like I wasn't there.
Nobody explained anything. Nobody said a single word about why.
I started going to the smaller stalls. The ones that sold low-quality pills and cheap cultivation aids — places that shouldn't be picky about what they stocked. Still nothing. A woman at one of them actually looked uncomfortable, like she wanted to help but couldn't. She still turned me away.
Eventually I went to Old Feng.
He was one of the first merchants I'd sold low-grade pills to when I started. We'd done business dozens of times. Never anything beyond the transaction — hello, here's the pill, here's the silver, goodbye. But he knew my product was clean.
He was behind his counter sorting dried herbs when I walked in. I placed the pill in front of him.
He glanced at it. Then at me.
"Mid-grade?"
"Yes."
He exhaled through his nose and pushed the pill back toward me.
"Can't buy this. Nobody outside the Association can."
"What association?"
He looked at me the way you look at someone who just asked what the sun was.
"The Alchemist Association. Everything mid-grade mortal and above goes through them. That's how it works. That's how it's always worked."
"Since when?"
"Since when?" He repeated the question back at me like it didn't make sense. "Since always. Where have you been — another world?"
I didn't answer.
"Look," he said. "I'm telling you this because you've sold me good product at low prices before. Easy to resell. I earned a lot from that, so — don't waste your time walking around the market. Go to the Association. They'll buy it from you and they'll pay more than I ever would anyway. Their building is on the main road near the central square. You can't miss it."
I thanked him and left.
On the way back I went through every loop. Every market visit, every guild interaction, every conversation. The Lin family traded in goods that included alchemical supplies — an organization with a monopoly on mid-grade pills and above would have come up. At least once. At least some hints about it. And even in this loop — I'd been refining and selling pills in this city for over two years. Buying herbs. Talking to suppliers. Standing at guild counters. Two years, and not once had anyone mentioned it. Not the guild clerks, not the merchants, not the suppliers. It was like the Association had always existed for them, but at the same time it didn't — like it only came to mind when they were already thinking about something related to it.
And yet Old Feng had said it like he was telling me water was wet.
The butterfly effect could explain a lot. A personality shift. A crack in a wall. An inn that looked like it had never been occupied. Small things.
This wasn't small.
I walked to the central square.
The building was exactly where Old Feng said it would be. It also looked like it had been there for a long time, maybe even decades or centuries. And the stone steps were worn smooth in the center from years of foot traffic.
I went inside.
The interior was clean and organized. A long counter ran across the back wall with several attendants behind it. Shelves lined the sides, displaying materials and pill bottles at prices that confirmed what Old Feng had told me — they sold high, very high. But the range of materials available was broader than anything I'd seen in the open market. Things I hadn't been able to find at all were sitting on shelves with price tags.
I walked to the counter and placed the pill in front of the attendant.
"I'd like to sell this."
She examined it briefly.
"Mid-grade mortal. Boar-based." She paused, checking something behind the counter. "Eighty silver. Standard rate for this quality."
Eighty. Higher than what I'd been trying to sell it for at the market.
"Fine," I said.
She processed the transaction and handed me the silver.
Before leaving I looked around one more time. The foot traffic, the worn steps, the depth of the inventory. This place hadn't appeared recently. Everything about it said it had been here for a long time.
But it hadn't.
I left and walked back to my room.
How many other things had changed that I'd stopped noticing? How many things had changed that I'd never noticed at all?
The rewind...
I wasn't even sure what to call what the system did anymore. At the beginning I thought it was rewinding time — going back to the past. But I didn't know. I didn't know if I was even in the same universe, or if this was a parallel timeline, or something else entirely. I had no idea how the system actually worked. None.
I didn't have a name for it.
I put the silver away and started refining. I couldn't answer any of this, and it wasn't the time for answers.