He was up before dawn. The market quarter opened early and he found what he needed at the third stall along the main road, a small equipment seller with cultivator sundries laid out on a low table. Storage pouches, the basic kind, sat in a stack near the edge. He picked one up, a plain cloth bag no larger than his fist, reinforced with a minor spatial formation. The vendor said ninety spirit stones. Lin Yushu said seventy-five. They agreed on eighty and he walked away with it tucked in his coat.
Around the corner, in a gap between two buildings, he transferred one thousand low grade spirit stones from the ring into the pouch. One thousand covered any reasonable figure for Tianping property. He tucked the pouch inside his coat and walked to the office.
He was at the city affairs office before the second hour after dawn, as agreed. Clerk Fang was already behind his counter, a fresh ledger open, ink still wet on the morning's first entries. A young assistant stood near the door with a key and the look of someone who had drawn the short straw for the morning's property walk. He introduced himself only as the clerk's assistant and led Lin Yushu out into Tianping at a pace that suggested he had other things to get back to.
The shop was on the corner of Millstone Lane and the north market road, exactly as Clerk Fang had said. Three storeys of dark timber framing and pale plaster, the ground floor fronting directly onto the street with a wide wooden shutter that folded outward to open the shopfront entirely. The shutter was warped along one edge. The plaster above the door had a long diagonal crack that had been filled badly at some point and then left. Someone had painted the door a deep red, the paint now faded and peeling at the corners.
The assistant unlocked the door and stepped back.
Lin Yushu went in alone.
· · ·
The ground floor was a single open room, larger than it looked from outside. The previous tenant had left in a hurry or without sentiment, judging by the debris. A broken display shelf along the left wall, a counter scarred with years of use, dead flies on the windowsill, the particular smell of a space that has been closed too long. Two of the ceiling beams were stained from an old leak. The staining was dry and old, the leak long since stopped or routed elsewhere.
He walked the floor slowly, pressing it with his heel in places. Solid throughout. The broken shelf was one bracket pulled from the wall. The counter scarred but level. Good timber under the damage.
The second floor was accessed by a steep internal staircase. Up here the space divided naturally into two halves. A front section with two windows overlooking the street, wide enough for a table and chairs, light enough at this hour to read by without a lamp. A back section behind a hanging partition, darker, low-ceilinged, solid shelving along three walls. Storage, with the bones of something better if a lamp bracket was added and the shelving repaired.
The third floor was smaller, the roof sloping down on one side, but it had a window that faced east and a door with a proper bolt and a floor that was clean and level. A bed frame had been left behind, stripped of everything else. The room smelled of old timber and nothing worse.
He stood at the east window for a moment. The morning light was coming in at a low angle, warm and unhurried, laying itself across the floorboards in a long rectangle. Outside, Millstone Lane was starting its day. A cart going past with something that clinked. A woman opening shutters two buildings down. The sound of the north market road one corner away, already busy.
He went back downstairs.
· · ·
The negotiation, such as it was, took place in Clerk Fang's office an hour later. The listed price was nine hundred and twenty low grade spirit stones, covering the building purchase, registration under the sect's authority, and the standard formation inspection certificate. Lin Yushu had looked at the warped shutter, the cracked plaster, the old leak stains, and the broken shelf, and he offered eight hundred and eighty.
Clerk Fang considered this for approximately four seconds and accepted.
Lin Yushu drew the pouch from his coat and counted out eight hundred and eighty stones into the transaction box the office provided, the stones cool and faintly luminous in the morning light. Clerk Fang counted them again, produced three documents, had Lin Yushu sign each in the relevant places, stamped all three with the city affairs office seal, and handed one copy across the counter.
"The formation inspection is scheduled for three days hence," he said. "Standard practice for new registrations in Tianping. Nothing to worry about unless there is something to worry about." He said this the way people say things they have said several hundred times. "Congratulations on your property."
Lin Yushu folded the document, put it in his inner pocket beside the parchment, and walked back to Millstone Lane with a key.
· · ·
He spent the morning cleaning. He had bought a broom and a bucket and a rag from a stall on the way, and he worked through each floor from top to bottom, sweeping out dead insects and old dust and the accumulated residue of someone else's years here. The work was straightforward and required no thinking, which suited the particular quality of his mood. Eight hundred and eighty stones for the shop, eighty for the pouch, a few copper for the cleaning things. He had roughly one thousand and forty stones remaining. He had a building with a warped shutter and a cracked plaster facade and no stock and no customers and no plan beyond what a piece of old parchment had told him.
He had also, it occurred to him somewhere between the second floor and the ground floor, spent his entire life to this point being the person with less. Less talent, less resources, less progress, less standing. The family with the least in a village that was itself not much. And now he owned a building. Three floors of dark timber and pale plaster on the corner of Millstone Lane in a town he had arrived in yesterday evening.
He sat down in the chair behind the counter when the cleaning was done. Outside, the street moved past the open shutter with complete indifference. He was a young man sitting in an empty shop. There was nothing yet to distinguish this from any other empty shop in Tianping.
He thought about his father's hands on the porcelain spoon. About Xiaomei's jacket with the patched elbow. About his mother walking him to the edge of the village and straightening a collar that did not need straightening.
He would send money home at the end of the week, once he understood the town's exchange rates well enough not to lose on the conversion. He would write a letter. He would tell them he had a building.
He sat in the chair and looked at his empty shop and felt, underneath the tiredness and the uncertainty, something that was not quite pride and not quite fear but lived in the same neighbourhood as both.
· · ·
He closed the shutter at midday, bolted the door, and sat back down in the chair.
The ring warmed on his finger.
It was not subtle, not a suggestion. A definite heat, and then a pull, as though the space around him had decided to rearrange itself, and then the shop was gone and he was somewhere else entirely.
A cave. Low-ceilinged, rough-walled, lit by no source he could identify but lit nonetheless, a faint ambient light that seemed to come from the stone itself. Behind him, the same blank wall he had woken facing. In front of him, a single opening in the rock, roughly arched, wide enough to walk through without turning sideways.
He stood very still for a moment, taking inventory of himself. He was whole. He had his belt knife. He could feel the ring on his finger, warm still. The air in the cave was clean and cool with a faint mineral edge, and somewhere through the opening ahead came the smell of soil and something green.
He walked toward the opening.
· · ·
What was on the other side was not another cave.
It was a space of indeterminate size, the ceiling high enough to be invisible, the ground underfoot packed earth softening toward something grassier further out. The ambient light was stronger here, directionless, like overcast sky without the sky. Low shrubs grew in patches along the near wall, and he could see the dark shapes of ore deposits protruding from the rock face at intervals, and further out, half-obscured by the shrubline, something moved.
He stopped.
The thing moving was rat-shaped and roughly twice the size of any rat he had seen. It was grey-furred, thickset, its snout working at something on the ground with focused attention. Spirit beast. The thought arrived clearly, and with it a second thought: he had never fought one.
The rat's head came up. It turned and looked at him, then made a short sharp sound and charged.
He had time to draw the belt knife and not much else.
The rat was fast, faster than it looked, but it ran in a straight line and he had two years of throwing practice and the instinct to move sideways rather than back. He stepped left, felt it clip his right shin hard enough to numb the leg briefly, and brought the knife down across the back of its neck as it passed. The blade caught something vital. The rat thrashed once, twice, and was still.
He stood over it breathing harder than the fight warranted. His shin throbbed. He looked at the rat on the ground, at the knife in his hand, and then at the space around him, checking for others. Nothing moved.
Then the rat dissolved.
Not slowly, not dramatically. It simply came apart, the body losing coherence from the edges inward, and where it had lain, three things remained. A piece of hide, grey and surprisingly dense, the size of his palm. Two curved teeth, yellowed, harder than they looked. And three small claws, dark and sharp, still faintly warm.
He crouched and picked up the hide first. It was thick, close-grained, the kind of leather that would hold a formation inscription without cracking. Low grade talisman material, he thought, though he had never made a talisman. The teeth and claws were weapon materials, clearly, the stuff that went into basic qi refining blades and arrowheads when refined properly.
He put all three away and straightened up.
· · ·
He spent the next hour exploring the near area carefully, moving in widening circles from the cave entrance and keeping his knife out. No other beasts appeared, though he found tracks that suggested the rat was not entirely alone in this space.
The shrubs along the near wall were spirit herbs, common grade. Irongrass, used in qi-stabilising tinctures. Dustmoss, which dried to a powder that eased meridian ache. Pale rootweed, essential as a catalyst in low grade elixir refinement. Common, all of it, but everything had a buyer.
He harvested what he could carry comfortably and stored it away.
The ore deposits were ironstone and copper ore, standard low grade refinement materials. He chipped loose what he could and stored it away.
When he had covered the accessible ground he went back to the cave entrance and sat down against the wall and looked at the space around him. A dungeon, or something like one. Beasts that dropped materials when killed. Herbs growing wild. Ore in the walls. Everything here had a use and everything here had a buyer, if you knew where to sell it.
The ring warmed again, brief and definite, and the cave and the space beyond it folded away, and he was back in his chair behind the counter of his shop on Millstone Lane, the afternoon light coming through the gaps in the shutter in thin bright lines, his shin still throbbing, and the ring's spatial pocket full of things that had not existed in his possession an hour ago.
He sat quietly for a moment.
Then he reached into the ring and took out the rat hide and held it in the light, turning it over in his hands, thinking about what it was worth and who in this town would pay for it and what story he would tell about where it came from.
He had a shop. He had stock. He had no sign above the door yet and no name for the business and no customers.
Tomorrow, he thought. One thing at a time.