Chapter 151 — The Price of a Piece of Ore

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 151 — The Price of a Piece of Ore

Most of Li Fan's days settled quickly into a pattern that suited him precisely — mornings inside the courtyard, working through formation theory and the artifact-refining manuals he'd carried out of Crow's Throat, afternoons spent gathering whatever materials that morning's study had shown him he still needed.

Talisman paper. Spirit ink. Talisman pens with bristles fine enough to draw a stable line at a scale most mortal calligraphers would never attempt. Low-grade spiritual metals for the artifact work he'd only begun to properly understand. Medicinal ingredients, more out of old habit than present need. He bought all of it in small, unremarkable quantities, spread across a dozen different stalls rather than concentrated at any single merchant's counter, the same instinct that had once kept him from spending his spirit stones too visibly in a mortal river town.

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One afternoon, ten days into this new routine, he visited a material market on the inner district's northern edge looking for a specific piece of spiritual ore — a dense, faintly blue-veined stone the artifact manual named as essential for a particular class of stabilizing component, and rare enough that he'd already checked three other stalls without finding a piece of suitable quality. He found what he needed at the fourth. The merchant, an older man with a jeweler's loupe permanently tucked into his breast pocket, produced the ore from a locked case at Li Fan's request and set it on the counter between them. Li Fan examined it the way he examined everything — turning it slowly in the light, checking the veining for consistency, testing its weight against what a stone of that size should properly carry. The purity satisfied him. He negotiated the price in the same unhurried, ordinary way he negotiated everything, settled on a fair figure, and paid.

He was reaching to fold it into a cloth wrap when another cultivator arrived at the stall behind him.

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The newcomer wore robes of a quality that marked him immediately as someone with real standing — dark green silk, subtly embroidered along the collar, the kind of garment that cost more than most of the stalls in this market turned over in a season. He carried himself with the easy, unhurried confidence of a man who had never once needed to hurry for anyone, and the merchant behind the counter straightened visibly the moment he recognized him. "Ah — Master Peng," the merchant said, a note of genuine deference entering his voice that hadn't been there for Li Fan's own transaction moments earlier. The man — Peng, evidently an established artifact refiner by the quality of his robes and the merchant's tone — glanced past Li Fan toward the ore still sitting on the counter, and his gaze sharpened with immediate, obvious interest. "That's exactly the grade I need," Peng said, addressing the merchant rather than Li Fan directly, as though Li Fan's own claim to the stone barely registered as an obstacle worth acknowledging.

The merchant's discomfort showed plainly on his face. "Master Peng, this gentleman has already—" "I understand," Peng said, and turned, finally, to look at Li Fan directly — a brief, assessing glance that took in his plain traveling clothes, his unremarkable bearing, and arrived, visibly, at a conclusion. "You've no particular need for this piece specifically, I'd imagine. There's more where it came from, for a formation master." It wasn't quite a threat. It didn't need to be. His cultivation pressed faintly against the air between them even at rest, unhurried and enormous compared to the modest presence Li Fan allowed himself to project, and the meaning sat plainly beneath the polite phrasing regardless: give me the stone.

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Li Fan looked at the man. Then at the ore, still sitting where he'd left it on the counter, purchased fairly, owed to no one. He could have refused. He could have pointed out, accurately, that the stone was already his, paid for in full, the transaction complete before Peng had ever arrived. He could have let his own cultivation answer the pressure Peng's presence exerted, and watched the man's easy confidence falter once he understood exactly what he was standing next to. None of those responses served him. A formation master newly registered in this city, still unknown, still building the shape of the life he intended to live here, had nothing to gain from making an enemy of an established artifact refiner over a single piece of ore — and everything to gain from being forgotten by him as quickly as possible.

He picked the stone up, and held it out. "Since Senior needs it," Li Fan said, "please, take it."

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The merchant's eyebrows rose slightly, clearly not expecting the exchange to resolve quite so easily. Peng himself paused for half a breath, something like mild surprise crossing his face before he accepted the stone with an easy nod, already turning his attention back to the merchant to discuss terms. "Sensible," Peng said, not quite to Li Fan, not quite to the merchant either — the kind of comment a man makes when he's already moved past a moment he considers settled.

Li Fan asked for his spirit stones back. The merchant returned them without argument, apologetic in a way that suggested this wasn't the first time he'd watched a transaction get quietly overwritten by someone with more standing than the original buyer, and Li Fan accepted the refund with the same even, unbothered manner he'd shown throughout — no complaint, no lingering, no visible resentment at all. He left the stall and did not look back.

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He gave the incident no further thought that afternoon, continuing his search for the ore at two more stalls before finally locating a comparable piece from a merchant on the market's far side, purchased without incident this time. By evening, sitting in his own courtyard with the new stone unwrapped on his workbench, he had already turned his attention fully back to the artifact manual's next section. He did not know, and would not learn for some time, that someone had watched the exchange from a neighboring stall — a spice merchant's assistant with nothing better to do that hour than observe, and a habit of repeating anything mildly interesting to whoever happened to be nearby that evening. By the time the story reached the third or fourth telling, passed between stallholders closing up for the night and cultivators drifting home from a long day in the markets, it had already begun to change shape — not dramatically, not yet, but enough that the plain facts of a simple transaction interrupted by a more powerful man had started acquiring the particular polish that gossip always gave to anything worth repeating. A formation master had bought something first. An artifact refiner wanted it. The formation master surrendered it immediately, without complaint, without argument, entirely unwilling to cause the slightest trouble over a piece of ore. Li Fan, unaware that anyone beyond the merchant's own stall had noticed the exchange at all, had unknowingly taken the first small step toward building exactly the reputation he would eventually come to value more than almost anything else he owned.