27 | Collections

The Sallow Hand collected on the river road on Fridays.

They had done it that way for nine years, because for nine years there had been no reason to do it any other way.

They masked their collections and called it 'protection fees', saying the only reason they were the only major group around was because they kept the others down.

Nobody bought it, but nobody could do anything about it. And those who could either benefitted from their presence, or just didn't have a reason to.

Soren spent the first Friday watching.

He sat on a coil of rope on the wharf with his a make shift hood he made himself up and a sack he was not delivering, and by dark he had four collectors, two routes, and a pattern you could set a clock by.

<<Loraine: 3rd Stage Apprentice. 5th Stage. 5th Stage. And the one with the scar is 8th, which makes him Ost's replacement and then some.>>

How does a gang in a town of four thousand have four ranked men?

<<Loraine: ...>>

<<Loraine: Soren, I want you to understand something and I want you to actually hear it rather than nodding.>>

Go on.

<<Loraine: You reached 2nd Stage Apprentice in three days. That is not normal. That is not just talent. That is a Refined grade passive drawing ambient mana at eight times the natural rate, running while you sleep as well, in a body that a system repaired to a baseline beyond what it already actually had.>>

<<Loraine: A man from here who wants to reach 1st Stage Apprentice needs a method, and methods are Guild property. A copy of the worst legal cultivation method in the Solvane Ascendancy costs about forty crowns, which is four months of a carter's wages.>>

Soren nodded, digesting the information before asking her to continue.

<<Loraine: Then he needs somewhere mana-dense to sit, and the mana-dense places belong to somebody. And as if all that isn't enough, because their talent for absorption, which is separate from technique because even a good technique won't always guarantee cultivation speed, is terrible, he needs eight to ten years just to get where you started.>>

Ten years to Apprentice?

<<Loraine: To 1st Stage. The warrior path is worse, because a warrior tempers his body and a tempered body must be fed. Meat every day. Bone broth. Medicine when the marrow splits. Marrek is 3rd Stage and he is thirty one years old and he has been at it since he was fifteen.>>

<<Loraine: Corrin Bly is 8th Stage Apprentice and he is forty. He has spent twenty five years and every crown he has ever earned getting to the place you will reach in six weeks by accident.>>

Soren sat on the rope for a while.

So when I walk up to one of them and they laugh at me.

<<Loraine: They are laughing at a nineteen year old slave who could not possibly have cultivated, in a world where cultivation costs a life. They are not being stupid. They are being correct about everything except you.>>

<<Loraine: To them, if they could sense anything from you, they'd rather believe you had an item on you than believe their decade or more of work was pointless.>>

And Brannick's 1st Stage Adept.

<<Loraine: Brannick Sallow is the strongest man in a town of four thousand people and has been for nine years, and it took him until he was forty six to get there, and he is very aware that it is as far as he goes. That is why he is bad-tempered. Adept is where ninety nine men in a hundred stop forever.>>

And I'm going to be Adept in a month.

<<Loraine: Yes.>>

<<Loraine: And if a single person in Greyfen understood that, they would stop trying to kill you and start trying to buy you, and the price would be extraordinary.>>

Well then, I guess I better start my collections now then. Soren replied, his gaze getting colder by the thought.

...

He took Marrek on the second Friday.

It was not a fight. Fights were for people with a reputation to keep.

Marrek was 3rd Stage Apprentice walking a towpath at dusk with a bag of other people's money and he never saw the man come out of the reeds.

Soren took his blade off him afterward, because he did not have one, and because the Refined knife in system storage was the only weapon he owned and he had been thinking about it a great deal.

<<Loraine: You are not going to use it.>>

Not yet.

<<Loraine: Explain.>>

Because it comes out of nowhere. Soren wiped Marrek's cleaver on the grass.

Nobody in this world has ever seen an object appear in a man's hand. That's worth exactly one surprise and I'm not spending it on somebody at 3rd Stage.

<<Loraine: ...>>

<<Loraine: I have four projections and I am adjusting all of them.>>

<<AWARD: 1 EPIC TICKET, 1 RARE, 300 FP.>>

<<Lilith: +22 LP.>>

Twenty two.

<<Lilith: He was 3rd Stage. Ost was 7th. It scales badly downward, sweetheart.>>

<<Loraine: The small ones are worth tickets. They are not worth points. Those are different problems and you keep trying to solve both with the same knife.>>

...

Dell and Ounce came together on the third Friday, which was significantly harder, and which he only survived because both of them spent four seconds deciding which of them was going to collect the bounty on the unranked slave standing in the road.

Four seconds was two Piercing Palms and a cleaver.

He got a broken finger and a cut across the ribs that took nine days to stop leaking, and Loraine talked him through stitching it himself behind the feed store with the Refined needle he had pulled in his first week and never once used.

<<AWARD: 2 EPIC TICKETS, 3 RARE, 2 UNCOMMON, 700 FP.>>

<<Lilith: +71 LP.>>

<<Loraine: You are getting hurt, which is not the same as getting worse, but it is heading there. You have no body path, no weapon art, and no ability to read a fight before it arrives. You are a mage with a good palm strike and every one of these has worked because the other man underestimated you.>>

And when one doesn't?

<<Loraine: Then you find out what an 8th Stage Apprentice Warrior does to a 6th Stage Apprentice Mage who has never blocked anything in his life.>>

...

By the fourth week Greyfen had a story in it.

Nobody had a face. What Greyfen had was three collectors gone in a month, a river road nobody walked after dark, and a rumour that got worse every time it was repeated, which was the entire reason Soren had let it start.

Reia told it to him herself, across the counter, with his hood down and one cup in front of him.

"They say he's Ordwyn. Deserter, come over the border and gone feral." She wiped the table. "Old Pell says he's eight foot."

"Does he."

"Mm. And Brannick's put fifteen crowns on it, which is more than he put on you, and I thought that'd upset you."

"Bit."

"There it is." She flicked the cloth at him. "Don't make it strange."

"I would never."

<<Lilith: You are having so much fun.>>

I'm really not.

<<Lilith: Soren, I live in your head.>>