Chapter 33: A False Scholar Sleeps in the Crow’s Own Inn, a Guild Seal Opens the Doors of the Void-Star Pavilion, and the Slum Ring Hears the Price of Mercy

The black jade token lay on the cellar’s stone altar, and Adam looked at it for a long time.

The thread of soul-sense wound around it was thin and cold, and it hummed faintly in the silence, like a note held at the edge of hearing. Somewhere in the Inner Noble Ring, an old man could feel exactly where it was.

’If I carry it, the Ancestor knows where I sleep, where I eat, and when I’m not at home,’ Adam thought. ’If I destroy it, he knows I’m hiding something.’

He turned and looked at the cellar’s far corner.

A tall figure sat against the wall in a pitch-black robe and a silver mask, its hands folded in its lap. It had not moved since the night he carried it through the Boundary Portal in a storage pouch. It did not breathe.

"Avatar Zero," Adam said.

The figure’s head came up.

That evening, a scholar in a gray cloak and a deep hood stepped out of Ling’s Antiquities & Scraps and walked toward the Dragon-Vein Inn, a black jade token swinging from his belt. He walked with a slight stoop. When he passed the Iron-Tiger Gang’s tea house, he nodded politely to Hu Bao, who sneered back.

Beneath the cloak, a soul-thread puppet moved at a fraction of Adam’s strength, and with exactly none of his Qi.

It rented a small room at the Dragon-Vein Inn, near the Inner Noble Ring’s wall, and lay down on the narrow bed with the token on the table beside it. Every dawn, Adam would collect the token on his way to the shop and carry it through his day: the Guild’s library, a noodle shop, the Pavilion’s counter. Every night, it would go back to the inn room, and the puppet would lie there until morning. Anyone watching through the thread or through the eyes of a Gilded-Crow spy would see a nervous young scholar from the Southern Continent who slept at an inn and never went anywhere suspicious.

In the cellar, Adam sat down at the furnace and began to work.

Three days later, a green-and-gold envelope arrived at the shop’s back door. It was sealed with Su Lian’s own mark.

The Council has voted. The Champion’s seal grants you the right to sell any pill in the Imperial City without a patron or a license fee. The Heir’s Seal remains unclaimed. They are afraid to touch it. Come to the Hall. —S.L.

Adam read it standing up and burned it over the furnace’s flame.

The Guild’s registry office, when he reached it, was almost empty. Su Lian waited behind the desk with a ledger the size of a small tombstone and a smile that did not entirely hide how tired she was.

"Name of business?"

"Void-Star Pavilion," Adam said. "Imperial City Branch."

Her brush paused. "That’s the name of the Southern Continent house that has been undercutting the Gilded-Crow in the shadow markets."

"It is."

"You are the Void-Star Pavilion?"

"I am," Adam said, "its Imperial City branch."

Su Lian looked at him for a long moment and began, very slowly, to laugh.

"Of course you are," she said. "Prices?"

He slid a jade slip across the desk. She read it, and her brows rose.

"Mid-Grade pills at seventy percent of the Guild’s price. High-Grade at sixty." She looked up. "Mister Han, at those prices, you’ll bankrupt every pill shop in the Outer Commercial District inside a month."

"I will not bankrupt them," Adam said. "I will correct them."

"Is there a difference?"

"Their prices are inflated by four. Mine aren’t. When customers see the gap, they’ll ask why. The honest ones will lower their prices to meet mine. The rest will fail." He tapped the slip. "And at sixty percent of what the Guild charges, I will still be making a margin the Guild has never seen."

Su Lian stamped the paper with the seal of the Imperial Alchemy Guild, hard enough to echo.

"Registered," she said. "God help the Gilded-Crow."

On the fourth day, the shop opened.

Adam had changed very little. The faded sign still read Ling’s Antiquities & Scraps. But beneath it, a new plank of black wood had been nailed up, and on it, in silver characters, a name: VOID-STAR PAVILION. Below it hung the Guild’s green-and-gold seal, small, plain, and unmistakable.

The first customer was a street sweeper with a baby on her hip.

She stood in the doorway and stared at the price list on the counter. Then she dug a handful of copper out of her sleeve and counted it twice, as if the numbers might change.

"A Blood-Replenishing Pill," she said hoarsely. "For my boy. The Guild shop wanted nine hundred. I’ve been saving since spring."

"Four hundred and fifty," Adam said, behind the counter in his gray cloak. "If the pill doesn’t work, I’ll refund you."

She stared at him as though he had spoken in a foreign language.

By noon, the line stretched around the block. Mercenaries, apprentice smiths, housemaids, a retired guard captain with a bad leg and a worse temper. They came in with their savings and left with pills in small jade vials, whispering to one another about the price, and the whispering ran down the alley and out into the street like water finding a crack.

At midday, Hu Bao arrived.

He pushed through the crowd with his iron-studded fists at his sides and his two men behind him, and the line parted before him like a sea.

"Scholar," he said, grinning. "Business is good. Your fee is eighty a month, but a shop that does this well pays more. Say, four hundred."

"Eighty is what’s registered," Adam said mildly.

"I said four hundred."

A murmur ran through the line. An old woman near the counter, with a basket on her arm, said clearly, "Brother Bao, he healed my granddaughter’s fever for half the Guild’s price."

Hu Bao’s eyes flicked to her, and to the others watching. A hundred faces turned toward him. Not one of them looked afraid, and not one looked away.

He swallowed.

"Eighty," he said at last, with a bad grin, and took the coins.

When he had gone, the line closed behind him in silence, and then, quite suddenly, somebody started to clap.

Adam did not smile. He wrote a line in his ledger with a small, neat hand.

Hu Bao. Four hundred demanded. Eighty paid. Crowd observed.

By sundown the shelves were bare. Adam counted ninety-four pills sold and fifty-two thousand stones in the till. Against it stood a cost of herbs that came to just under three thousand.

He closed the shutters and was reaching for the bolt when a tall, spare man in a gray robe stepped through the door without knocking.

He had a pale face, a ledger under his arm, and a gold-ringed crow pin on his collar. His eyes went over the empty shelves, the cash box, and the open ledger in one precise glance, like an accountant reading a bill.

"Scholar Han," he said, with a small, cool bow. "I am Mei, Treasurer of the Gilded-Crow Chamber of Commerce. I have come to congratulate you."

"You are kind."

"Not at all. I am curious." The Treasurer set a sealed envelope on the counter. "The Chamber is hosting a small gathering at the Heavenly Exchange Hall tomorrow. A discussion of the merchant houses of this city, their credit and their futures. We would be honored by your presence."

He bowed again and left, and the door closed behind him.

Adam looked at the envelope.

’A gathering of merchant houses,’ he thought. ’Credit, and futures.’

He turned it over in his fingers, and a slow, quiet smile touched his lips.

’Now this,’ he thought, ’is a battlefield I know.’