Chapter 666: Buying Stones, Hunting Ghosts

Chapter 666: Buying Stones, Hunting Ghosts

The journey took eleven days, and almost nothing happened.

They travelled openly — Palace transport to the coast, then the northern road with an authorisation that opened every waystation without a question. Two months ago Leon had come the other way with a temporary jade and a merchant’s borrowed clothes. Now a garrison captain recognised the household mark on Vyra’s token and had their horses changed before she finished asking.

Leon spent the safe nights inside the dimensional world and did not gain a thing, which he had expected.

Early Qi Refinement held perfectly. The layer did exactly what he had built it to do, but his early estimates suggested Mid Qi Refinement would demand at least as much energy, and the seven cores were dark.

He spent those nights revising the purchase list instead. Every session taught him something about what the Scripture actually ate: not raw quantity, but clean quantity. A hundred low-grade fire stones from four different sources cost him more effort to strip than forty from one.

"Single-source lots," he told Vyra on the ninth night. "Even at a worse price. Add it to the list."

"Noted, Young Master." She was already writing. "It’ll cost about a fifth more and I’d rather pay it than have you spend a week scrubbing four strangers’ imprints out of the same crate."

Moonfall in the rain looked exactly as it had.

The walls, the lantern-lit ore lift over the northern quarter, the caravan queue at the eastern gate—Leon remembered all of it. He had once stood outside that gate as an unregistered stranger while an officer dismissed his story about a collapsed inheritance realm.

Six of them went through it this time without stopping. The gate officer took one look at Qingyue’s collar and the household tokens and waved the whole party past a queue half a kilometre long.

"That," said Ira, "is going to be very easy to get used to."

The merchants adjusted faster than the walls did.

Two months ago an alchemist had looked at Leon and asked which house he came from, and told him that everything above the counter had a buyer before it was made. This time three separate senior merchants sent invitations to their private rooms before the household had unpacked.

Vyra ran all of it and enjoyed herself enormously.

"Eleven percent," she told a spirit-stone factor on the second morning, in a tone of mild surprise. "You quoted the Palace’s purchasing office eight last quarter. I have the reconciliation." A pause. "I’d like eight."

She got eight and a half and considered it a defeat.

Each of them had a real list. Seraphine wanted lightning and light materials with their native charge intact and rejected four artificially treated lots. Ira returned from the fire markets complaining that most fire materials merely burned. "I don’t need it to burn. I need it to survive me." Vyra chose slow, dense materials suited to sustaining a formation rather than powering a single strike.

Loriel spent the longest and bought the least, because everything she wanted had to survive being moved into soil that came from another world.

Leon’s own list was the strangest, and he never handed it over in person. It went to merchants in Vyra’s writing: balanced quantities across nine categories, single-source lots, unimprinted stock preferred, prices agreed for repeat supply.

Nobody in Moonfall learned that the Palace Mistress’s disciple had nine affinities. They learned that his household had an unusually broad shopping list and paid on time.

They went to the Shen estate on the third evening.

Shen Baoyuan met them in the front courtyard and did not know what to do with his hands. He looked less strained than he had two months earlier, which Leon took as a good sign for both the man and his household.

"Senior Leon," he said, and then stopped, because the last time he had said anything to Leon it had been in a garden full of bodies.

"Master Shen."

"I have — the guest wing is still yours. I said it and I meant it, though I confess I did not expect—" He gestured helplessly at Qingyue, at four registered attendants, at the general shape of what had walked through his gate.

"Father," said Yanning, arriving at a fast walk with a ledger still in her hand, "you’re standing in the rain. All of you, inside."

She had not changed. Within four minutes, she had six people, their horses, and their cases sorted and food on its way. Then she stopped in the doorway to look at Leon properly.

"Direct disciple."

"Apparently."

"We heard in the second week. My father cried, which I’m telling you because he’ll deny it." She held his eyes a moment. "You look better than the last time you left this house."

"I was bleeding the last time I left this house."

"You were. Come in."

Only Shen Yuanhe was told the rest, and only what was necessary.

The old ancestor heard Qingyue’s request without asking about Ashen Rain Basin. He retrieved the preserved ward-breaker from beneath the counting house, along with the estate’s full record of how the raiders had crossed the outer array.

"Take it," he said. "Take the rubbings, take the formation logs, take whatever you need. I have wanted somebody to ask me for these for two months."

Comparing the two sets of evidence took Seraphine and Vyra an evening and produced the first genuinely new thing.

"They’re built for different jobs by the same hand," Seraphine said, with the ward-breaker and a spike rubbing side by side. "This one is delicate. It’s meant to put an active array to sleep without the array noticing — the cutting is shallow and it’s all about the timing of the entry. The spikes are the opposite. They’re built to sever a major channel and then sit there so the ends can’t find each other again."

"Which tells us the maker isn’t a specialist in one thing," said Vyra. "It tells us he’s competent enough to build to a brief. Somebody comes to him with a target and a requirement and he makes the tool for it." She set the rubbing down. "That’s not a criminal with a forge. That’s a supplier with clients."

The hidden trade was nothing like Ira had hoped.

There was no market. A legitimate repair shop accepted commissions absent from its books. A formation-components merchant kept a clean front room and referred certain customers upstairs. Four shell companies had held one warehouse lease for eleven years without filing a shipping manifest.

Qingyue got them through doors. She did not get them answers, and she knew it.

"Watch," she said quietly, after the second interview. "That man told me the truth about three things and stopped the moment the answers got useful. He isn’t protecting anyone. He’s frightened of me and frightened of somebody else, and I’m the one standing in front of him."

"Then we stop using you as the door, Young Master’s leave permitting," said Vyra. "I’d rather find the alloy in a customs book than in a man’s face."

So they changed methods.

Vyra traced the stabilising additive through customs reconciliations and bulk purchase records over four days, and found three importers who could legally have handled it and one who had received four consignments and sold on three.

Qingyue named the intermediaries who could move the fourth without a manifest.

Seraphine walked eleven workshops and eliminated eight of them on equipment alone. "The cutting on those spikes needs a stabilised bench and a fine-draw press. Four shops in this city have both. Three of them do Palace-certified work and would be insane to risk it."

And on the sixth day, a components merchant in the eastern industrial ward went pale before anyone asked him anything.

Loriel noticed it first. "Young Master, his pulse jumped when you said the word commission," she murmured. "Before you said formation-breaker. He’s already been warned."

Leon narrowed the questions after that and stopped asking about tools at all. He asked about deliveries, and schedules, and who had cancelled recently.

The answer, when it came, arrived from three directions at once and pointed at the same place: an old workshop behind a legitimate metal-repair business in the fourth industrial ward, owned through four false names, receiving the rare alloy on a standing quarterly order.

The last contact told them the rest without being asked, because he wanted them to leave.

"They stopped taking messages this morning," he said. "Shutters down. Furnace cold since before dawn. I sent a runner about a bill and nobody answered the door."

Leon stood in the rain outside that shop for a moment, doing arithmetic he did not like.

Seven men have been missing their check-in for over three weeks.

"Seraphine," he said. "We approach it as a hostile scene. Nobody touches a door until I’ve looked at it."