Li Yuguo wiped the blood off his mouth with the back of his good hand.
It smeared. He looked at the red streak across his knuckles, and then at the headless body in the dust, and then at the King of Thieves standing calmly over it with his sword already sheathed, as if he had just finished swatting a fly. The noon sun beat down on all of it. Somewhere off in the waste ground, one of the riderless horses whinnied.
For a moment, the anger was so hot in him that he could not speak.
Li Yutang. That smiling, handsome, brotherly face in the courtyard. Sooner or later, I'll have her. And the very same night, he had ridden out of the city to buy his younger brother's death for five hundred taels.
He wanted to say yes. He wanted, very badly, to walk straight back to the mansion with Guan Yunfan at his side and drag Li Yutang out into the street and—
"No," he said.
It came out hoarse. He cleared his throat and said it again.
"No. Not now." He shook his head, and drops of the dead man's blood flew off his chin. "We don't have any evidence against Li Yutang. The only witness just lost his head. And Li Yutang isn't a horse thief on a back road—he's an Advanced Martial Teacher, and he's surrounded by the garrison every hour of the day. It wouldn't be easy to kill him." His fists clenched, and the torn one throbbed. "And if we try, and we fail? Then I'm the one who becomes the target of all Nalan City. The useless King of Soft Rice, murdering the city's beloved hero out of jealousy. My bad name would become real. I'd never be able to wash it off."
He looked up at Guan Yunfan.
"So not yet," he said. "But one day."
The King of Thieves regarded him in silence for a long moment, his one eye unreadable.
Then he nodded slowly.
"As expected of the benefactor," he said. "Your consideration is deeper than mine." He paused. "This time, I have already settled my family. My wife has her medicine. My children are with her people in the hills, safe." And then, without any warning, the big scarred man dropped down onto one knee in the bloody dust and clasped his fists before his chest. "I, Guan Yunfan, am willing to follow the benefactor. I swear to accompany him unto death!"
Li Yuguo blinked down at him.
Unto death. In the original story, Guan Yunfan had sworn exactly this oath to Ye Qiong—word for word—and kept it to the last chapter.
He reached down with his good hand and hauled the big man to his feet.
"Get up, get up. If you're going to follow me," he said, "then let's go. Because right now, our first priority is to make money."
Guan Yunfan's one eye went blank. "…Huh?"
"Look around you."
Li Yuguo spread his bloody hands at the high mud-brick walls, the dead tree, the dust, the empty city beyond.
"The people of Nalan City are withered. Everyone is struggling. Half the market is beggars. If we want to make this city prosperous—really prosperous—then robbing the rich and giving to the poor isn't going to work. It's too small. So what we're going to do is squeeze as much money as possible out of the merchants who pass through here." He held up a finger. "Reasonably. Using the most reasonable methods. Honest trade. And then we use that money to make up for everything Nalan City is missing, so the city can grow."
Guan Yunfan stared at him.
Then his face lit up as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud.
"As expected of the benefactor!" he cried. "Truly, you are thoughtful beyond all men! I, the so-called King of Thieves, have been confused my whole life! Robbing the rich and helping the poor, robbing the rich and helping the poor—but there are so many people in this world! Today I help one family, tomorrow I miss ten others! It is a hundred times less comprehensive than what the benefactor has just laid out!" He thumped his chest with one fist. "The benefactor is truly a man come down from heaven to walk the earth! You will surely create an unparalleled feat and become a pillar of the kingdom! From today onwards, I, who was nothing but a thief, am willing to be driven by you like an ox! I will help you bring glory to your ancestors and honor to your house, and I will not hesitate to do anything at all!"
Li Yuguo opened his mouth. Closed it.
Then he burst out laughing.
"Hahaha! Bah, bah, bah!" He wiped his eyes with his sleeve, smearing blood. "I thought I was good at talking nonsense! I didn't expect to meet a real expert today! Brother, ease up, ease up!" He clapped Guan Yunfan on the shoulder, still laughing. "Tsk tsk! The accuracy of that flattery! The clarity of the angle! I've never seen anyone so shameless in my life!"
Guan Yunfan grinned broadly, entirely unembarrassed.
"Come, brother," said Li Yuguo. "Let's go and have a drink first. Then we'll discuss making money."
"All right! Brother, after you!"
They had walked a few paces when Li Yuguo looked up at the King of Thieves' weathered, scarred face, the gray already threading his cropped hair, and said, "It looks like you're a good deal older than I am, though…"
Guan Yunfan stopped dead.
"My elder brother is far more knowledgeable than I am," he said gravely, "so you are my elder brother. And if elder brother does not reject me—" his voice took on a tone of deep, solemn sincerity— "I would very much like to be my elder brother's godson. Father! Please accept your child's kowtow!"
And he rolled up his sleeves and started to drop to his knees in the dirt.
"Don't make trouble!" Li Yuguo yelped, grabbing his arm and hauling him back up. "Drink! Let's just go drink! Big brother is big brother. Call me whatever you like—just don't call me father!"
Two days passed.
He spent them mostly in the little guest room at the back of the mansion, with his split knuckles bound up in clean cloth, cultivating at night and buying goods for a market booth by day—a little at a time, because every time he lingered too long in Alimama he came away strangely tired, a heavy, hollow weariness in his limbs that he put down to the fight and chose not to think about.
Guan Yunfan, meanwhile, simply followed him. Everywhere. Like a large, scarred, silent shadow.
On the morning of the third day, Li Yuguo sat cross-legged on a straw mat behind a rented plank table in the market of Nalan City, and thought.
The table in front of him was covered with goods. He had chosen them very carefully. Paper packets of white sugar, fine as snow. Little jars of salt, pure and dry. Cloth bags of black pepper and red chili flakes, star anise and cinnamon bark and cloves, ground ginger, dried mushrooms. Simple things. Raw materials. The kind of thing any merchant might carry, if that merchant happened to have a very good supplier.
Behind him, leaning against a post with his arms folded and his sword on his back, stood Guan Yunfan.
That was the thing that made Li Yuguo's shoulders feel lighter, every time he glanced back. He had spent those two days watching the King of Thieves, and he knew now just how strong the man was. The horse thief leader, the one whose head had flown—that man had not been weak. He had been a Martial Teacher, the same rank Li Yuguo had just clawed his way up to. And Guan Yunfan had gone through his men like a scythe through wheat.
He had to be at the level of a Martial Soul. Perhaps even higher. Comparable, in fact, to Nalan Meng herself.
With a bodyguard like that standing at his back, Li Yuguo found it much easier to sit calmly behind his table and think.
"Brother Yuguo!"
The familiar voice jerked him out of his thoughts. He looked up, and found a familiar round pink face beaming down at him from between the stalls.
"So it's Brother Dacheng!" he laughed.
Shi Dacheng waddled over, his rings flashing and his belly swaying, his two guards trailing behind. He was smiling broadly—and then his eyes fell on the table, and the smile froze in place, and his mouth fell slowly open.
A thin thread of drool actually slid out of the corner of it.
"Where," the fat merchant breathed, staring at the white sugar, the pepper, the cinnamon, "where did you get so many things?"
Li Yuguo smiled. "This is sugar. That's salt. And these are all kinds of seasonings—"
"Wait." Shi Dacheng's head snapped up. His voice had dropped to a hiss. "This is salt?"
"Yes. Why—"
The merchant slapped both his fat hands down flat on the table, so hard that the sugar packets jumped. His face had gone from pink to the color of old tallow. "Smuggling private salt is a capital crime!" he whispered, leaning so close that Li Yuguo could smell the garlic on his breath. "Put it away. Put it away right now! I don't know where you're getting so many good things, brother, but listen to me—there are some things you can buy and sell openly, some things you can only sell quietly, and some things are completely banned! Private salt is one of them! Iron, too! Weapons, horses for the army—" He glanced over his shoulder, fast, his little eyes darting through the crowd. "If the wrong person sees this, they'll take your head off at the city gate!"
Li Yuguo's blood ran cold.
He had not expected the state's control over salt to be so strict. But when he thought about it carefully, it made perfect sense. In an ancient society, salt was very difficult to produce in quantity—and yet every human body needed it to live. A thing that everyone needed and few could make was a thing that made enormous profits. Of course the state ran it directly. Of course anyone selling it outside the state's control would lose their head.
He had written a whole world and forgotten that.
He swept the jars of salt off the table and into a sack under it so fast he nearly knocked them over.
"Thank you," he said, and clasped his fists to Shi Dacheng, and meant it. "Thank you, Brother Dacheng, for warning me. If someone with bad intentions had found out, I'd have been in serious trouble."
"Haha! No need, no need." The merchant's color began to return. He straightened up and rubbed his fat hands together, and his little eyes crinkled, and an expression spread across his round face that could only be described as wretched—greedy and sly and ingratiating all at once. "After all, as I said last time… we can all cooperate with each other, eh? Hehe…"
Not far away, in the shadow of a fruit stall, a young man with a narrow, mean, ratlike face had pulled his hood up over his head and was watching the whole thing.
He had seen the jars. He had seen the fat merchant's face go white. He had seen the King of Soft Rice sweep everything off the table in a panic.
A slow, nasty sneer curled his lip.
"So it was smuggled salt," he muttered to himself. "Hmph. Now I've got you red-handed. I'll report this to Lord Yutang right away. Let's see how long you can stay arrogant!"
He slipped away into the crowd and was gone.
At the booth, nobody had noticed him. The market was too noisy and too crowded, and Li Yuguo was busy doing business.
"By the way, Brother Dacheng," he said, gesturing at the sugar and the spices, "for everything other than the salt, you can just quote me a price and take the lot. And while we're at it—you're familiar with the other goods on this street, aren't you, brother?"
"What, are you looking to buy something special?" Shi Dacheng waved to his guards, and they began scooping up the sugar and spices and loading them into baskets with an eagerness that suggested their master had already decided he was getting a bargain. He named a price for the lot—fifteen hundred taels—and Li Yuguo, who had paid barely a tenth of that on Alimama, nodded gravely as if accepting a painful loss. The silver changed hands on the spot.
The reason he was only selling such simple ingredients was to protect his secret.
If he had pulled out a mobile phone, or a wristwatch, or a pair of sunglasses, it would have set off an enormous wave. People would have asked where they came from. People would have looked into it. And a man with a pile of impossible treasures and no explanation for them was a man who would very soon wake up with a knife at his throat. The tallest tree in the forest is the first one the wind breaks.
But raw materials? Sugar, spices, seasonings? At most, people would think that Li Yuguo had somehow gotten his hands on a special shipping channel from the south. A lucky connection. A clever deal. Nothing more.
"I want to buy some magic tools," Li Yuguo said. "After all, I'm a martial practitioner too, these days."
"That's easy!" Shi Dacheng thought for a moment, stroking his chins. "It just so happens there's a caravan heading to the capital that's resting here right now. They're carrying a few instruments—magic tools and the like. You can go and have a look." He beamed. "Better yet, I'll take you there myself. I know them well. For my sake, they'll definitely give you a discount."
"Good. Then let's do that, Dacheng." Li Yuguo rose from his mat. "But wait a minute, brother. First, I have something I want to give you."
He nodded to Guan Yunfan, and the King of Thieves followed him without a word to a small, empty reed hut at the back of the market—an abandoned storeroom, its door hanging off one hinge. Li Yuguo had the King of Thieves wait outside the door. Then he slipped inside alone, and in the dim, dusty, slatted light, he called up the panel and bought something he had been thinking about for two days.
Whistle—thok.
Thok. Thok. Thok.
Four boxes dropped out of nowhere onto the dirt floor. Not wooden ones this time; the larger orders, it seemed, came in cardboard, square and brown and neatly taped, exactly like the parcels that used to pile up outside his apartment door in his old life. They looked absurdly out of place in a reed hut in a cultivation world.
Sure enough, he thought, whatever I buy on this interface just appears out of thin air.
He and Guan Yunfan carried them back out to the booth, two each, and set them down at Shi Dacheng's feet.
The fat merchant looked at the strange brown boxes in bewilderment. Then Li Yuguo slit the tape on the first one with his thumbnail and folded back the flaps.
Shi Dacheng looked inside.
And dropped to his knees on the ground.
The box was full of outfits. Neatly folded, each one in its own clear wrapper, twenty of them packed tight. And not ordinary outfits. These were things that did not exist in the Haotian Kingdom—that could not have existed, because nobody here had ever imagined them. A waitress's uniform of glossy black satin with a skirt so short it would barely cover the curve of a woman's ass, a frilled white apron, a choker with a little bow. A sheer red qipao slit to the hip on both sides, so thin it was almost transparent. A bunny-girl suit of shining black latex with fishnet stockings and a fluffy white tail. A nurse's uniform two sizes too small. A schoolgirl's sailor top cropped high over the ribs. Lace. Leather. Mesh. Silk so fine it slid through the fingers like water. Every one of them made of a different material, every one of them designed for exactly one purpose: to make a woman's body impossible to look away from.
Shi Dacheng picked one up with trembling fingers. It was the black satin waitress uniform. He held it up against the sky and stared at the light shining through the lace edge of the tiny skirt, and his eyes filled with tears.
Li Yuguo knew exactly what he was seeing.
Shi Dacheng owned a great many bars on City Gate Avenue—Li Yuguo had remembered that in the tent. And a bar owner was always looking for a way to make his waitresses more alluring than the bar next door. More skin. More shape. More reason for a rich merchant to stay for one more jar of wine, and one more, and then go upstairs. And here, on his knees in the dust, he was holding a golden opportunity—something that would make his bars famous through the entire region. Something no one else could copy.
"This is a very rare outfit," Li Yuguo began carefully. "You know, this kind of thing—"
"Brother!" Shi Dacheng flung his arms around Li Yuguo's leg and clung to it. "No—not brother—grandpa! Grandfather! Please, you must sell these colored outfits to me! However much you want, I'll pay! I'm willing! I'm willing to pay anything!"
Li Yuguo looked down at the fat merchant hugging his shin in the middle of the market. Passersby were stopping to stare. Behind him, he heard Guan Yunfan make a very small choking noise.
He smiled awkwardly. "This…"
"I'll pay you the market price!" Shi Dacheng howled. "An outfit like this—each one is worth a thousand taels of silver! Four boxes, twenty in each box—that's eighty pieces! Eighty thousand taels!"
Li Yuguo went very still.
Eighty thousand taels.
On Alimama, each outfit had cost him ten taels.
A hundredfold. That's a hundredfold profit. His head swam. This isn't business. This is profiteering on a heavenly scale.
He forcibly made himself calm down. He gently pried Shi Dacheng's arms off his leg and helped the fat man back up onto his feet.
"Well," he said, as evenly as he could manage. "This is the most precious thing in Nalan City, and you should know how valuable it is better than I do. So I won't bargain with you." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "But you must keep the source secret for me."
"Of course! Of course! Brother Yuguo, you are my reborn parents! I'd be a fool to say a word! You can trust me—from now on, you and I are partners. Your only partner!" Shi Dacheng clasped his hands together and shook them at the sky. "I should have prayed to heaven years ago!"
Then his face fell a little. He rubbed the back of his thick neck.