~ The Haul
The three women came in when the air stopped smelling entirely of iron.
Sun Mei walked the rows of the dead with a flat professional face and stripped artifact pouches with quick hands, and her mouth said nothing but her eyes did a tally and her eyes were impressed. Nineteen artifacts. Two ranked. Gao Peng's blade alone, a spirit edge with a storm-temper line down the center, was worth more than the Wei family's armory.
Hua stood in the entrance a long moment, looking at twelve dead men who had followed greed into a dark cave because a crying woman told them to, and something cold settled in her stomach and made itself at home. She recognized it, later, as the understanding that she was now the kind of person who knew exactly how this worked, because she had been on the other side of the wall once, and the wall had never protected anyone.
Yan Shu read the room through her skin, all of it, every cooling body, and said nothing at all.
