Chapter 10 : Becoming Mercenary
Yunhe unfolded before Li Tianlan like a storybook come alive.
The morning sunlight gilded every rooftop, and the town's main street was a river of motion — carts creaked, bells sang, hawkers cried wares, and the air was thick with a thousand scents: roasting meat, steaming buns, frying dough, incense from a small shrine, the sweet-sour tang of candied hawthorn skewers. Tianlan had thought the forest's sounds were full of life; here, life shouted itself into being.
He wandered without plan, each turn revealing something new. A vendor piled steaming baozi high in a lacquered basket; an old woman offered candied haw; a young apprentice rolled sugared rice cakes at a stall that smelled of toasted sesame. He stopped at each stall like a child at a fair, buying the small things that a long road had taught him to cherish — two warm buns, a stick of candied haw, a handful of sugared peanuts, and a pale green rice cake that dissolved sweetly on his tongue. He tasted the town in bites and coins, careful not to spend everything Mingyue had left him. There was a kind of giddy, naive joy in it: simple sweetness after months of dried rations and campfires.
Whenever he approached a stall, he kept his bag snug against his chest. Mingyue's words echoed in him — no beasts in town; they'll capture and kill them. The little fox, Fierry, rested inside the bag, tucked beneath his cloak. Every so often he loosened the drawstring and peered in; Fierry's amber eyes blinked, the small muzzle twitching as if savoring the scent of street food that drifted through the cloth. When a child came running by with a sugar sculpture, Fierry's ears pricked; Tianlan pinched the fox's ear lightly and whispered, "Not now." The fox's tail thumped softly, a damped metronome.
He moved past the market proper into poorer lanes and wealthier alleys, curious about everything — the blacksmith's hammering echoing like a heartbeat, the pottery stall where glazes shone like a crowd of tiny lakes, the apothecary crowded with jars of herbs labeled in neat, old calligraphy. He bought a cheap but sturdy new shirt and a pair of replacement sandals, paying the cobbler half in copper and half in gratitude for his patience. He bought a thin woolen blanket to keep out the chill that crept in at night, and a cheap reed mat to sleep on when inns were full or unaffordable.
He tried, almost instinctively, to ask people about Cloudveil Village, about any rumor of destruction, about anyone fleeing with familiar names. He earsplit the market's hum, overhearing gossip — a quarrel over debt, a bet on a cockfight, a complaint about taxes — but no one knew of the small mountain village he had left. A young porter shrugged and said he'd never heard of such a place; an elderly tea-shop owner blinked and told him he sold tea for sixty years and had seen many things, but not every remote hamlet came to his kettle. The more he asked, the more the answer turned thin: no news. The absence of news pressed at him like a bruise.
Disappointment warmed into a dull ache as he walked. The town was full of faces, and none belonged to the sisters he had lost. He kept walking until the sun tipped and began to cast long lanes of gold and shadow. At the inn where he paused for a bowl of mutton porridge — a plain but nourishing meal — he watched families eat together, merchants sign deals, a troupe of street performers train in a back courtyard. He felt small and naked in the crowd, a single twig in a bustling fire. But he also felt something else: a small ember of resolve that would not be snuffed by absence.
That night, after paying the innkeeper the smallest room he could find — a single pallet in a narrow chamber that smelled faintly of old smoke and last week's rain — Tianlan drew Fierry out by the light of the lantern. The little fox blinked in the lamp's glow, her fur catching it in tiny, deliberate sparks. He set her on his knee and spoke to her as if she were more than she seemed.
"You saw the town. Do you think I can find my sisters?" he murmured, more to empty air than to the fox. He told Fierry about the market, about the apothecary's jars, about the sound of a woman bargaining fiercely for silk. He imagined telling Mingyue every detail, and the memory of her calm face steadied him.
Fierry listened with the patient silence of one who has watched empires grow and fall from the edge of the world. She nudged a bun crumb from his sleeve and looked up with black, unreadable eyes. Tianlan laughed softly and tucked her back into the bag. "You're ordinary today," he said fondly. "Just my ordinary fox." He drifted to sleep on the thin mat with the lantern guttering on the table, dreams full of streets he would walk a thousand times more.
He rose with the dawn and moved through the town like a man on a mission. He visited every shop in the lower quarter and asked for work — sweeping, carrying, kitchen help, laundry. The answers came in polite shakes of the head or, worse, in indifferent looks. "We do not need another hand today," a bakery girl said, with flour on her fingers. "Try the north inn." "Our cooks are full," an innkeeper told him, "but if you want to work, go to the labor yard near the west gate." He followed the thread of leads for hours — a mapless pilgrimage through the town's veins.
By noon his shoulders ached and his stomach pinched. He was beginning to suspect that the world did not simply give work to those who asked for it. Men here preferred proven skill. The idea of a boy fresh from the wilds carrying skill was laughable to a city merchant who had spent years learning to read ledgers and haggling like a hawk.
He found hope near a cluster of men who bore darker clothes and harder eyes — mercenaries. Their leather was worn but well cared for, their faces were maps of old fights and sharper deals. One of them wore the name-plate Iron Shadow stitched in dull iron-thread at his breast. Tianlan lingered at the edge of their conversation, listening. The mercenaries were discussing escorting a wealthy silk merchant's cart to the eastern suburbs for a fortnight — pay promised, disputes to settle, routes to avoid.
He approached cautiously, heart hammering like a trapped bird. "I… I can work," he offered, voice rough. "I'll carry packs, sweep, clean, stand guard — whatever is needed."
The leader, a broad man with a scar like a crescent along his jaw, appraised him in a look that measured weight and worth. "You've got a raw look," the scarred man said. "You fought in the wilds? You look stronger than a city boy." Tianlan nodded. The man spat into the dirt and gestured toward a battered board where names and contracts were hammered into notice. "We need men who'll keep calm with a blade at their back. Not all have courage. Not all have teeth. The Iron Shadow company hires those who can stomach both. Pay's fair. Food's included. You stand watch for ten days; we assign you a family guard post. Do you understand?"
Tianlan swallowed. "Yes. I understand." He thought of Mingyue's advice — avoid cruel sects, join a righteous path — but mercenary work was not a sect. Survival had a language all its own.
The negotiation that followed was less romantic and more transactional. Iron Shadow's rates were blunt: ten days' service for fifty copper pieces, and five copper in additional allowance — the latter to be spent on small personal expenses (tobacco, salt, or the occasional porridge upgrade). Lodging and three meals a day would be supplied by the Han family he would guard; every evening he would have a pallet in the family's servant room. He calculated the numbers in his head: one silver equaled one hundred copper — Mingyue had told him the currency earlier — and a hundred silver equaled one gold. The inn where he had stayed the night typically charged ten to twenty copper for a day and night in a common room; a better inn, with softer bedding and warmer fires, might charge five silver (that is, five hundred copper). A proper guild house or an urban lodgings could be pricier still. The sum Iron Shadow offered sounded small in city terms but sizable for his shoestring needs. Fifty copper for ten days — five copper a day — with food and bed included; plus the five-copper allowance. It wasn't wealth, but it was enough to buy new clothes, replenish his supplies, and perhaps send a small coin beyond town if news ever came.
When the leader pushed a rough leather coin-pouch across to him, Tianlan felt his face heat. He had never held so many copper pieces together at once. The coin weight in his palm felt like a promise and a warning. Iron Shadow's junior sergeant clipped a small brass tag to his collar — a sign he'd been accounted for — and handed him a plain, dark sash to be worn when on guard duty.
The Han family they were assigned to protect was mercantile in appearance: three stories if you counted the storage loft, sliding lattice windows with paper panes, jars of pickled vegetables stacked like little towers near the kitchen. Master Han received them in plain but tasteful robes, a man in his middle years with a careful smile and a concern that always seemed measured against his purse. His wife wore elaborate hairpins and spoke too loudly for what she actually needed. Their son — a thin-faced youth with ink-stained fingers — watched Tianlan as one might watch a stray cat, curious but noncommittal.
"Young man," Master Han said as he reviewed the roster, "we need steady eyes. Keep to the household quarters. If anything stirs outside, sound the bell. There are jade merchants arriving this week, and I have goods that must not disappear."
Tianlan bowed hard, the humility of the countryside still polished on his movements. "I will not fail."
That night, as he lay on the pallet provided in the servant's room, Tianlan counted the coins beneath his blankets and thought of how small fortunes could change the path of a life. Fierry slept curled in a corner, her breath whispering like a small wind. He rolled onto his back and watched the beams overhead, thinking of the road to Mingzhou in five months' time, of Mingyue's distant silhouettes of sect halls, and of the unanswered emptiness where his sisters' faces should be.
He had come to the town as a wanderer and, by dusk, had become a guard. The world had offered him an entry-level place to stand in; it had not yet handed him belonging. But there, beneath thin straw and warm blankets, the thought that warmed him was not of the coin or the work — it was of the slow accumulation of days. Ten days of watch. Fifty copper. Five additional copper to spend on a warm bowl and perhaps a book on cultivation if the merchant's wife ever tire of gossip long enough to sell him one.
Outside the Han courtyard, the town continued its chorus — laughter, bargains, horses' hooves striking stone. Inside, in a small sleeping room with a single lamp guttering, a mortal tightened his sash, felt the small fox against his hip, and resolved to earn every copper with the stubborn, aching patience of someone who had already lost too much to give up.
Li Tianlan's first steps into Yunhe mark the beginning of his mortal trials — a world no longer ruled by beasts and blades, but by survival, coin, and quiet resolve. The journey from wandering traveler to mercenary guard might seem small, yet for him, it is the first real foothold toward destiny.
In this chapter, the contrast between the vast cultivation world and the humble bustle of Yunhe Town shows how fragile a mortal dream can be — and how persistence, even in the simplest of days, becomes the true foundation of strength.