Shree Yan and Yi Ner entered the shop, a small bell above the door announcing their arrival with a thin, tinny chime. A middle-aged man worked behind the counter, hunched over a ledger, ink-stained fingers tapping absently against worn wood. His eyes found Shree Yan and Yi Ner almost immediately, lifting from his work with the practiced alertness of a man who never missed a paying customer.
His expression turned warm at once, and he rushed forward, wiping his hands hastily on his apron as he came.
"Young master Shree Yan, I'm so surprised to see you here in my shop." He bowed slightly at the waist, his smile wide enough to show teeth. "After your awakening test, and that golden glow, you've become our clan's hope. I think you'll do great things for us. My name is Gome, the owner of Lawati Shop."
"I'm not here to talk. Don't waste my time. Just tell me: are you selling hidden stones?" Shree Yan replied in a cold tone, his gaze already drifting past Gome toward the shelves lining the walls.
Gome clenched his teeth. This little punk. What happened to him? He wasn't like this before, he was a crybaby who never left his mother's side. He smoothed the flash of irritation back into practiced hospitality.
They weren't alone in the shop. Other customers browsed the shelves, stacked with jars and small carved trinkets, so he kept his voice low and pleasant. Fighting Shree Yan never even crossed his mind. Shree Yan could take him down without effort, and there was nothing he could do about it. The safest choice was to do nothing at all, a fact he understood with the clear, cold instinct of a man who had survived this long precisely by knowing when not to push.
"Ohh, no, young master, you're too rude for that. Come with me, I'll take you to what you're looking for." Gome was irritated but didn't let it show, gesturing toward the back of the shop with an exaggerated sweep of his arm.
Yi Ner watched the exchange in quiet shock from a half-step behind. This isn't how the young master usually acts. He doesn't act like this. But something's changed. She could hardly believe what she was seeing, her earlier assumptions about him quietly unraveling with each cold, clipped word he spoke.
Gome led them to the second floor, the wooden stairs creaking faintly under their combined weight, the air growing thicker with dust the higher they climbed.
The second floor held racks of weapons and shields, all lower tier, arranged haphazardly along the walls, some clearly overdue for a proper polish. At the center of the room stood three large wooden tables, their surfaces scarred from years of use. On top of them sat stones wrapped in a special sand meant to conceal them completely, pale grey and fine as powdered chalk. Ten hidden stones lay across the tables in all, four to a line, each one indistinguishable from the next to an untrained eye.
Gome brought them to the tables and gestured broadly. "Young master, which hidden stone would you like?"
"The middle table," Shree Yan said, already stepping toward it without waiting for further invitation.
He sifted through the stones, fingers moving with deceptive slowness over each sand-covered surface, and settled on the one in the middle. His gaze sharpened as he studied it, something behind his eyes shifting into focus as the borrowed sight did its work. He'd found it. Five stones to his left, five to his right.
"Young master, are you sure about that one?" Gome asked, one eyebrow raised in polite skepticism. "If there's nothing inside, don't come complaining to me."
Shree Yan couldn't be wrong about this. Not after everything he remembered from his previous life. The certainty settled into his shoulders as something closer to boredom than confidence, and he said nothing, simply holding the stone loosely in his palm.
Gome frowned slightly. "Young master, the total comes to fifteen star stones. I'm giving you a good price, I usually sell these for twenty, but for you, only fifteen." He spread his hands as though offering an extraordinary kindness.
This was human nature laid bare: greedy, selfish, always looking for an angle. People chased money and tried to get one over on each other, and most never found a way out of that trap. Gome's price had come too quickly, the calculation behind it obvious, and Shree Yan knew exactly what the man was doing. Yi Ner said nothing, watching quietly from near the stairwell, her hands folded in front of her.
Shree Yan smiled lightly and leaned in close to Gome's ear, his voice dropping to an icy whisper only Gome could hear. "Gome. Did you really think you could trick me?"
"Don't try fooling people you can't handle. If you're still thinking you can fool me, I'll kill you."
Pressure rolled off Shree Yan's presence, pressure Gome had never felt in his entire life, settling over him like a physical weight pressing down on his chest, stealing the breath from his lungs.
Fear darkened Gome's expression, sweat gathering rapidly along his hairline and dripping toward his collar. He stepped back, heels catching against the leg of the nearest table. "Who are you?" he said, his voice shaking between fear and disbelief. "You're not the Shree Yan I know. You're a demon. You're..."
He never finished. Shree Yan crossed the distance between them and broke his neck in a single, silent motion, so fast that even Yi Ner barely registered it as more than a blur. The body folded to the wooden floor like a puppet with its strings cut, and for a moment the shop's ordinary noise, footsteps, distant haggling, carried on downstairs as though nothing at all had happened.
Shree Yan turned to Yi Ner and raised a hand, signing for her to stay silent.
Her breath caught in her throat, her eyes fixed on the body now still against the floorboards, but she said nothing. Whatever fear or doubt crossed her face, she swallowed it down, forcing her expression back into something flat and unreadable.
He crossed to her, his voice losing the cold edge he'd used on Gome. "Even if he wasn't important, he could have caused trouble for me."
Yi Ner looked at him, baffled. "Young master, why are you telling me this?"
Shree Yan smiled. "When my clan's elders and my father ask me where he is, and they will, since plenty of people saw me with him last time, I'll need an answer."
She was still lost. "And what does that have to do with me?"
"You're going to be my witness," he said gently, watching her carefully as he spoke. "I know you'll help me. Just tell them what you saw."
Yi Ner lowered her gaze slightly. "Yes, young master. I'll tell them the truth, exactly what I saw."
"Do you have a space ring?" he asked. "We need to store the body somewhere."
"Yes, young master, I have one," she said, already reaching to slide it off her finger.
She handed it over, the small band cool and unremarkable against his palm. Shree Yan turned to Gome's body and drew it into the ring, the corpse vanishing into a faint shimmer of compressed space, leaving nothing behind but a thin smear along the floorboards. Then he picked up the hidden stone.
"Yi Ner, we need to leave. Now."
She obeyed without hesitation, already moving toward the stairs.
Shree Yan took her hand and used the one-step skill he'd gained upon breaking through to Star One, the world blurring briefly around them as they covered in an instant what should have taken minutes on foot.
***
A few hours later, Shree Yan and Yi Ner were home. He sat on the bed in his room, afternoon light slanting low through the window and painting long shadows across the floor. Now came the work of cleaning the sand away.
He set his hand on the hidden stone and began brushing off the fine grey grains, careful, patient strokes of his thumb working the surface clean.
Once it was clear, the stone needed to be broken open. He cracked it cleanly between his palms. A small brightness caught his eye.
It was a saangee worm.
He felt something close to satisfaction, though not the full weight of it yet, and set the worm carefully into his open palm. The real satisfaction would come later, once he'd used its eyes and confirmed what he already suspected: this was a worm he would need badly in the years ahead.
He began the refining at once, letting a single drop of blood fall onto the worm's pale, glistening surface. Within a few minutes, the bond took, and a faint warmth settled quietly into place behind his eyes.
***
Author's note: Hello, readers!
I have some good news for you. I believe you can now read the chapters without the translation issues that gave you trouble before.
Even better, I think I can start releasing chapters daily.
I was honestly stunned to see this book reach 49.8K views by Chapter 8. You've all been giving me power stones, leaving reviews, and supporting it in so many ways, and we already have ten fandom members after only eight chapters. That's incredible.
I'm truly grateful for all of it. Thank you so much, everyone. I'll keep doing my best to bring you more chapters and make the story worth reading. I hope I don't disappoint you, and I promise to keep giving this my full effort.
I still can't quite believe it. Thank you again, readers, for reading and supporting my book.