The journey back was a reversal of the one we'd taken just hours before, but the world felt different. Or maybe I was. The sun was lower, casting the iridescent crops in long, alien shadows. My hunger, a dull ache before, was now a sharp, demanding presence.
The city wall loomed before us. I braced for another confrontation with the guards, but this time, the spitter just glanced at me. His eyes did a quick, dismissive inventory: clean rags, clean cloak, hair tied back. I wasn't a threat, but I wasn't vermin anymore, either. I was just... poor. He looked right through me. The other guard didn't even bother to look up. We walked past them without a word.
The moment I was through the gate, the city hit me again, harder this time. If the view from the cliff was a fantasy artist's portfolio, the view from the street was the gritty, unedited reality. The air was a thick soup of a thousand competing smells: roasting meat that was definitely not chicken, a sharp ozone tang from passing magical contraptions, and the ever-present stink of too many people living too close together.
We moved through a river of bodies. Humans, elegant beings with skin like polished obsidian, and broad-shouldered dwarves haggling with lanky, reptilian-faced men over glowing crystals.
'Whoa, check out the stonework on that building, Murph!' Ronan proclaimed, sounding like a history nerd at a museum. 'That filigree is classic Third Age Artisan stuff! A testament to endurance!'
"Yeah, looks real sturdy," I muttered. The building he was admiring was leaning at an angle that suggested its primary structural support was wishful thinking.
We pressed deeper, leaving the merely poor districts behind. The streets narrowed, the shadows deepened, and the air grew thick with desperation. This was the frayed hem of the grand city, the place where things were bought and sold without the inconvenience of guild stamps or tax records. This was the Lower Market.
The small pinch of gold dust was safely tucked away in the Inventory. In past lives, I'd have a plan for a place like this: a decoy purse with a few coppers, the real money in a false heel, an emergency stash baked into a piece of hardtack. You always needed a small, acceptable loss you could offer up to avoid a real fight.
But this new body came with nothing. No boots, no pack, no decoy. Everything was in the Inventory, which offered no middle ground. You couldn't hand a thug a few coins from a magic dimension to make him go away. It was all or nothing. A confrontation couldn't be bought off; it could only be won or lost.
My shoulders hunched. My eyes started scanning the alleyways, mapping escape routes, clocking faces that lingered a little too long. My paranoia, honed over centuries, went on high alert. It didn't take long before my spidey-senses triggered. As we walked, a vendor ahead of us "accidentally" tripped, sending a crate of bruised, brown-spotted apples tumbling across the cobblestones. The smell of vinegar and rot hit us instantly—these were cullings, fit only for pigs.
The spill blocked the narrow lane, forcing the crowd to compress into a tight bottleneck.
'We should help him!' Ronan's thought was one of instant sympathy.
'No,' I thought back, keeping my elbows tight to my sides. 'Look at the crowd, not the fruit.'
The vendor was wailing about his lost livelihood, creating a chaotic distraction. As the crowd surged and bumped together to get around the mess, I saw it—not one, but three different hands dipping into pockets in the span of a single second. A nimble hand brushed my side, found nothing, and instantly moved to the fat merchant squeezed in beside me.
'The spill is the net,' I explained as we squeezed past, stepping over the rotting mush. 'He sacrifices a crate of garbage to create a choke point. His friends work the crowd while everyone is looking at his feet. They don't care who they rob; they just want volume.' I glanced back at the "distraught" vendor. 'Today it's rotten apples, tomorrow it's a spilled cart of fish guts. The prop changes, but the play stays the same.'
We moved deeper into the warren of streets. Ahead of us walked a young man in pristine leather armour, a fresh-faced adventurer clearly new to the city and eager to prove himself. He walked with a confident stride, his eyes scanning the rooftops rather than the shadows.
As he approached the mouth of a dark alley, a beggar sitting near the entrance suddenly started coughing—a sharp, rhythmic hacking sound.
Instantly, the silence of the alley was shattered by the thud of punches and a desperate cry for help.
'Murphy, look!' Ronan roared in my head, his fury boiling. 'They're beating that guy to a pulp! We can't just walk by!'
We peered in. Two large thugs were kicking a smaller man curled up on the ground. The young adventurer ahead of us didn't hesitate. He drew his sword and charged in, shouting a challenge to the "villains."
'Watch,' I told Ronan, grabbing an awning pole to stop us from following. 'The 'victim' is barely bruising. He's rolling with the hits perfectly. They weren't fighting ten seconds ago; they were waiting for a mark like him.'
As soon as the adventurer engaged the two standing thugs, the "victim" on the ground uncoiled like a spring, grabbing the hero's legs and knocking him flat.
'The group I was in used to call it the 'Righteous Fool,' and it's designed to prey on people exactly like you, Ronan,' I explained as the three thugs began to strip the stunned adventurer of his purse and sword. 'They have a lookout. If we had looked like guards or local muscle, that alley would have stayed quiet. They only start the show when they see someone clean enough to have money and naive enough to be a hero.'
Ronan fell into a stunned, resentful silence. It was one thing to be cynical; it was another to see the entire world as a web of calculated traps. For him, it was a horrifying revelation. For me, it was just the way the world worked.
The mix of smells... roasting meat, strange spices, dust, and sweat... was violently familiar. It was late afternoon as the street opened into a sprawling, chaotic plaza suffocating under a patchwork canopy of stained canvas. This place was a brutal ecosystem, all predators and prey chewing each other up. Rusty blades flashed in the hands of grizzled thugs, their edges dull but still mean enough to carve a point. Slaves of every race I've seen in the city so far were huddled in cages, stacked like crates of spoiled goods, their eyes hollowed out by despair. Nearby, rickety stalls showed off rows of mismatched potion bottles, their murky contents swirling like bad decisions in liquid form. A scuffle kicked off in an alley... a sharp cry, a dull thud, then dead silence. Nobody blinked. Just another day in this shithole.
I watched the slaves, their chains clinking like a grim soundtrack, and my stomach churned. I'd been there... too many times, too many lives. Different incarnations, same story: a slave master's boot stomping me into the dirt. If there's one thing I loathed more than anything, it was that. The memory of it burned, each incarnation a fresh scar. If I ever got the chance to turn this world inside out, the first thing I'd do is smash slavery to pieces. No hesitation, no mercy.
'This place is a cesspit, Murphy,' Ronan's voice rumbled, laced with disapproval. 'But even somewhere this grim, you can still find decent people. Look, over there!'
He directed my attention to a stall run by a dwarf with a magnificent, iron-grey beard, his table neatly arrayed with finely balanced daggers and axe heads.
'Look at his work, Murphy. He's a true craftsman,' Ronan declared. 'A man like that will know what our gold is worth and give us a fair price!'
I stopped dead, almost laughing. 'Ronan, are you trying to get us killed?'
'Killed? By that Smith? Murphy, just look at him. You can tell he's an honest man just by his posture.'
'His posture radiates 'I pay taxes,' I shot back in my head. 'But you're missing the real story. What's an artisan of his calibre doing in a cesspit like this, selling his masterwork next to a goblin hawking slave collars?'
I guided Ronan's focus. 'Look closer. His beard is magnificent, sure, but the clan rings that should be braided into it are gone. You can see the indentations where they used to sit. His knuckles are bruised, but not from a hammer—those are the scrapes of a back-alley brawl. And his eyes aren't on his craft; they're scanning the crowd, watching his back.'
I let the pieces click into place for him. 'That's not the posture of integrity, Ronan. That's the posture of a man who owes the wrong people a lot of money. A gambler, probably. Lost his main forge in a wager or a duel and is now selling his last good pieces in the one market where the guild can't find him, just to stay ahead of his debtors for one more day. He doesn't reek of honour; he reeks of desperation.'
My assessment settled in our shared mind. 'That makes him an unpredictable element. A potential ally if you have the right leverage, maybe. But it also makes him the absolute last person we should approach with a pinch of untraceable gold.'
'That's why we don't need honour,' I concluded. 'We need a rat. A sewer rat who knows the value of gold and the virtue of forgetting a face.'
I could practically feel Ronan's indignant sputtering.
'But not yet,' I added, reining him in. 'First, we watch. We listen. We figure out the rules of the game before we try to play.'
We spent the better part of an hour just drifting, two more ghosts in the chaotic flow. My eyes weren't on goods, but on transactions, trying to get the pulse of this place before we made a move. We paused near a stall run by a hulking man with orc blood, his table covered in monster parts: fangs, claws, and a small pile of dull, off-white stones. A young woman, barely more than a girl, approached nervously. She clutched three of the pale stones in her hand. The orc-blooded merchant grunted, counted out three gold coins, and swept the stones into a drawer. She scurried away with her money.
'One gold per Pale Core,' I noted.
'A fair, if ungenerous, price,' Ronan commented. His mental voice was that of a lecturer now, precise and informative. 'Ten copper pieces to a silver, and ten silvers to a single gold sovereign. As for the cores, the Pale ones are the most common, you see. Almost every creature of the wilds drops one upon its death. They are like empty vessels, capable of being charged with Aether to power simple enchantments, but they do not replenish themselves. They are disposable, like a waterskin you can only fill once.'
With the muscle memory of a seasoned pickpocket, I swiped an insignificant empty vial from a vendor into my inventory and sorted the gold into the vial. We would need a plausible way to present our gold when the time came.
Just then, a seasoned hunter in scarred leathers stepped up to the same stall. He slapped a single, murky Blue Core onto the table. It pulsed with a faint inner light that the Pale Cores had lacked. The merchant's eyes lit up with professional interest. He examined it for a moment before pushing a small, neat stack of ten gold coins across the table. The hunter swept them up and walked away without a word.
'There!' Ronan's thought was sharp. 'That is a true prize. A Blue Core replenishes its own Aether over time. The power it provides is not infinite, but it is constant. A vast improvement! And yet... he only received ten gold for it. In my age, a core of such potency would have commanded twice that!'
'Good,' I thought, filing the information away. 'One for a Pale, ten for a Blue. The market is low, but at least it's consistent. Now we have a baseline.'
With that knowledge anchoring us, my gaze drifted past the loud and the flashy, the barkers hawking glowing potions and dubious maps. I wasn't looking for the biggest or the richest dealer. I was looking for the quietest. And then I saw him. In a dark corner was a small, unassuming table manned by a creature with dry, scaly skin and large, unblinking black eyes. He was perfect.
'That one,' I thought, the decision solidifying. 'He's our guy.'
'His spirit... it feels like a stagnant pond, Murphy,' Ronan warned. 'He reeks of deception.'
"Good," I replied, starting towards the stall. "Deception, I can work with. It's a hell of a lot more predictable than honour."
I approached the stall. The reptilian fence's head twitched back and forth as his black eyes tracked my approach. He looked me up and down, his expression one of profound boredom. He saw exactly what I wanted him to see: a broke kid in rags. He turned his attention back to a jagged dagger he was polishing, dismissing me entirely.
"Looking to trade rock for coin," I said, my voice a low rasp as I placed the vial, a quarter filled with gold dust, on the table. "Is that something you are interested in?"
He let out a tired hiss, annoyed at being interrupted by a beggar. "Another panner with river-scum. Let's see it."
He pulled out a velvet cloth and dumped the contents of the vial onto it. Then produced a flat, black touchstone. He took a pinch of the dust, rubbed a thick streak onto the stone, and began applying drops from his testing vials. The first few did nothing. He got to his stronger acids, and under the harshest one, the golden streak finally showed the faintest hint of discolouration, the tell-tale sign of a high-grade natural alloy.
He leaned back, looking at the stone with professional appreciation. "High grade," he grunted. "Very high. Twenty-two karat, maybe a touch more. And clean. No quartz mixed in."
He looked from the pile of dust to my scrawny frame and empty hands. A sudden shift occurred in his posture. The boredom vanished, replaced by a predatory gleam. He saw the disconnect—gold this pure didn't belong to a kid in rags.
He leaned forward, his voice dropping to a low, threatening hiss. "This isn't even half an ounce, boy. But this much, this clean... it would take sophisticated equipment and a lot of money to get gold this pure. So tell me," he snarled, "which merchant's lockbox did you crack? Where did you steal it?"
His assumption was clear: I was a common thief who had gotten lucky. He expected me to flinch, to stammer, to fold.
I didn't. I just looked at him.
I let him see the same thing I'd shown the gate guard. The sudden, terrible stillness of a cornered animal that has decided it will not just die, but take whatever is in front of it down into a world of dirt and blood. It was the pure, unblinking exhaustion of a soul that had stared down a thousand violent ends and was utterly unimpressed by one more.
The fence, a predator in its own right, recognised it instantly. He saw the complete absence of morality. He saw the abyss peek out from behind my eyes, and he recoiled as if my gaze had physically struck him. The threatening posture deflated, replaced by a tense, wary stillness. His calculation had been wrong, dangerously so. This was not prey.
Into that heavy silence, I finally spoke, my voice flat and cold. "I didn't steal it."
The fence stared for a long moment, then let out a slow, controlled hiss, forcing a greasy, reptilian smile that didn't reach his eyes. His strategy had changed. If intimidation wouldn't work, perhaps greed would.
"Indeed," he hissed, his tone now slick with false camaraderie. "Kid, I don't care about the dust in this vial. I'm interested in the source. Anything that produces gold this pure is worth my time."
He leaned forward again, but this time it wasn't a threat; it was a conspiratorial invitation. His black eyes gleamed. "I'll give you ten gold sovereigns and a Blue Core. All of it. For the location."
'He thinks we've found an untouched motherlode,' Ronan confirmed. 'A place so rich that even a child could pull a fortune from it.'
"The location isn't for sale," I said firmly, my mind racing. The secret wasn't the gold anymore; it was our ability to gather it. That was the real power, the real danger.
"A hundred gold!" he snapped, his greed overriding his caution. "A fortune for a simple set of directions!"
Even if I had a magic gold-finding stream, I'd be a dead man the second I gave him the map. I stood and made a show of taking the vial back. "The deal was dust for coin, not directions. Two gold and a Blue Core for what's in the vial. Yes or no?"
He stared, his face a conflict of frustration and avarice. He was desperate for the source, but the gold in front of him was still a prize. I could see the gears turning in his cold, reptilian head. He knew pushing me further right now was a losing game. But letting me walk away meant losing the lead forever.
So, he made the smart play. He would give me a "fair" price now, establish himself as a reliable buyer, and hope I'd be stupid enough to come back with more. This wasn't an end to the negotiation; it was a tactical retreat. He was letting me go so he could wait until he had the muscle to corner me in an alley and bleed the answer out of me. This deal was just a down payment on a future ambush.
With a long, final hiss, he relented. "Fine," he growled as he produced a blue core and two heavy gold sovereigns. He dropped them into a simple leather pouch, then paused, picking up a dull, off-white Pale Core from a nearby tray. He tossed it in as well.
He pushed the pouch toward me. "A little something extra. Consider it, and the purse, a gift," he hissed, his voice now slick with false generosity. "To encourage future business. And come see me again if you find any more of that... lucky dust."
The deal was done. As we walked away, I felt his gaze on my back like a physical weight. I hadn't just made a sale... I had made an enemy who was patiently waiting for his chance to strike.
My palm itched to shove the pouch into the Inventory. It was the only safe place. But I couldn't. Not while the fence was watching, and not with his eyes scanning me from the shadows. In a place like the Lower Market, flashing a spatial storage ability was a death sentence. It screamed 'high-level mage' or 'stolen artefact'. If I vanished that pouch into thin air now, I wouldn't just have thugs following me; I'd have every guild assassin in the district on my tail before sunset.
I had to walk. Just until we broke line of sight. Just until we turned the corner. I gripped the pouch tight, calculating the steps to the nearest alley where I could safely stow it.
'Just ten more yards, Ronan,' I thought, my nerves pulled taut. 'Then we vanish it.'
We were halfway across the wide, sun-drenched plaza of the Merchant's Tier, mere seconds from safety, when a luxurious carriage barrelled around a corner.
I threw myself backwards to avoid being trampled. On instinct, I braced my fall with the one good hand I had left, which was also the one holding our pouch of gold. The little pouch spilt onto the pavement behind me, and the carriage door, sporting a gaudy hawk-and-thorny-rose sigil, swung open like it was announcing royalty. A hulking brute in a blue-and-silver suit that screamed "I'm rich, fear me" clambered out first, laughing like he'd just heard the world's dirtiest joke. "Watch your step, gutter trash!" he roared, probably thinking he was hilarious. Next came a leaner guy, all sharp angles and sharper smiles, who hopped out with a flourish and held the door like he was auditioning for best lackey. "A fine entrance as always, Lord Lysander," he said, bowing so low I thought he'd kiss the dirt.
Lysander Thorne, the one actually running this circus, stepped out last, cool as a blade in winter. He gave a slight nod, and that was enough for the leaner noble, Silas, to scurry into formation like a well-trained dog.
The one in charge gave a slight nod. That was all the permission Silas needed. He feigned a stumble, his shoulder slamming squarely into me the moment I was back on my feet, the impact jarring enough to send me staggering.
A cold knot of panic tightened in my gut. I knew that looking desperate would only fuel this moron's lust for humiliation, but the gold was our lifeline. In that instant, the full weight of my earlier mistake—not stashing the pouch away—crashed down on me.
My eyes darted to the pouch on the cobblestones. Maybe they haven't noticed? The thought was a fleeting spark of hope, but before I could even twitch, the hulking one, Garrick, planted his massive boot firmly on the leather pouch. "Look what the street rat dropped," Garrick boomed, a cruel grin spreading across his face.
"Well?" Silas sneered from a safe distance. "Aren't you going to pick it up?"
I looked at the hulking brute, Garrick. A classic type I'd seen in a hundred different lifetimes. All muscle, minimal thought, driven by a simple, primal need to provoke a reaction. Any reaction.
Begging would feed his ego. Bargaining would acknowledge his power. Fighting back would be the ultimate reward, giving him the excuse for the violence he was clearly itching for. All of them were losing moves, designed to give him exactly what he wanted.
So I chose the one option he wouldn't know how to process. I ignored him. Not by standing still, which a brute like him would interpret as a challenge, but by making my entire world about the pouch. By kneeling, I wasn't submitting to him; I was simply trying to solve a logistical problem. In my mind, he ceased to be a threat to be feared or fought; he became an inanimate, inconveniently placed obstacle. A piece of furniture in my way.
I knelt, my hand closing over the pouch pinned beneath his boot. As I did, Garrick crouched, bringing his brutish, laughing face level with mine. The stench of his hot, sour breath washed over me. He was furious that my focus wasn't on him.
"That's it," he whispered, his voice a low, guttural rumble that sprayed my cheek with spittle. "Grub around in the dirt where you belong." He punctuated the insult with a hard nudge from his knuckles. "Look at you. Nothing."
His voice dropped lower, a goading rasp. "Go on. Get angry. Fight back. Show me you're not just a piece of trash waiting for the rubbish cart."
'Skab it all, Murphy, how can you just kneel there?!' Ronan's righteous fury was a white-hot scream in my skull, no longer just angry, but verging on horrified disbelief. 'He's spitting on us as he speaks! How are you so calm?!'
I continued to pull on the pouch, my movements deliberate and steady. My hand did not shake. My breathing did not quicken. Garrick's taunts were just a buzzing in my ears, a pressure against my skin. They were nothing.
'Because it doesn't matter, Ronan,' I sent back, my internal voice a clinical whisper against his fire. 'It's just spit. It dries. It's meaningless data. Compared to... other things... this is just noise.'
My utter lack of reaction was starting to genuinely infuriate Garrick. His taunts grew louder, edged with frustration. He wanted a reaction... fear, anger, tears... and I was giving him nothing. His face purpled. "LOOK AT ME WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU, YOU FILTHY..."
"That's enough, Garrick," Lysander Thorne's voice cut through the air, sharp and cold with boredom. "Don't be tedious. You're failing to amuse me."
Garrick froze, then instantly straightened up, his face falling into a mask of subservience. "My Lord."
Lysander didn't even glance at me. "Come. I'm already tired of this shithole." With that, he turned and strode away. I didn't exist anymore.
Shoving the coins back into the dirt-stained pouch, I pushed myself to my feet and scurried away.
'You let them go,' Ronan seethed, the anger in his thoughts now mixed with a deep, unsettling confusion from what he'd just witnessed.
'Yes,' I thought back. 'I did.'
'That was our honour, Murphy! They just spat on it for everyone to see.'
I could feel the shift in his voice. The 'honour'. That was a tell. Most of the time, he sounded like a guy I'd known for ten years, but when his emotions got too high—especially his paladin-brand of righteous fury—the ancient noble leaked out.
'Honour is a luxury for people who don't have to worry about getting beaten to death by the City Guard,' I replied. 'We start a fight there, we lose. End of story.'
Ronan fell into a broiling, resentful silence. He knew I was right on a tactical level, but he couldn't comprehend my emotional fortitude. I let the silence hang before sending one last, final thought to quiet him, a promise forged not in anger, but in the ice of a thousand lifetimes.
'And Ronan,' I added, the memory of their faces... Garrick's brutish grin, Silas's weaselly smirk, Lysander's bored arrogance... burning itself into my mind. 'Just because I don't rise to it, doesn't mean I'll forget it.'