He had reached the very peak of the Martial Soul realm—one breath from breaking through to Martial King. In a backwater border town like this, where a Martial Teacher was considered a local hero, a man at the edge of Martial King was nothing less than a natural disaster.
The funny thing—the thing the readers had loved—was that this monster had been running. Fleeing, wounded and furious, from Ye Qiong, who at that point had only just reached Martial Soul himself. A protagonist chasing a stronger villain across half the kingdom on nothing but bloodline and nerve.
Funny, when you were reading it.
Less funny when you remembered which city he fled into.
Ximen Lang had come to Nalan City with Ye Qiong on his heels. And Nalan City had been the place where they finally collided. And when two men like that collided, everything around them broke—walls, houses, people. Especially people.
Li Yuguo looked down at his own soft white hands, and at the cola can in them, and thought about a nearly-Martial-King cultivator with a grudge against the whole world walking through the gate on City Gate Avenue.
Cultivation: None.
He would not even be a speed bump. He would be a smear.
He clenched his fist so hard that the empty can crumpled in his grip with a tinny crunch.
"Damn it," he muttered. "The bitter fruit I planted myself. No matter what, I have to clean up the mess. At the very least—" he looked at the crushed red can, at the dust, at the hungry square— "I have to live."
And it would not stop at Nalan City.
That was the part that made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. Ximen Lang was only the first. After Nalan City came the next disaster, and the next, and the next—an endless parade of catastrophes marching across the Haotian Kingdom, one after another, each one worse than the last. Because Liu Mang had been an online author who loved abuse. He had piled tragedy on tragedy with relish, chapter after chapter, and laughed at the comments.
And now he had to live through every single one of them himself.
All those years torturing my characters, he thought, and in the end the one I'm abusing is me.
He did not know whether to laugh or cry, so he did neither. He just sat on the broken cart and looked out across the market.
The old men in the dust. The women with their silent babies. The children with their huge, patient eyes. None of them knew they were in a novel. None of them knew that half a year from now, a pair of monsters would come through the gate and the walls would burn. They were just poor, and hungry, and pitiful, and alive.
And if he did nothing, every one of them would die here.
That was too miserable. Even for him.
He stood up, brushed the dust off his robe, and opened Alimama again.
He scrolled to Food and then to Seasonings, and there, among the salts and the sugars, he found it.
Pepper Powder — Fresh Ground. 1 packet.
He knew pepper. More importantly, he knew what pepper was worth here. He had written it himself, in some throwaway paragraph of worldbuilding about the trade routes: pepper did not grow anywhere in the Haotian Kingdom. Every grain of it came from the Western Regions, across deserts and mountain passes and bandit country, and by the time it reached the capital it was literally worth its weight in silver. In the noble households, they served it in tiny dishes at banquets, the way the rich in his old world served caviar. In a city like this, most people had never even smelled it.
On Alimama, it cost almost nothing.
He bought one packet.
Whistle—thok.
The wooden box landed in the dust. He opened it, and inside, folded into a neat, flat square, was a packet of heavy white paper, sealed at the edge. Even through the paper, the smell came up at him—sharp, hot, dark, woody, so strong it made his nose tingle and his eyes water.
He held it up and sniffed it carefully. Then, without quite thinking, he rubbed a little of the paper between his fingers, so that the scent spread and rose into the heavy air.
Now. Where to sell it. And to whom. And for how much, without getting robbed—
"This—this—"
The voice came from behind him, high and breathless and quivering with greed.
"Is this the legendary pepper?!"
Li Yuguo turned around.
A man was hurrying toward him across the market square at a pace that made his whole body jiggle. He was enormously fat—round as a winter melon, with a belly that strained against a robe of expensive mulberry-colored brocade and rolled over the top of a jade-buckled belt. His face was broad and pink and shiny with sweat, his eyes small and bright in the folds of his cheeks, his nose a little upturned at the tip, so that from certain angles he looked startlingly like a well-fed pig. Gold rings glittered on every one of his sausage fingers. Behind him, two burly guards were trying and failing to keep up.
And his nose was twitching.
It twitched as he came, the nostrils flaring and quivering, sniffing at the air like a hound on a scent. His eyes locked onto the white paper packet in Li Yuguo's hand and lit up with a joy so pure and so naked that it was almost touching.
"Ha?" said Li Yuguo intelligently.
The fat man reached him, panting, and bent over the packet with his nose an inch from it. He inhaled. His eyes rolled back in his head.
"Sure enough," he breathed. "Sure enough! This is real pepper. Western Regions pepper—and fresh, so fresh, I've never smelled it so fresh—" He straightened up and grabbed Li Yuguo's free hand in both of his own damp, ringed ones. "This friend! This good friend! Can you sell me this pepper?"
Li Yuguo looked at the fat man's shining eyes.
He looked at the expensive brocade, and the gold rings, and the guards.
And he thought: sheep.
He coughed. Seriously. Gravely. He let his face fall into an expression of great reluctance and even greater pain, the expression of a man being asked to part with a family heirloom.
"Well… you know," he said slowly, "this kind of thing is very rare. Very rare. I went to a great deal of trouble to get my hands on it. If you say you want to buy it from me…" He sighed, and looked down at the packet as if it were his own child. "I'm very embarrassed, but…"
"Money is no problem! Everything can be talked about, everything can be talked about!" The fat man flapped his hands. "Please, please, come to my place. We can sit, have some tea, discuss it properly, like gentlemen. What do you say?"
Li Yuguo let a long, heavy moment pass.
"All right," he said. "Then I'll reluctantly go with you."
The fat man's tent was the largest of the merchant pavilions against the inner wall—a great square of red canvas, its door flaps tied back, a guard on either side. Inside, the air was cooler and smelled of camphor and sandalwood and tea. Carpets from the south covered the ground three deep. And everywhere, on shelves and chests and low lacquered tables, stood goods: bolts of shimmering silk in every color, porcelain bowls thin as eggshell, bronze mirrors, jade combs, little ivory boxes, rolled scrolls of painting, glass bottles filled with colored liquids. It was a dazzling, glittering mess of treasure, as if a dragon had emptied its hoard onto a market stall.
The fat man waved him to a cushion and sat down heavily across from him. A servant girl brought tea. The fat man did not touch his.
"Well," he said, rubbing his hands together, "let me be straightforward, friend. Fifty taels. I'll give you fifty taels of silver for that pepper. What do you think?"
"Fifty silver?!"
It came out of Li Yuguo before he could stop it, a strangled yelp of disbelief. He had paid next to nothing for the packet. Fifty taels was everything Nalan Meng had been able to give him. Is money really this easy to make?
The fat man misread his face completely.
He saw the shock, and the wide eyes, and he flinched as if he'd been slapped. "Ah—no, no, of course, of course, I insult you. One hundred silver!" he said hastily. "One hundred, let's make friends!"
"One… one hundred silver?!"
The fat man's face twitched. He mopped his brow with a silk handkerchief. "Cough—cough. One hundred and fifty silver. That's—that's really the best price, friend. I can't add any more."
"What?!" Li Yuguo's voice cracked. "It's actually one hundred and fifty—"
The fat man clenched both his fists on his knees. His face had gone a deeper pink. He looked like a man in physical pain.
"It seems," he said heavily, "that I've met a real connoisseur today." He sighed through his nose. "Well. You know how it is. If I buy this pepper powder, I still have to carry it all the way to the capital, and on the road there are costs, and guards, and bandits, and the officials at every checkpoint have their hands out…" He held up two fingers. "Two hundred silver. That's the price. That is truly my limit. If I go any higher, I won't be able to afford it."
Li Yuguo sat on the soft southern carpet and stared at the two fat fingers.
Two hundred.
Four times what his wife had been able to give him. Four times the last of the relief money.
For a packet of pepper.
"All right." He held out his hand. "Deal."
The fat man's face split into a beaming smile of pure relief. He seized the offered hand and shook it hard, up and down, as if he were pumping water from a well.
The silver arrived on a lacquered tray, in four neat rows of bars, and the pepper went into an ivory box that the fat man locked with a tiny golden key and held against his belly with both hands like a newborn. Then he leaned forward, his small bright eyes narrowing in their folds of flesh.
"But friend," he said softly, "can you tell me… where did you buy such fresh pepper powder? Even in the capital, I've never seen anything so good."
Li Yuguo smiled.
It was not Liu Mang's smile. It was the smile that had lived in the muscles of this face for years: lazy, sly, a profiteer's smile, curling up at one corner. For once, he let it come.
"Now, that," he said, "is a trade secret. If I told you, how would I eat?"
The fat man stared at him for a moment—and then burst out laughing, a great wheezing belly laugh that made his whole body shake and his rings rattle against the ivory box.
"Good! Good! I understand, I understand!" He wiped his eyes. "We're all in the same business, after all. Well, then—let me introduce myself properly. My name is Shi Dacheng." He laid a ringed hand on his chest. "Will you trade with me again in the future?"
Li Yuguo considered him.
Shi Dacheng.
The name went into his memory like a key into a lock, and things on the other side turned and opened. He knew this man. He had written him—only as a minor background figure, a fat pig-faced merchant who showed up now and then to supply the plot with gossip or goods. But he remembered the details now. Shi Dacheng was not just a traveling merchant. He was one of the wealthiest men in Nalan City. He owned a merchant group that ran caravans up and down the southern road. And he owned—or held a share in—a good many of the city's most famous establishments: the wine houses on City Gate Avenue, the bars with their waitresses, and the brothels with their red railings and their women leaning down over the balconies.
A man with money. A man with caravans. A man with a finger in every pot in this city where people drank and gambled and spent.
A man who would pay two hundred taels for a packet of pepper and walk away grateful.
Somewhere deep inside him, a writer of nearly thirty who had read and written every trick in the book—the face-slapping, the hidden treasure, the humble young master who turns out to hold the ace—sat up and began, very quietly, to take notes.
This pig-faced merchant, he thought, is going to be very, very useful.
"Well," Li Yuguo said calmly. He gave Shi Dacheng's damp hand one last firm shake, and then let it go. "That depends on your sincerity."
He set down his cup of tea.
"My name is Li Yuguo."