The city had always been a marketplace. Silk, salt, firewood, meat, opium, coin. But now it sold something weightless and far more combustible: words.
The Ash Market had sprung overnight where the civic square once stood, its marble fountains cracked and dry, its stone benches toppled. Tarps sagged from broken colonnades, stitched from banners of fallen sects, each one proclaiming the opposite of its neighbor. Smoke smeared the air from cooking fires and braziers meant less for warmth than for theater. A thousand voices roared at once—buyers, sellers, prophets, frauds. Above it all hung the stench of sweat, charred parchment, and desperation.
Xuemei pulled her hood low. She had streaked her face with ash until she looked like another soot-stained refugee. The disguise was crude, but in a place where everyone carried ruin on their faces, it was enough. She moved carefully between stalls, cataloguing the new economy of belief.
"Original words of the Seeker!" cried a toothless man, waving a strip of parchment so thin it curled like a dying leaf. "Taken from the sanctum ruins themselves! Only three coins!"
A woman beside him hissed. "Three? I'll sell you his final breath for two!" She held up a clay vial, stoppered with wax. "Captured the moment he died, I swear it!"
The crowd did not laugh her away. Coins clattered into her palm. Xuemei tilted her head. Authenticity optional. Performance mandatory.
Two stalls down, a merchant laid out bones—femurs, ribs, skull fragments—etched with scripture. He didn't even pretend they belonged to saints. "Human bone," he admitted cheerfully, "but the words burn truer when carved in flesh." The crowd nodded as though this were sound theology.
Children traded too. A boy no older than twelve held up fragments like trading cards. "One line for a song. Two lines for a story." His customers were other children, who ran off chanting half-verses as jump-rope rhymes. Xuemei's lips twitched. The market did not stop at stalls. It bred in mouths.
Contradiction flourished like weeds. One seller swore the Seeker had died in the sanctum fire. Another claimed he had ascended, glowing like a lantern, leaving only ashes behind. Both stalls had customers. In fact, buyers occasionally purchased from both, contradictions cradled in each hand as if the clash itself made the words truer. Xuemei's mind clicked. Contradiction sells. Certainty sells faster. Prophecy sells fastest of all.
She paused at a table stacked high with fragments bound in string. The woman selling them had arms like butcher's cleavers. "Best lines! All rhyme! Easy to memorize!" And indeed, they disappeared into eager hands. Xuemei leaned close enough to read. Short, sharp couplets, no longer than a breath. Lines that rolled off the tongue and rolled straight into memory. The butcher-woman was selling not words but rhythm.
"This one sparks hope," Xuemei whispered under her breath. "This one breeds fear. This one will echo endlessly." She weighed them as if balancing coin. For years, she had sold books to scholars and pilgrims. Now the world itself had become her shop. The only difference was that here, customers would kill for their purchase.
The further she wandered, the clearer the pattern became. Words had detached from meaning. They circulated like silver, exchanged and spent, their value fluctuating by the hour. A verse declaring apocalypse fetched twice the price at dusk than it did at dawn. A hopeful chant lost its worth once too many voices had sung it. Even faith obeyed the laws of supply and demand.
A man in priestly robes shouted atop a crate, clutching a scroll. "The Seeker promised to return in flame!" The crowd roared back. Xuemei elbowed through, listening. The scroll was nothing but a recipe for lamp oil, smudged and torn. But he had learned the secret: read it with enough conviction, and people heard prophecy.
Xuemei wondered—not for the first time—what it would cost her to stand on such a crate and speak. She imagined reciting a line of her own invention, watching it ripple through the crowd. The thought was intoxicating and dangerous. Not yet. She was not ready to burn that brightly.
Then she overheard it. Two cult enforcers, broad-shouldered and blade-armed, leaned close over mugs of broth. One muttered, "Keep the ledger safe. Without it, we can't track which words belong to which faction."
Xuemei stilled. A ledger. Not fragments themselves, but records of their trade. Who bought which words. Who claimed which lie. With such a ledger, she could chart alliances and rivalries, see faith itself like a map.
Her pulse quickened. She followed the men, weaving between bodies. They stopped at a heavy stall draped in crimson cloth. Behind it hunched a merchant, scribbling in a thick leather volume. Each line marked: buyer, seller, phrase. Transactions of faith. Accounts of lies.
The enforcers barked at passersby, "Keep moving. Sacred accounts." Sacred indeed. Xuemei pretended to eye trinkets while her eyes stayed fixed on the book.
Fortune intervened. A fight broke out two stalls over. A zealot drew steel against a counterfeiter. Tarps caught fire, smoke coiled upward. The crowd surged in panic. Xuemei moved with the tide, then against it, slipping to the crimson stall. Her hand darted forward, quick as a pickpocket's. The ledger was heavier than she expected, but she clutched it against her chest and melted into the throng.
The merchant looked up too late. "Stop!" he shouted, but she was already gone.
"Thief!" roared one of the enforcers.
The crowd heaved. Xuemei ran, shoving bodies aside, boots slipping on spilled oil and ash. The ledger dragged at her like an anchor. Behind her, men bellowed orders.
She ducked into an alley, lungs heaving. Ash fell from the sky, fine gray snow settling on her shoulders. Shouts thundered behind her, closer and closer. She leapt over a brazier, ducked under a sagging tarp. Still they came, blades out, scattering the innocent.
Even as she ran, her mind counted. The story of her theft was already spreading. By dusk, the market would tell of a woman who stole the words of gods. That rumor itself would be more valuable than the ledger she clutched.
She nearly laughed, but her throat burned. Survival first. Reputation later.
The alleys narrowed, walls leaning close. She stumbled into a poor quarter, where ruins had been patched into hovels. Children played in the street, skipping rope made of shrine ribbons. Their laughter rose above the din.
Xuemei ducked behind a collapsed wall, pressing the ledger flat against her ribs. The enforcers' footsteps thundered past, their curses fading. She let her breath leak out slowly, trembling with relief.
Then she heard the children's chant.
"Flame goes up, ash comes down,
Seeker walks through burning town.
Count to three, he disappears,
Count again, he reappears."
The rope slapped stone. Their voices rose in sing-song rhythm. Xuemei peeked out. Their rhyme was nonsense. It was also prophecy. Contradiction disguised as play.
Her eyes widened. The fragments had already escaped sanctums and stalls. They were alive now in rhythm, in rhyme, in games. They belonged to mouths and laughter. No ledger could contain this. No codex could keep it bound. Belief was mutating on its own, wildfire in language.
She pressed her palm against the leather ledger, then against her pouch where the Seeker's name burned. Power in one hand. Uncontrollable contagion in the other. She thought: I can shape markets. I can chart trades. But children—children carry faith like plague.
The rope slapped. The rhyme repeated. The words echoed absurd, prophetic, inevitable.
Xuemei slipped deeper into shadow, clutching the ledger. The children kept singing, their joy careless and unstoppable. She whispered to herself, "Fragments breed faster than fire."
The ledger weighed heavy in her arms. The rhyme fluttered light as ash in the air. She understood, with a sudden chill, that she had gained power but not control. The true market was not in stalls or ledgers. It was in minds that sang.