Chương 5: Chapter 4

Hua City's outer gate was not the sort of landmark anyone would carve into a travel brochure. Two weather-beaten stone pillars leaned toward each other like old men sharing a secret, their surfaces cracked, moss-stained, and half-swallowed by vines. Whatever crest had once been carved above the entrance had eroded into a shapeless lump. Ling Tian passed beneath it without slowing. Then the market hit him. Noise came first.

Not a steady background murmur, but layers of shouting stacked on top of one another until individual voices blurred into a single abrasive roar. Merchants advertised fish, grain, knives, medicine, cloth, charms, livestock, and several things Ling Tian could not identify. Customers argued back. Somewhere nearby, a baby wailed. A mule protested its existence with remarkable commitment. Ling Tian stopped just beyond the gate and took one careful breath through his mouth. It did not help.

Hundreds of wooden stalls crowded both sides of the main road. Most had been assembled from mismatched planks and optimism. Their roofs sagged under old thatch, rain stains, and grime accumulated over what looked like several generations. A few posts had been reinforced with rope. One entire stall leaned so far into the street that Ling Tian automatically calculated where it would land if the support beam snapped: directly onto a noodle vendor and at least six customers. No permits. No inspections.

No visible drainage system. From a liability perspective, Hua City was breathtaking. The merchants themselves appeared unconcerned with structural collapse. They were too busy fighting for customers. A fishmonger bellowed prices while slapping the side of a wooden tub. Silver-scaled river fish thrashed in murky water, spraying nearby shoppers. Across from him, a spice seller had built little mountains of red, yellow, and brown powder that looked beautiful from a distance and weaponized up close.

Every gust sent enough dust into the street to trigger coughing fits. Ling Tian watched a woman sneeze directly into an uncovered basket of dried mushrooms and quietly revised his opinion of civilization downward. The smell was worse. Fish water, smoke, sweat, mud, cheap liquor, wet straw, animal waste, fried meat, and spices sharp enough to sting his nose all blended into one aggressive atmosphere. Something sweet was boiling nearby, though the sugar did little to improve the overall composition.

Grease hissed over open coals, and the smoke settled beneath the low awnings instead of escaping. It coated the tongue with salt and old fat and left a metallic sting at the back of his throat. The market reminded him, unpleasantly and nostalgically, of the crowded traditional markets he remembered from Java. The same heat trapped between bodies. The same vendors who could detect hesitation from twenty meters away and raise a price before the customer even spoke.

The same constant bargaining, shouting, and improvisation. But Hua City lacked several modern conveniences he had previously failed to appreciate: plumbing, refrigeration, waste collection, and, judging by the condition of the meat stalls, even a passing acquaintance with germ theory. Ling Tian tightened his grip on the strap of his herb sack and entered the crowd. Moving through Hua City required technique.

He slipped between adults twice his width, ducked beneath a butcher's swinging elbow, and stepped over a channel of gray water running between broken paving stones. The liquid smelled faintly of ammonia, so he chose not to investigate its origin. Some information had no practical value. A man carrying three cages of chickens nearly clipped him from behind. Ling Tian pivoted aside just as two boys sprinted past with stolen buns, followed several seconds later by an enraged baker waving a wooden paddle.

No one else seemed interested. Normal Tuesday, apparently. Then he smelled grilled meat. A vendor stood over a sheet of blackened metal balanced across glowing coals, turning thin wooden skewers with practiced fingers. Fat hissed as it struck the fire. Smoke curled upward carrying salt, char, and the deep caramelized scent of roasting meat. For one treacherous moment it smelled close enough to satay that Ling Tian's entire body betrayed him. His stomach cramped so violently he nearly stopped walking.

The vendor noticed immediately and raised a skewer.

"Fresh goat! Two coppers!" Ling Tian stared at it for half a second too long. Two coppers was too much. That was the first problem. The second was that "goat" represented an unverified claim from a man cooking unrefrigerated meat beside an open drainage channel. Food poisoning would be inconvenient in modern civilization. Here, it could kill him. Vomiting or diarrhea meant dehydration. Dehydration meant weakness. Weakness meant no mountain climbing, no herb gathering, and therefore no income.

The chain of consequences was brutally simple. One questionable lunch could produce bankruptcy, organ failure, and death. He mentally assigned the stall a Class-A biological hazard rating and kept walking before hunger overruled risk management. Halfway through the market, another thought began to bother him. He had tested his spiritual perception on the mountain, where the biggest threats had been trees, rocks, and his own inability to filter information. Hua City was different.

Hundreds of people were packed into a small area. If cultivators could pass among ordinary citizens without announcing themselves, this seemed exactly the kind of place where one might hide. Probably. Ling Tian admitted he had no factual basis for that assumption, but paranoia had kept more than one accountant employed. He loosened his mental firewall by the smallest amount he could manage. The market changed.

Not visibly, his physical eyes still saw people shoving through muddy streets, shouting over prices and carrying baskets, but another layer surfaced beneath the ordinary scene. Every person around him carried a faint halo of life. Unlike the mountain, where the ancient pines had radiated vitality like deep reservoirs and the earth itself had felt effectively endless, human lifeforce clung close to the body. It was uneven, thin, and disturbingly fragile.

A porter staggered past with two grain sacks across his shoulders, his energy guttering around his spine and knees where years of strain had worn him down. An old woman sat behind a basket of onions, coughing into a cloth; her lifeforce trembled weakly around her chest. A young mother argued over the price of rice while bouncing a sleeping child against her hip. Hers burned brighter, but it was stretched thin, as though exhaustion had pulled it in too many directions at once. Ling Tian's pace slowed.

He had expected hidden cultivators. He had not expected an involuntary public-health survey. These people were not "mortals" in the distant, abstract way cultivation stories liked to use the word. Hunger, age, stress, untreated injury, infection, he could not name every cause, but his new senses showed the result with humiliating clarity. They were candles in bad weather. Some burned steadily. Some sputtered. Some were already close to going out. Ling Tian snapped the perception shut.

The second layer vanished, and the market returned to mud, noise, bargaining, and bodies pressing past him. He exhaled through his nose. Existential awareness of widespread mortality had no place on today's schedule. He had no breakfast, limited daylight, and a business transaction to complete. Those were sufficiently terrible priorities already. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Auntie Mei's stall sat away from the worst of the main thoroughfare, wedged into a damp corner where the road widened beside an old stone wall. It was not a prime location, which probably explained why she could afford it. The shade kept casual customers away but also protected delicate herbs from direct sunlight. Ling Tian considered that competent inventory management. In Hua City, competence was rare enough to be memorable. The stall itself was more organized than almost anything else around it.

Clay jars lined the back shelves in tight rows, each sealed with wax or cloth. Bundles of dried roots hung from overhead beams. Small wooden drawers contained powders, seeds, bark, and what looked suspiciously like dried insect parts. Behind the counter stood Auntie Mei, bent over a heavy table scarred by decades of knives, stains, and spilled medicine. She looked as though she had been born old and simply continued from there.

Her back curved beneath a faded brown robe, and her thin gray hair had been pulled into a knot that was slowly losing its battle with gravity. Her hands were knotted with age, but they moved with precision. One steadied a brass mortar while the other drove a pestle into a dried yellow root. Thwack. Grind. Thwack. Grind. Her eyes, when she finally raised them, were sharper than anything else about her.

In Ling Tian's professional estimation, Auntie Mei remained the only supplier, buyer, and commercial contact in Hua City who had demonstrated consistent reliability. Everyone else operated somewhere between opportunistic and criminal. She merely insulted him while paying market rate. By local standards, that bordered on premium service. She did not look up when he first stopped in front of the stall. Ling Tian waited through another three strokes of the pestle. Thwack. Grind.

Finally, Auntie Mei tapped the brass against the rim of the mortar and inspected him from head to toe. Her gaze paused on the mud coating his calves, then on the bruise darkening one knee.

"You're dripping mountain dirt beside my crates," she said. Her voice sounded like gravel dragged across dry wood.

"Still alive, I see. I gave the mountain until Tuesday." Ling Tian glanced at the ground, then back at her.

"Good morning to you too, Auntie."

"I didn't say it was good."

"Your forecast was inaccurate." Her eyes narrowed.

"Put the herbs down before I revise it." A dry smile tugged at Ling Tian's mouth as he removed the bundle of Cloudmint and placed it on the least damaged patch of table he could find. Auntie Mei grabbed the bundle before his hand had fully withdrawn. There was no ceremony to her inspection. She turned it over, separated several stalks, smelled the leaves, crushed one between two fingers, and examined the residue on her skin. Then came the inevitable attack.

"Too much stalk," she said.

"The buds are small. You cut these early."

"By less than a day," Ling Tian replied.

"The lower-ridge patch develops differently. The soil is more acidic. Bud growth is slower, but sap retention in the lower stalk is higher. The leaves look underdeveloped, but the usable extract should still be within normal range." He delivered the explanation with the calm confidence of a vendor defending a quality-control report, which was perhaps not the most natural behavior for a starving ten-year-old in rags. Auntie Mei stared at him for several seconds.

"Normal range," she repeated flatly.

"Yes."

"You've become annoying."

"I was under the impression that was already established." One corner of her mouth twitched. Barely. Then she took a stalk, pinched the base between two fingers, and split it open with her thumbnail. A bead of thick green sap appeared immediately. The sharp scent of mint cut through the market air. Auntie Mei rubbed the sap between her fingertips, checked the texture, then gave a dismissive grunt.

"Acceptable." Ling Tian filed the word under victory. She tossed the bundle into a basket behind her and reached for the leather pouch at her waist.

"Don't get clever," she warned while loosening the drawstring.

"One decent bundle doesn't make you an herb master. Bring me scrubweed and call it Cloudmint, and I'll make you drink whatever I brew from it." Ling Tian considered that.

"That seems medically irresponsible."

"So does being stupid." He could not argue with the local standard of care. Copper clicked against copper inside her palm. Auntie Mei counted a small stack and slapped it onto the table. Ling Tian glanced down. Eight. He counted again automatically. Eight copper coins. The correct price. No charity in his favor, but more importantly, no orphan exploitation against him. She could easily have paid six, perhaps five.

He had no family, guild, bargaining power, or realistic alternative buyer who would not shave the price simply because they could. Auntie Mei never did. Her criticism was relentless. Her pricing was not. That distinction mattered. He collected the coins and slid them into an inner fold of his tunic, then adjusted the cloth so they would not clink as he walked. Pickpocketing was one industry Hua City appeared fully capable of supporting. The cold metal against his skin produced a brief, unwanted sense of relief.

Eight coppers was not much. But it was food. And food was time. His mind converted the amount immediately. At current prices, he could buy roughly a pound and a half of low-grade millet. If he negotiated well, perhaps two salted tubers too. Protein remained a problem. So did fat. So did practically every micronutrient required by a growing human body. But those were medium-term problems. The short-term objective was simpler. Do not die this week.

If rationed carefully, the purchase could keep him functional for around two days, perhaps slightly longer if environmental Qi continued reducing his fatigue. He had no intention, however, of treating mysterious magical energy as a substitute for nutrition until he understood what it was actually doing to him. A body could not run on enthusiasm. Presumably. Then again, this world had already violated several assumptions he had once considered non-negotiable. The arithmetic was depressing in its simplicity.

Living paycheck to paycheck had been stressful in his previous life. Here, missing payday meant starvation. One failed herb-gathering trip, one twisted ankle, one fever, one bad meal, and the entire system collapsed. He was not building savings. He was purchasing forty-eight-hour extensions on his life. A memory surfaced before he could stop it. A small kitchen in Java. Oil popping in a pan. The faint rattle of a cheap exhaust fan that never seemed to actually remove any smoke. His mother's voice.

A much younger Aditya had forgotten to thank an elderly neighbor who had helped him carry something home. His mother had not been pleased. Never forget kindness. Never behave as though help is owed to you. And remember the people who treat you fairly when they have every opportunity not to. The memory passed quickly, but it left an uncomfortable tightness behind his ribs. Ling Tian looked at Auntie Mei. She had already dismissed him from her attention and returned to the mortar. Thwack. Grind.

She had never fed him for free. Never hugged him. Never asked whether he was lonely. By sentimental standards, she was terrible at kindness. But she bought what he brought. She paid fairly. She warned him when certain herb patches were dangerous. Once, when he had arrived with a fever, she had shoved a foul-smelling packet of bark at him and deducted only half its cost from his next sale. In this world, that counted. Possibly more than words did.

Ling Tian mentally moved her from reliable vendor to critical long-term contact. Strategic relationship management. Supply-chain stability. Mutually beneficial commercial cooperation. The corporate terminology made the gratitude easier to tolerate. Certainly not affection. He nodded once to himself, satisfied with the classification, while Auntie Mei continued grinding as though he had already ceased to exist. Ling Tian turned from the stall and reviewed the rest of his schedule. Groceries next.

Millet first, then compare tuber prices between the northern and eastern stalls. Avoid anything wet, raw, fermented beyond recognition, or actively moving. After that, leave Hua City before the afternoon heat turned the climb back up Crimson Peak into a furnace. It was a simple, practical plan. Naturally, reality chose that exact moment to interfere. The market changed so suddenly that Ling Tian stopped mid-step. The shouting did not vanish all at once.

It faltered, one pocket of noise after another, as if an invisible hand were moving through the square and pressing voices flat. A mule near the gate went silent. Merchants lowered their heads. Customers who had been arguing seconds earlier stepped aside without being told. Then pressure descended over the street. Nothing physical touched him, yet his shoulders tightened as though a heavy palm had settled across them. The air itself seemed harder to draw into his lungs. Ling Tian's expression changed.

His carefully constructed mental firewall trembled. Something beyond it was enormous. Not mountain enormous. Not ancient-tree enormous. Those had been vast but indifferent, forces that existed without caring whether he lived or died. This was different. This presence was focused. Intentional. Moving. And it was coming closer.