# Chapter Four — What the Market Knows

  The servant's name, Feizui learned, was Pei Dun.

  Seventeen years old. Third son of a kitchen worker. Two years employed by the estate, most of which he had apparently spent watching Feizui's soap operation with increasingly desperate eyes.

  "...You could have just asked me," Feizui said.

  They were standing in Yaho's receiving room — clean, spare, reflecting its occupant perfectly. Yaho was Wufu's appointed administrator in the Duke's extended absence. Tall. Late forties. A scholar's posture and the particular stillness of someone who had learned long ago that most problems resolved themselves if you waited and watched carefully enough.

  Pei Dun stood between two household guards, head down, not speaking.

  "...He was found in your quarters," Yaho said, glancing at Feizui. "...With the box in hand."

  "...He didn't open it," Feizui said. "...I'd already moved what was inside."

  "...That is not the relevant point."

  "...I know. I just want it on record."

  Yaho studied him for a moment. Then turned to the guards.

  "...Confined to quarters. Duties suspended pending review." A pause. "...Dismissed from the estate at month's end."

  Pei Dun's shoulders dropped.

  He was escorted out without another word.

  Feizui watched him go.

  "...You're not imprisoning him?"

  "...He is seventeen," Yaho said. "...Dismissal is sufficient."

  "...Fair enough."

  Yaho looked at him. "...You seem unbothered."

  "...I moved the formula two days ago," Feizui said. "...I had a feeling."

  A brief silence.

  "...You anticipated this."

  "...I grew up broke," Feizui said simply. "...You learn to watch people when they start looking at your things differently."

  Yaho said nothing for a moment. Then, quietly, something that might have been approval moved behind his eyes.

  "...Keep your business running," he said. "...You've earned that much."

  Feizui bowed and left.

  ---

  The soap operation didn't miss a day.

  If anything, Pei Dun's removal simplified things. Feizui restructured the supply chain, brought in two workers he had been watching for months — reliable, unbothered by long hours, not particularly interested in what made the product work as long as their share of the coin arrived on time.

  The business hummed along.

  And Feizui, with the thin thread of early Qi Refinement now alive in his chest, began to understand for the first time what the cultivators around him were actually doing.

  Not in theory. Not from books.

  He could feel it now. The faint pressure of Qi moving through someone else's meridians when they stood close enough. The way a room changed texture when a cultivator was actively circulating. Things he had been blind to for ten years, suddenly visible — not clearly, not fully, the way you can't read a page from across the room, but present. Real.

  It made him hungry in a way nothing had since he first arrived.

  *I'm still at the very bottom,* he thought, during one of his night sessions in the empty courtyard. *Early Qi Refinement. There are children in this city who outrank me.*

  He sat against the wall.

  *Early. Mid. Late. Peak. Then Qi Condensation — early, mid, late, peak. Then Foundation Establishment. Then further still.*

  He stared at his hands.

  *The people who chased me through that forest. Whatever they were — they weren't weak. They moved differently. Felt different.*

  He hadn't forgotten them.

  He hadn't forgotten that line — somewhere far away, something had noticed him — or the way it had felt less like a metaphor and more like a fact.

  *They're still out there,* he thought. *Waiting for something. Waiting for me to get somewhere worth hitting.*

  He stood up.

  *Then I'd better be ready before they decide I'm there.*

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  He went back to training.

  ---

  It was on a market day — three weeks after the Pei Dun situation — that he found the egg.

  The Surei City market ran along three connected streets in the merchant's district, a dense and chaotic sprawl of stalls and carts and shouted prices that Feizui had come to know well over the years. He had suppliers here. Familiar faces. A few vendors who set things aside for him when they came in.

  He was moving through the crowd toward his usual fat supplier when something stopped him.

  Not a sound. Not a sight.

  A feeling.

  Like something pulling at the thread of Qi in his chest. Not hard. Not aggressive. Just — present. A resonance, faint and strange, like hearing a song you don't recognize but somehow already know the melody to.

  He stopped walking.

  Looked around.

  A few stalls down, half-buried under a pile of miscellaneous goods on a blanket spread across the ground, was an egg.

  It was not large. About the size of two fists pressed together. Dark — not black, but the particular deep grey of storm clouds seen from underneath, shot through with veins of something that caught the light wrong, like oil on water but colder.

  The vendor — an old woman with no stall, just the blanket and a bored expression — didn't look up as he crouched down.

  "...What is this?" Feizui asked.

  "...Don't know," she said. "...Found it three days ago outside the city wall. Something left it there." She shrugged. "...Or dropped it."

  "...Is it alive?"

  "...Warm," she said. "...That's all I can tell you."

  He reached out and touched it.

  The resonance hit him like a bell being struck directly against his sternum. His Qi flared without his permission — just a brief, involuntary pulse, like a reflex.

  He pulled his hand back.

  Stared at the egg.

  "...How much?"

  ---

  The auction happened two days later, at a hall in the merchant's district that Feizui had walked past a hundred times without going in.

  He went in now.

  It was not a grand affair — mid-tier goods, mostly. Pills of modest quality. A few weapons. Some materials he didn't recognize. The kind of auction that attracted serious buyers without attracting the kind of attention that brought trouble.

  He bought three things.

  A set of meridian-warming wraps that Steward Bao — now Yaho — had mentioned were useful for early Qi Refinement practitioners in physical-heavy training. A small manual on Qi circulation efficiency that cost more than he wanted to spend and was worth every coin. And, at the very end, almost as an afterthought in the final lot, a pendant — plain stone, nothing remarkable to look at — that when he held it produced the same faint resonance as the egg. Weaker. Older. Like an echo of the same source.

  He bought it without understanding why.

  He understood, increasingly, that some things in this world operated on logic that arrived after the fact.

  ---

  The egg hatched nine days later.

  He had kept it on his desk, which he recognized was not a sophisticated incubation strategy but which seemed to be working based on the fact that it kept getting warmer.

  He woke at dawn to a sound like paper tearing and sat up to find the egg cracked open and something sitting in the ruins of the shell, regarding him with eyes that were entirely silver — no pupil, no iris, just flat mercuric silver that caught the early light and threw it back wrong.

  It was small. The size of a large cat, roughly, though the shape was wrong for a cat — longer through the body, lower to the ground, limbs jointed in a way that suggested speed rather than strength. Its coat, if you could call it that, was the deep moving dark of the egg's shell, and when it shifted, shadows moved with it in ways that didn't track the actual light source.

  It looked at him.

  He looked at it.

  "...Hello," he said.

  It made no sound.

  It stepped off the desk — not jumped, stepped, with a strange liquid precision — and walked across the floor to him and sat down at his feet and continued looking at him with those silver eyes.

  "...What are you?" he said.

  Still nothing.

  He reached down slowly.

  It didn't move.

  He touched its head.

  The resonance again — stronger now, much stronger, a clear and unmistakable connection running between his Qi and whatever lived in this creature. Not painful. The opposite of painful. Like something that had been slightly misaligned clicking into place.

  He sat on the floor of his room at dawn with this ancient-lineage shadow creature at his feet and thought about his algorithms homework and how long ago that felt.

  "...Xu," he said.

  The creature blinked its silver eyes.

  "...That's your name. Xu."

  Xu looked at him for another long moment.

  Then, with complete dignity, turned around twice and lay down on his feet.

  Feizui decided this was acceptable.

  ---

  Yaho found him in the courtyard the following morning, Xu draped across his shoulders like a living scarf, silver eyes tracking everything with predatory patience.

  Yaho looked at Xu.

  Xu looked at Yaho.

  "...I won't ask," Yaho said.

  "...Probably wise."

  Yaho clasped his hands behind his back — his thinking posture, Feizui had learned. "...There is something I've been meaning to discuss with you."

  "...Alright."

  "...The Surei Academy enrollment opens in four months," Yaho said. "...Lord Wufu's emblem grants you the right to apply. Given your current cultivation level and your..." he glanced at Xu, "...particular circumstances, I believe it would be in your interest to attend."

  Feizui was quiet for a moment.

  "...What kind of academy?"

  "...Cultivation. Combat. Strategy. Alchemy to a basic degree." Yaho paused. "...It is located in the capital. A city called Lianmen — perhaps a day's travel from here. The academy sits at the city's highest point. It is called the Tianmen Academy."

  "...And you think I'm ready?"

  Yaho considered this with the seriousness it deserved.

  "...I think," he said carefully, "...that you have spent ten years becoming ready for something. Whether that something is the academy or not, the academy will at minimum accelerate what you have already started."

  Feizui looked out across the courtyard.

  Xu shifted on his shoulders, tail curling briefly around his neck.

  "...Four months," Feizui said.

  "...Four months," Yaho confirmed. "...I suggest you use them."

  ---

  He used them.

  The mornings were the same — disciples' courtyard, forms, Qi circulation drills that now actually meant something since he had something to circulate. But Yaho added structure to what had previously been self-directed chaos. A schedule. Specific goals. A curriculum built around the gaps Yaho had clearly been noting for years without comment.

  Feizui's Qi Refinement deepened. Still early stage — the threshold to mid was not close yet — but the quality of it changed. Became more stable. More responsive. Less like a candle flame that went out if he breathed wrong and more like something with actual roots.

  Xu trained with him.

  Not in any formal sense. But the creature was always there — watching, occasionally moving to intercept something or position itself in a way that, Feizui gradually realized, was actually useful. Like a shadow that had decided to be helpful. When he sparred with the household knights Xu would sit at the edge and track every movement with those silver eyes, and afterward Feizui could swear his awareness of his own blind spots had sharpened.

  He didn't fully understand what Xu was yet.

  He suspected he wasn't supposed to yet.

  The soap business ran itself at this point, largely. He checked in. Collected his share. Reinvested a portion into the next round of elixirs.

  He read everything Yaho made available about Tianmen Academy.

  The trial system. The enrollment structure. The ranking methodology. He approached it the way he had approached every system in his life — understand the rules completely before you decide which ones matter.

  Four months passed.

  And on a clear morning with Xu on his shoulders and a travel pack on his back and Yaho standing at the estate gate with an expression that was probably the closest he came to warmth, Feizui set out for Lianmen.

  ---

  Lianmen was larger than Surei City.

  Not dramatically — not the difference between a village and a metropolis — but larger in the particular way of a city that had been important for a very long time and had the architecture to prove it. The streets were wider. The buildings were older. Everything had the faint weight of history pressed into its stone.

  Tianmen Academy sat at the highest point of the city, exactly as Yaho had described — a complex of buildings that stepped up the hillside in tiered levels, each one visible from the one below, the whole thing crowned at the top by a structure whose roof caught the morning light and threw it across the city like a signal.

  Feizui stood at the base of the approach road and looked up at it.

  "...Well," he said.

  Xu made a sound for the first time since hatching — not a word, not quite, something lower and briefer than that, somewhere between a breath and a note.

  "...Yeah," Feizui agreed.

  He started walking up.

  ---

  The enrollment hall was on the academy's first tier — a large, organized space that managed to feel both official and chaotic simultaneously, the way all check-in processes do when too many people are trying to move through them at once.

  Feizui joined a line.

  He waited.

  Around him, the other enrollees ranged from clearly confident to visibly terrified, with most of the confident ones clustered in groups and most of the terrified ones standing alone. He recognized the social geometry immediately. It was the same in every new environment he had ever entered.

  He had long since stopped caring which category he appeared to be in.

  When he reached the front, a tired-looking administrator with ink on three of his fingers and the expression of a man on his fortieth enrollment check-in of the morning looked up at him, looked at Xu, looked back at him, and decided not to address the creature on his shoulders.

  "...Name."

  "...Feizui."

  "...Clan or family affiliation."

  "...Duke Wufu's household. Surei City."

  The administrator's pen paused for a fraction of a second. Then continued.

  "...Cultivation level."

  "...Early Qi Refinement."

  No pause this time. The pen moved. A card was produced — plain, rectangular, with a number stamped in dark ink.

  **2969.**

  "...This is your academy identification," the administrator said. "...Do not lose it. Your trial assignment is in three days. Report to the eastern grounds at dawn."

  Feizui took the card.

  Looked at the number.

  "...Thank you."

  He stepped out of the line and found a wall to stand against and looked out at the enrollment hall filling with the next generation of cultivators, some of them from families that had been powerful in this world for centuries, some of them from nothing, all of them here for the same trial.

  Xu's tail curled around his arm.

  "...Three days," Feizui said quietly.

  He thought about the feeling he'd had since arriving in this world — the one that lived at the edge of awareness, like weather before it arrived. The pressure at the margins of things.

  It was closer now.

  He couldn't have explained how he knew.

  He just did.

  "...They're here too," he said.

  Xu's silver eyes swept the hall slowly.

  And said nothing.