Chapter 271: Rich, All at Once

Chapter 273 - Rich, All at Once

Xuan told them he was going into seclusion, and nobody argued, because there is no faster way to end a conversation than to tell a room full of people who’ve just watched you nearly die that you’d like some quiet to put yourself back together.

It was even mostly true. He did need to heal. He did intend to cultivate. He simply left out the part where the cultivating in question meant spending a quarter of a million points nobody else could see, out of a shop that didn’t exist. Details.

The harder conversation was the other one, and he had it with his father before Lin Zhen left.

Because Lin Zhen was leaving. They all were, the Skyedge people, headed back up to a mountain they’d been away from far too long, a sect that needed its founders home now that it was a founder of something. It was the right call and everyone knew it. What took saying out loud was that Xuan wasn’t going with them.

"You’re staying," Lin Zhen said. Not a question. He’d worked it out on his own, the way he worked most things out, a step ahead of being told.

"I’m staying." Xuan didn’t dress it up. "My life’s down here now, or it’s about to be. I’m going to be the Empress’s husband, and Qingyue’s, and neither of those happens from a mountain three provinces north. It’d make no sense to plant myself back in the sect and rule a marriage by letter."

"No. It wouldn’t." His father took it without a flicker of hurt, which was its own small kindness. "Skyedge doesn’t need you sitting on it anymore, Xuan. You already did the impossible thing for it. Go do the next one from down here, and come home when you feel like it, and we’ll leave your rooms the way you left them." A pause, dry. "Try not to conquer anything else before the wedding."

"No promises," Xuan said, and that was that, settled between two men in the handful of words they preferred for the things that ran deepest.

Then the door closed, the room went quiet, and Xuan sat down on the floor of a borrowed chamber with a quarter of a million points and the one person in the world he could actually talk to about it.

’All right. We’re alone. Show me what I’m working with.’

[ Finally. ] Mira had been sitting on this since the coronation, and he could feel her practically vibrating with it. [ I thought that rite would never end. Do you have any idea how long I’ve wanted to open this in front of you without you having to keep a straight face? Here.]

Something unfolded behind his eyes, the familiar shape of the Shop, the one he’d been browsing broke and hungry most of his life like a starving man reading a menu he couldn’t order from. Only it was different now. A whole layer of it had lit up that never had before.

[ Tier Three’s unlocked, ] Mira said, with real relish. [ Finishing a quest that size did it. You’ve been shopping in the shallow end this whole time, Xuan. Severing Dragon Roar, Dragon Descends the Mountain, all of it was Tier Two. Kid stuff. This is where it gets interesting.]

Xuan scrolled into it the way he’d scrolled the lower tiers a thousand times, and started reading, and his good mood lasted exactly until the first price.

’Mira.’

[ Mm?]

’There’s a technique here. A simple one. Footwork, by the look of it, nothing fancy.’ He read it twice to be sure he wasn’t misunderstanding. ’It costs sixty thousand points.’

[ It does.]

’Sixty thousand. For footwork.’ He scrolled down, and it got worse. ’And here’s a pill. A basic one, it literally has "basic" in the name, bottom shelf of the whole tier, and it’s a hundred and fifty thousand.’ He sat back. ’I’ve got a quarter of a million points and this shop just looked at me and laughed. One decent pill and I’m broke again. I fought a whole war on eleven hundred points and I felt rich next to what I’m staring at right now.’

[ Are you finished?]

’I might not be. I’m still processing being poor in a new and more expensive way.’

[ You’re looking at the prices, ] Mira said, patient in the way that meant she was thoroughly enjoying herself. [ Now look at what they do.]

So he looked.

He’d skimmed the descriptions the way you skim a price you’ve already decided you can’t pay, without letting any of it in. Now he read one properly, the basic pill, the hundred-and-fifty-thousand-point one he’d just been sneering at, and read what it actually did to a cultivator’s foundation, and went quiet. Then read it again, slower.

’Oh,’ he said.

[ There it is.]

’That’s not a pill. That’s a shortcut past about two years of dangerous cultivation and a bottleneck people die on.’ He kept reading, and the sneer drained out of him and left something closer to hunger in its place. ’That’s not expensive. If anything it’s underpriced. People would give an arm for this. People have given a great deal more than an arm for a great deal less.’

[ Now you’re getting it. ] The satisfaction in her voice was total. [ Tier Two sold you clever tricks. Useful ones, the kind that kept you alive punching above your weight, and I’m proud of every one. But that’s what they were. Tier Three doesn’t deal in tricks. It sells the actual thing. It sells outcomes that rich old monsters spend centuries chasing, sitting on a shelf with a number beside them, and the number only looks insane until you understand you’re not paying for an item. You’re paying for the twenty years you get to skip.]

’All right,’ Xuan said, and the strategist in him woke all the way up, the part that had never once in his life looked at a resource without immediately working out how to spend it three moves ahead. ’Then we do this properly. I’ve got a quarter of a million points, which is either everything or barely anything depending on how stupid I am about it, and I would very much like to not be stupid about it.’

[ Music to my ears. Talk it out. You think better out loud, and I like the company.]

’First rule. I don’t blow the whole purse on one shiny thing.’ He was already pacing it the way he’d paced the war. ’The flashy single card wins a moment and loses the fight after it. Dragon Descends the Mountain ended battles and put me facedown on the ground every single time. I don’t want more of that. I’m done being a man who wins once and then can’t stand back up.’

[ Resilience over fireworks. Boring. Correct, but boring. Keep going.]

’Second. I’ve got a hole in me now.’ He pressed the heel of his hand to his sternum without thinking about it, to the quiet scar of the channel that would never carry what it used to. ’Whatever I buy has to account for that. I’m not spending a single point pretending the damage isn’t there. I want something that works with it, or around it, or turns it into a road instead of a wall. I’d rather build the man I actually am now and build him well than paper over the old one and have the patch fail me at the worst possible second.’

[ Now that,] Mira said, and the teasing dropped out of her for a beat, [ is the smartest thing you’ve said since the crown went on the woman downstairs. Most people who come into money try to buy their old self back, only bigger. You’re trying to buy the self you’ve actually got, and make it good. That’s rarer than you’d believe. It’s also how you don’t waste this.]

’Third. Versatility.’ He was warming to it now. ’I’ve spent my whole life winning fights I had no business being in by having exactly one answer the other man didn’t see coming. That runs out. The higher I climb, the more the people across from me will already have seen every trick I own. So I don’t want one more trick. I want options. I want to be the man with three answers to a problem, not the man who bet everything on the one and prayed.’

[ So. Not a bigger hammer.] He could hear her assembling it right alongside him, pleased. [ A better toolbox. Resilience, honesty about the scar, options. For a man who spent the whole war broke, you have remarkably expensive taste in strategy.]

’I’ve had a lot of time to window-shop,’ Xuan said. ’You learn what you actually want when you can’t afford any of it. Turns out I don’t need to be the strongest thing in the room. I want to be the last thing in it still on my feet. There’s a difference, and it’s the only reason I’m still breathing.’

[ Then here’s the plan,] Mira said, shifting into the brisk, competent register she got when something was actually coming together, which was quietly one of Xuan’s favorite versions of her. [ We don’t buy tonight. You’re held together with pills and stubbornness and you’ll make a bad call tired, and Tier Three is not the place to make a bad call tired. Sleep. Heal a little. Tomorrow we go through it item by item, and I make you justify every point before it leaves your hands, and you resent me for an afternoon, and we come out the other end with a version of you that would frighten the man you were a month ago.]

’You’re going to make me show my work.’

[ I’m going to make you show your work.]

’For a shop only I can see, run by a voice only I can hear, spending money that isn’t real anywhere but the inside of my own skull.’

[ The money is extremely real, Xuan. It just quoted you a footwork technique that costs more than most cities. Show the footwork technique some respect.] A beat, and the warmth came back under it. [ Get some rest. You pulled the impossible off today and watched your father sit at a table he’ll dine out on for the rest of his life, and tomorrow you get to quietly turn into something new in a locked room while an empire assumes you’re taking a nap. That’s a good couple of days by anyone’s count. Even yours.]

’Even mine,’ Xuan agreed, and lay back on the floor of a borrowed room, in a capital that was apparently home now, with a quarter of a million points burning a hole in a pocket nobody else knew he had, and let himself feel, for the first time in longer than he could remember, something that wasn’t grief or exhaustion or dread.

It felt a great deal like anticipation. He’d half forgotten he still had it in him.