Chapter 26: A Poor Scholar Named Han Wen Signs the Registry, and a Guild Appraiser Stares at a Single Pill Too Long

By dawn, the cellar beneath Ling’s Antiquities & Scraps had stopped being a cellar.

The silver array chalked across its floor glowed a steady gold, and the thread of old spirit Qi in the wall had swelled into a thin, patient stream. A compact bronze furnace stood against the far wall, its belly warm, a fine plume of white smoke rising from the Nine-Dragon flame. The air smelled of herbs and heated stone.

Adam stood in the middle of it with his sleeves rolled back and nodded once.

’Enough for a lab,’ he thought. ’Not enough for a business. For that, I need a license.’

He pulled his gray hood forward, bolted the cellar door behind him, and stepped out into the morning.

The Commercial Registry Bureau of the Outer District was a long, flat building of gray stone with a line that curled twice around its courtyard. Adam joined the end of it, stoop-shouldered and patient, and waited three hours.

When he finally reached the counter, a clerk with ink on his cuffs did not look up.

"Name."

"Han Wen." It was the first name that came to him that belonged to no one he knew. "A traveling scholar from the Southern Continent. I’ve bought a shop in the Slum Ring and need the deed transferred."

"Southern Continent." The clerk finally glanced up, found a thin man in a gray cloak, and looked away again. "Three hundred stones for the transfer. Fifty for the stamp. Property number?"

Adam read it from the yellowed deed. The clerk flipped through a ledger, ran his finger down a column, and stopped.

"Ah. You’ll want to know this one’s already encumbered."

"Encumbered?"

"Security services." The clerk turned the ledger so Adam could see. "Registered to the Gilded-Crow Commerce Office, Slum Ring Division. Eighty stones a month, collected by a licensed agent. It transfers with the deed."

Adam read the line twice. Under the red stamp of the Gilded-Crow, in small, neat characters, was the name of the licensed agent: Iron-Tiger Gang, per Hu Bao.

"That’s legal?" he asked quietly.

"It is paperwork," the clerk said, with the tired contempt of a man who had said it ten thousand times. "Next."

Adam paid his three hundred and fifty stones and walked out into the sun with the deed in his sleeve.

’So it isn’t a gang,’ he thought, as he threaded through the market crowd. ’It’s a tax. The Gilded-Crow doesn’t need to break the law, because it wrote the law, and every shop in the Slum Ring pays it twice, once to the tiger and once to the crow.’

He walked on until the signs changed from scrap and rope to glass and brass, and the street opened onto a broad square of white jade.

The Nine-Cauldron Hall of the Imperial Alchemy Guild rose at its center. It was a pagoda of nine stacked roofs, each one a different color, with a green-and-gold banner snapping from the highest tier. Apprentices in matching robes hurried across the steps with bundles of herbs in their arms.

Adam went in through the side door, to the public appraisal counter, where a long bamboo desk was manned by a single woman.

She looked about thirty, in the Guild’s green-and-gold robes with ink on her cuffs and a pair of jade needles in her hair. Her aura had the steady shape of a Late Foundation Establishment cultivator, and her eyes were sharp enough to cut glass.

"Appraisal is five stones," she said without looking up. "I appraise pills, pill furnaces, and fools. If you’re a fool, I charge extra."

"Then I’ll hope to be a pill."

Adam set a small jade vial on the bamboo. Inside rested a single High-Grade Blood-Replenishing Bone Pill, the humblest thing he knew how to make.

She tipped it into a dish of clear liquid and watched the surface. Then she stopped.

Her eyes widened.

The liquid, which should have clouded with the pill’s sediment, did not. It stayed perfectly clear, and the pill’s pale light pulsed through it like a heartbeat.

"There’s no residue," she said slowly.

"Is that unusual?"

"Unusual?" She picked up the pill with a pair of silver tongs and turned it to the light. "Mister..."

"Han Wen."

"Mister Han. A High-Grade pill with zero sediment does not exist, because nothing exists with zero sediment. The best of our Guild’s journeymen manage ninety-two percent on a good day." She put the pill down very gently, as if it were an egg. "I am Su Lian, Senior Appraiser of this hall. Who refined this?"

"A friend of mine," Adam said.

"Your friend," Su Lian said, "is not an ordinary alchemist." Her eyes flicked up, sharp and searching.

Adam said nothing. The corner of Su Lian’s mouth twitched, and she let it drop with a shrug.

"Fine. Keep your secrets. Everyone in this city has some." She reached beneath the desk and pulled out a thin jade placard. "This is for your friend, then. Or for you, if you’re braver than you look."

He took it. Green characters glowed on its surface: AUTUMN CAULDRON TRIALS. Ten days from today. Open to all unlicensed alchemists. Entry: one hundred stones.

"The winners receive the Guild’s seal," Su Lian said. "With it, you may sell pills anywhere in the Imperial City without a patron, and the top three are granted residence in the Inner Noble Ring." She tapped the placard. "Without it, anything above a Mid-Grade pill is contraband. You’d be selling in the dark, Mister Han, and the Gilded-Crow owns the dark."

"I’ve noticed."

"I thought you might." She folded her hands. "A word of warning, then, for the record. Three years running, the champion of the Trials has been the same young man. Ye Xuan, of the Ye clan. Genius of the Gilded-Crow’s own bloodline, and a Golden Core at twenty-two."

The name rang in the quiet like a struck bell.

Adam kept his face exactly as it was. He felt the Void-Cleaving Sword stir in his dantian, curious, and stilled it with a thought.

"Ye," he repeated mildly.

"You’ve heard of him?"

"I’ve heard of the family."

"Then you know to be careful," Su Lian said, and for a moment the sharpness left her face. "Nobody beats Ye Xuan. I wouldn’t be sorry to see someone try."

Adam slipped the placard into his sleeve and bowed.

"Ten days," he said.

He walked down the nine-colored steps into the white square with the sun on his back. A stage, a license, and the bloodline he had crossed a continent to find, all under the same roof.

’Ye Xuan,’ he thought, tasting the name. ’You’ll do.’