Jiang knew that he should be finding somewhere to stay for the night before he did anything else. While he didn’t exactly have a frame of reference, it wasn’t hard to notice that Biragawa was playing host to a great many people, all presumably here for the tournament. That meant that accommodation would be more difficult to find, and likely more expensive as well.

  He would be best served by locating a decent inn, probably selling the two spirit beast cores he had on him to bolster his available funds, and only then heading to the slaver that had purchased his family from the Broker.

  But Jiang simply couldn’t bring himself to wait another second.

  It had already been months. He had crossed a province, joined and left a sect, and killed men just to get this far. The idea of stopping to haggle over the price of a room while being so close felt physically impossible.

  He turned away from the signs advertising food and lodging, adjusting his course toward the merchant district. He had the location from the Broker’s notes committed to memory. In a city like Biragawa, where everything was regulated and taxed, a slaver wouldn’t be hiding in a sewer. They would be a legitimate business, possibly even advertising to potential customers, though the idea of it turned his stomach.

  Still, it made things simpler. No sneaking around in the dark, no breaking locks. Just walking through a front door.

  Jiang moved through the crowd, finding the rhythm of the street easier to navigate than he expected. In Qinghe, the press of bodies had felt suffocating, a chaotic mess of threats he didn’t know how to read. Here, despite the sheer number of people flooding the streets for the tournament, he felt… settled.

  He wondered, briefly, if it was just experience. He’d spent weeks in Qinghe, learned the hard way how cities breathed and moved. Or maybe it was just the coin pouch at his belt. In Qinghe, he’d been a desperate beggar trying to avoid notice. Now, he had silver. He had a sword he knew how to use – mostly – and he was a cultivator of the second realm.

  He wasn’t prey anymore.

  As he walked, he let his awareness drift outward. It had become a habit over the last few weeks on the road. With his meridians damaged, actively cycling his Qi to practice techniques was agony, like pouring boiling water through his veins. But sensing was different. It was passive. The burn was still there – a low, high-pitched whine at the back of his mind – but it was manageable. It was just listening.

  He extended his senses, letting the threads of his perception brush against the world around him.

  The city resolved into a map of energy. The mortals were dim, quiet flickers, barely registering against the background noise. But scattered among them were brighter sparks.

  Jiang nearly stumbled.

  There were so many of them.

  In Liǔxī, a cultivator was a myth. In Qinghe, they were uncommon – while he had only personally interacted with a handful, Mistress Bai had mentioned there were a few dozen. Here, on a random street in Biragawa, he counted four within fifty paces.

  It was disorienting. He pushed his senses further, curious, sweeping across the flow of traffic.

  He brushed against a group of three walking on the other side of the street. They felt similar to him – second realm, maybe a bit further along. The moment his senses touched them, their Qi retracted. It snapped inward, pulling tight against their bodies like a turtle pulling into a shell. They didn’t look at him, but he felt their wariness, the sudden closing of a door.

  Interesting.

  He pushed further ahead, toward a figure moving through the crowd with an easy, drifting grace. The man’s Qi felt different – dense, heavy, like a coiled spring. Stronger than Jiang. Much stronger.

  Jiang’s senses brushed against him, probing, trying to gauge the depth of the man’s strength. The reaction was instant. The man didn’t turn or stop walking. He simply flared his own intent, a sharp, focused spike of will that slammed back down the connection Jiang had opened.

  It felt like a physical slap.

  Jiang gasped, his head snapping back as a spike of white-hot pain seared through his damaged meridians. It rattled his teeth, a sudden, ringing pressure that made his vision swim for a second.

  The message was clear, even without words. Back off.

  Jiang stumbled, catching himself on a wooden post supporting a shop awning. He blinked, shaking his head to clear the ringing. The pain in his meridians flared hot and angry, then settled back into the usual dull ache.

  He looked up. The cultivator was already gone, lost in the crowd, the rebuke delivered and forgotten. Jiang straightened, smoothing his tunic and forcing his breathing to even out. He felt a flush of embarrassment heat his neck.

  Right.

  In the forest, extending your senses was just survival. You needed to know what was around you. If you felt a wolf, you checked the wolf. But this wasn’t the forest.

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  He realised that what he’d been doing was the equivalent of walking down the street, staring at someone, and then going up and poking them in the face for good measure. In a city full of tigers, staring was a challenge. It was rude.

  It seemed there was an etiquette to this, one he hadn’t learned in his short time at the Sect. Mostly because at the time his Qi senses hadn’t been sharp enough to irritate people, and he hadn’t been familiar enough with using them to fall back on them naturally.

  He took a breath and pulled his senses back. He retracted the threads of perception, coiling his awareness tight inside his own skin until he was just another face in the crowd. The world instantly felt smaller. The map of energy vanished, leaving him with only his eyes and ears.

  It felt surprisingly terrible.

  But it was safer this way. If he wasn’t looking at them, they weren’t looking at him. And if he wasn’t projecting his senses, there was less chance of someone noticing the strange, dark texture of his Qi, or the cold shadow that lay underneath it. The scan at the gate had been cursory, but a focused cultivator might notice the Pact.

  The thought sat heavily with him as he moved on, threading through the crowd with his awareness folded tight. Without his senses, Biragawa felt louder and sharper, the press of bodies harder to anticipate. He found himself adjusting his pace more often, sidestepping carts and inattentive pedestrians by reading shoulders and footwork instead of the subtle shifts of Qi he’d grown accustomed to. It was… manageable. Uncomfortable, but manageable. He reminded himself that he’d lived his entire life up until now without the benefit of Qi senses, and he’d done just fine.

  The streets grew narrower and busier as he went, the buildings crowding closer together, their lower floors given over to shops and services. Signs jutted out over the road on wooden arms, painted in bright colours or carved in careful relief. Jiang didn’t slow, but his eyes flicked to them automatically. Food. Tailors. Bathhouses. Inns.

  He slowed despite himself when he reached the first one and noticed the neatly lettered board listing prices. He stopped long enough to read it twice, convinced at first that he must have misunderstood.

  One night: three silver.

  He stared at the numbers, then glanced at the building itself. It was clean, certainly, but not ostentatious – two stories, timber-framed, with shuttered windows and a modest common room visible through the open door. Nicer than the Leaky Kettle he’d stayed in back in Qinghe, certainly, but not three silver nicer.

  The further away he got from the main streets, the better the prices got, which was a small relief, but even these ‘better’ prices were enough to make his stomach churn.

  He could afford it. That was the irritating part. Between the money he had left over from the jobs he’d done for the Broker, the leftover money from paying for supplies that Li Xuan hadn’t bothered asking for, and what the two spirit beast cores would fetch, he wasn’t in immediate danger of running dry. But the numbers were… sobering. Biragawa didn’t just eat money; it swallowed it whole.

  And it wouldn’t just be him.

  The thought surfaced unbidden, and he didn’t try to push it away. If he succeeded – when he succeeded – he wouldn’t be paying for a single bed anymore. His mother and sister would need food, clothes, shelter. And whatever it took to actually free them, assuming the slaver demanded payment rather than simply handing them over out of the goodness of his heart. Jiang snorted softly at that idea.

  His hand brushed the pouch at his belt, fingers pressing briefly against the smooth shapes inside. The cores would help. A lot. But even as he did the math in his head, he felt the margin shrinking.

  He would need more money.

  Hunting was the obvious answer. It was straightforward, honest in its own brutal way. You found a beast, you killed it, you took its core. Considering how things had ended with the Broker’s offered tasks, the simplicity held a powerful appeal.

  He grimaced faintly as a familiar spike of heat flared along his meridians when he shifted his pack. Hunting meant using Qi, at least a little. Which meant pain. He could do it, probably, but it wouldn’t be pleasant.

  He pushed the thought aside. One problem at a time.

  The character of the street changed again as he went on. The smells grew harsher, layered with sweat and animals and something sharp and unpleasant that lingered at the back of his throat. Guards became more common here, posted at intersections and doorways, their expressions bored but watchful. The crowd thinned, replaced by clusters of men standing in small groups, talking quietly, eyes flicking toward passersby with calculating interest.

  Jiang slowed, scanning the signs until he found what he was looking for.

  The slave market occupied a broad, open square, paved in stone darkened by age and use. At its centre stood a raised platform – low and wide, with iron rings set into the stone at regular intervals. A stage.

  The square was ringed by buildings, each with its own sign and guards posted outside. Some were squat and utilitarian, their fa?ades scarred and stained. Others were larger, more ornate, with carved lintels and banners proclaiming the quality of their ‘goods’.

  Jiang stopped at the edge of the square.

  For a moment, the noise of the city seemed to dull, replaced by the thud of his pulse in his ears. His jaw tightened, teeth grinding together as an image rose unbidden in his mind – his mother and sister being dragged across that stage, paraded in front of a crowd like cattle, onlookers bidding—

  He cut the thought off hard, forcing his gaze away from the stage and down to the stone beneath his feet. Anger flared hot and fast, a dangerous thing in a place like this. He breathed through it, slow and controlled, until the edge dulled enough for him to think again.

  This was reality here. Open. Unashamed.

  Jiang’s stomach twisted, but his steps didn’t falter as he crossed the square. Quietly, in the privacy of his mind, he swore to himself that one day he would come back here and burn it all to the ground.

  But that day wasn’t today. Today required a different kind of fire—cold, controlled, and hidden deep beneath a mask of indifference. He forced his hands to relax, smoothing the tension from his shoulders as he scanned the perimeter of the square until his gaze landed on the establishment described in the Broker’s dossier.

  It stood apart from the squat, utilitarian holding pens that dominated the rest of the market; a narrow, two-story structure built of dark, polished wood and pale stone, its windows shielded by intricate latticework screens that suggested discretion rather than security. There were no iron rings set into the walls here, no cages left out in the open to advertise the wares. It looked less like a prison and more like a high-end tea house, the kind of place that catered to a clientele who preferred their barbarism presented with a facade of civilisation.

  The sight of it made his skin crawl more than the open cages did. It implied a permanence, a settled acceptance of the trade that turned his stomach, but he swallowed the bile and kept walking. He placed his hand on the door – for a brief, vicious moment imagined splintering it with a single strike before controlling himself – and stepped inside.