Chapter 218: The Shopkeeper
He climbed back up to his rooms with frost melting out of his collar and a woman’s laugh ringing somewhere pleasant behind his ribs, barred the door, and lowered himself to the floor.
’All right. Open the shop. Let’s see what forty-four thousand buys.’
[ Welcome, ] Mira said, in a voice gone suddenly bright and horribly customer-facing, [ to the Sovereign System Emporium, where the prices are imaginary and the buyer is a menace. My name is Mira, I’ll be your shopkeeper this evening, and no, we do not do refunds, exchanges, or sympathy. How may I ruin your savings? ]
’You’re enjoying this far too much.’
[ I have been carrying a merchant’s soul in a warrior’s job for a very long time, Xuan, and I intend to squeeze every drop out of this. ] A panel unfurled across his vision, crisp-lined and glowing. [ Behold. Your balance.]
ORIGIN POINTS: 44,180
[ Now. Before you go pawing at the shiny things, house rules, because you’ll want to understand exactly what you’re buying.] Her tone kept the shopkeeper polish but the meaning underneath cut hard. [ When a normal cultivator buys a technique manual, all they’ve bought is paper. That’s all it is. They then have to learn it the hard way. A Black-rank technique eats months of a man’s life to master. An Earth-rank one eats years. A Heaven-rank one can eat a career, and half of them never finish. ]
’And when I buy one?’
[ When you buy one, the system pours it straight into your bones, complete, mastered, ready to swing the instant you stand up. No years. No fumbling through the forms. That is the single most broken thing about what you’re carrying around in your skull, and I say that as the thing carrying it. So spend like it matters, because every point you drop here comes back as a technique you’d otherwise never have lived long enough to learn. ]
Xuan scrolled. The shop threw up rank after rank, and most of it he waved past on sight. Cultivation methods he didn’t need, defensive arts that would slow him down, a hundred flowery sword forms with names about plum blossoms and autumn moons that cost a fortune and did, as far as he could tell, very little.
’Filter it. I don’t want pretty. I want two attack techniques, and I want them for a war, not a duelling stage. What’s wrong with what I’ve already got?’
[ Good question, and you already half know the answer. ] The shop dimmed and Mira laid two of his own techniques up beside the listings, comparing. [ Your Seven Dragon Sword Art is solid, versatile, Yellow-rank. Fine for a fair fight. And your pride and joy, Falling Stars, the Beidou thing you built yourself, is genuinely beautiful and I love it. But be honest about its flaw. ]
’It’s slow.’
[ It’s slow. You have to dance around a man planting seven stars before you can spring the trap. On a duelling floor, with room and time, gorgeous. In a battle, with three men coming at you and no time to waltz? You get a spear in the kidney on star number four. It’s a finisher that needs a quiet afternoon to set up, and wars don’t give you quiet afternoons.] She let that sit. [ So. First purchase. You want something that hits now, the instant you decide to, and takes full advantage of that new reach your blade just grew. Let me show you the one I’d buy.]
A single listing swelled to fill his vision.
[ SEVERING DRAGON ROAR ]
[ Rank: Earth. Golden Core-tier offensive sword art. ]
[ Function: Projected sword-intent shockwave. A single horizontal draw releases a crescent of compressed intent that travels outward at range, cutting whatever it crosses. No wind-up. No positioning. Draw and release. ]
[ Synergy — Dragonvein Core: your blade already projects intent past the edge. This art weaponises that projection into a ranged strike proper, extending killing distance to dozens of paces. ]
[ Synergy — Armorcleave: the crescent inherits the Dragonvein edge. Spirit-armor and defensive Qi shear rather than stop it. ]
[ Cost: 16,000 Origin Points. ]
Xuan read it twice, and something predatory woke up behind his sternum.
’It fixes exactly what Falling Stars gets wrong. No set-up. I just draw, and a man forty paces away who thinks he’s safe suddenly isn’t.’
[ Now you’re shopping. ] The shopkeeper gloss thinned into genuine approval. [ Falling Stars is your masterpiece for a duel you control. This is your answer for a battlefield you don’t. It’s instant, it’s ranged, and with that Dragonvein edge riding it, it walks through the wall of defensive Qi that half the officers you’re about to meet built their whole reputation on. Sixteen thousand. Expensive. Worth every point.]
’Buy it.’
[ Sold to the reckless young man on the floor. ]
The panel flared, the balance ticked down, and it hit him.
The technique came into him like water filling a footprint, instant and total. One breath he was a man who had heard of Severing Dragon Roar. The next he was a man who had performed it ten thousand times, who knew the exact angle of the draw, the precise pulse of intent to compress into the crescent, the timing of the release, all of it planted in his hands and his hips as though he’d trained it for a decade under a master who no longer existed. There was no learning. There was only, suddenly, knowing.
’That,’ he breathed, ’will never stop being unfair.’
[ Twenty-eight thousand, one hundred and eighty left, ] Mira noted, back to ledger-crisp. [ Now go and swing it before you buy anything else, because I want to see it as badly as you do, and a technique you haven’t tested is just an expensive rumour.]
He rose, crossed to the narrow window, and looked out at the sheer rock face across the ravine, grey and blunt in the early light. He drew Marrow Dragon, and the knowledge moved his body for him, the stance flowing into place unbidden. He breathed in, gathered the intent as the technique wanted it gathered, and drew the blade through one flat horizontal arc across the empty air.
A crescent of blue-green light peeled off the edge and left the sword entirely.
It crossed the ravine in a blink, a scything arc of compressed intent a full body-length wide, and struck the opposite cliff, and a gash opened across the stone as though a giant had drawn a knife down it, chips of rock sighing down into the gorge below. The cut was as wide as he was tall and deep enough to lose an arm in, and it stood forty paces from where he’d been standing when he swung.
He looked at the gouge in the mountain. He looked at the sword in his hand.
"Oh," he said softly, for the second time that morning. "That’s very new."
[ That, ] said Mira, with the quiet satisfaction of a shopkeeper who’s just sold a man exactly what he needed, [ is a Golden Core technique in the hands of a Foundation cultivator with a cheating blade. There are grown masters twice your realm who’d go pale watching you do that.] A beat, and the shopkeeper’s smile returned, keen-edged and inviting. [ Now. You’ve a fortune yet burning a hole in your soul, and I saved the truly dangerous one for last. Close the window and sit back down, Xuan. The next item on the shelf isn’t a duel-winner. It’s a battle-ender, and it costs almost everything you have left.]