He moved the moment the thought struck him.
Lin Mu rolled out of bed without a second's hesitation, shed the conspicuous blue Steward's robe of the External Affairs Hall, and changed into a set of dark, plain clothes that would vanish into the night.
He didn't let the urgency cloud his head, though.
If I walk up and show him the bone plate directly, I'm not just exposing its value — I'm exposing my own ignorance. Showing weakness in front of a crafty old fox like Old Ma is the same as laying my neck on the chopping block.
He tucked the bone plate carefully against his body and turned the problem over in his mind.
I need a pretext. Use a job as cover, and work the conversation around to what I want to know. A blunt blade cuts slowly — that's fine.
He pushed open the door. His figure blurred into a grey smear and dissolved into the dark.
Deep in Grey Street Market, the sickly white mist that never fully lifted drifted slowly through the midnight chill.
The underground market had long since closed for the night. The streets were empty, nothing left but a few guttering green phosphor lamps hissing their last.
In front of the ramshackle general store at the far corner, Old Ma was mid-yawn, dragging his lame leg, a thick door bar in hand, about to pull the heavy wooden door shut.
Then.
From the mouth of the alley, a faint but blindingly fast rush of displaced air cut through the silence.
Old Ma's single cloudy eye narrowed sharply.
Through the mist, he made out a shadow — elongated by moonlight, moving at an uncanny speed — bearing straight toward his shop.
"Damn it. Middle of the night, and trouble comes knocking."
A man in Old Ma's line of work — black-market intelligence — had made no shortage of enemies over a lifetime.
Seeing an unknown expert charging at him in the dead of night, he felt a jolt of pure terror cut through his drowsiness.
His first thought: *Some mark I burned has come for payback.
"Bang!"
Old Ma scrambled backward, both hands clamping around the heavy door bar, throwing every ounce of his strength into slamming the two thick wooden doors shut and locking them fast.
But at the last possible moment.
Thwack.
A foot in black cloth shoes wedged itself into the narrowing gap with precise, unhurried force.
No matter how hard Old Ma shoved from inside, the door didn't budge — as though an iron post had been jammed in the frame.
"Closing up this early, shopkeeper? Not taking customers anymore?"
A familiar, faintly teasing rasp drifted in through the crack.
Old Ma's hands froze. He squinted through the gap in the dim lamplight and made out a face — sallow, disguised with plant dye — that he recognized.
"You little—!"
Old Ma hurled the door bar to the floor, yanked the door open, and jabbed a finger at Lin Mu's nose:
"You rotten little bastard! Sneaking around in the dead of night like some ghost, not making a sound when you walk — you trying to give this old man a heart attack and finish him off?!"
Lin Mu took the scolding without complaint, squeezed past him into the shop, and pulled the door shut behind him.
"Just finished up with the clan's Grand Competition. Nothing else going on."
He brushed the night dew off his sleeves, found a reasonably clean chair, and sat down. His tone was perfectly casual as he floated his pretext:
"Old Ma, do you have any more of those escort jobs from last time? The kind that need the Red Mud Gu to seal the scent? I've been looking for something to keep me busy."
The wariness in Old Ma's eye vanished the instant those words landed.
Jobs like that — smuggling contraband with the scent masked — were high-risk and low-pay, pure thankless labor.
Outside of a freak like Lin Mu who happened to carry a Red Mud Gu, nobody at Grey Street Market would touch them.
"Still the same reckless kid, chasing coin over your own neck."
Old Ma shot him a sour look, though inwardly he was delighted.
He had been sitting on several batches of goods that couldn't see daylight and had no way to move them. Now that his most reliable cheap labor had walked through the door on his own, Old Ma wasn't about to be polite about it.
"Lucky for you, I've got three jobs backed up. But the terms changed — this time it's dead-drop delivery."
Old Ma turned and fished three heavily sealed lead boxes from a hidden compartment under the counter, sliding them across to Lin Mu, and laid out the details of the contactless handoff.
To protect both parties — and to prevent anyone from cutting out the middleman — these three jobs required no face-to-face meeting with the buyers at all.
Lin Mu only needed to seal the lead boxes airtight with Red Mud, then follow the addresses Old Ma provided and, in the dead of night, drop each package into a designated spot — a hollow in a dead tree, a gap between certain rocks.
The buyers would have pre-positioned specific Gu worms at those locations to swallow the goods whole. Once the cargo was consumed, the job was done.
"I know the rules."
Lin Mu swept the lead boxes off the counter, Red Mud surging up to wrap each one tight.
"Wait for good news."
Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, he was already gone — a wisp of smoke dissolving into the night outside.
The moon hung high in the branches.
Cold moonlight spilled across the forest on the outer edge of Black Wind Ridge.
Lin Mu pushed Earth Ring Body's speed to its limit, moving through the darkness like a ghost, slipping soundlessly between the designated drop points around Black Blood Stockade.
For Lin Mu, with his senses fully extended, this kind of dead-drop work was easier than breathing. He sidestepped several packs of nocturnal predators without breaking stride and dropped each package cleanly into its waiting Gu worm.
In under an hour, all three jobs were done.
When Lin Mu pushed open the door of the ramshackle shop on Grey Street Market again, Old Ma was sprawled in the battered rocking chair behind the counter, head nodding, snoring softly.
Knock.
Lin Mu rapped two knuckles on the counter.
Old Ma jolted awake, wiping the corner of his mouth.
When he looked up and saw Lin Mu standing there — breathing evenly, not a drop of sweat on his brow, expression completely undisturbed — that single eye went wide.
"You're back already? All three done?"
"The verification Gu didn't flag anything. All delivered." Lin Mu picked up the cold tea on the table and took a sip, unhurried.
"You little..."
Old Ma let out a long yawn, looked Lin Mu up and down — not a hair out of place — and shook his head with a mix of exasperation and amusement:
"You're a damn freak. You young people, I swear — energy to burn, like you've got an endless supply."
Something in his expression shifted. He seemed to drift into a memory, and a gleam of old pride flickered through his cloudy eye:
"Back in my day, I was quite the figure in these parts — a fine-looking young man with a reputation for ten li around!"
"Never mind a few dozen li of night running — back then I could climb seven widows' windowsills in a single night and still show up at the teahouse the next morning fresh as a spring rooster..."
Old Ma rambled on, savoring his own glory days, head swaying with self-satisfaction.
But mid-sentence, his gaze drifted downward and the ruined body that had long since lost certain capabilities.
The greasy, self-satisfied grin froze on his face.
The bubble of memory burst against the hard edge of reality.
Old Ma's mouth twitched twice. The pride slowly drained from his expression, and what replaced it was a single long, heavy, desolate sigh.
"Haah..."
That sigh carried a great deal — helplessness, bitterness, and the particular grief of a man who had once been formidable and was now diminished beyond repair.
In a world of Gu where strength was everything, a broken body meant a broken path. No chance of climbing toward the Great Dao. Only the life of a rat, hiding in the lightless depths of Grey Street Market, scraping by.
Lin Mu, sitting across from him, took in every flicker of that shift in Old Ma's face.
Looking at Old Ma's forlorn expression, Lin Mu — a man who had crossed over from another world — felt a quiet, private pang, and a memory surfaced unbidden in his mind:
*In this world, when a mortal Gu Master loses a limb, regrowing it from nothing is nearly impossible. Ordinary healing Gu cannot create what no longer exists.
*But if Old Ma knew... that far away in the Northern Plains, there was a Gu Immortal called Tai Bai Yun Sheng, who held an Immortal Gu condensed from the laws of Time Path itself — one that could reverse the flow of time, resurrect the dead, restore flesh to bare bone, and return all things to their original state — the Man as Before Gu...
Lin Mu glanced at Old Ma's empty trouser legs and felt a quiet, inward amusement:
*This old coward would probably crawl the entire way to the Northern Plains on his knees, and beat his head bloody on the ground at Tai Bai Yun Sheng's feet begging for a single ray of white light.
But that was nothing more than idle fancy. Tai Bai Yun Sheng's level was as unreachable to him right now as the stars overhead.
"Alright, I'm done for the night."
Old Ma shook off the melancholy and just wanted to send Lin Mu on his way so he could go dream about his window-climbing youth.
He pulled open a drawer, counted out a few dozen Primeval Stones in agreed commission, and tossed them onto the counter like scraps thrown to a beggar.
"Take your money and get out. When I've got more grunt work, I'll keep it for you."
Old Ma waved a hand and turned to lie down.
But.
Clink.
Lin Mu didn't reach for the Primeval Stones. He extended two fingers, pressed them down on the pile, and slowly — with quiet finality — pushed them back across the counter toward Old Ma.
Old Ma froze. He turned his head, puzzled: "What's this? Not enough? We agreed on this price beforehand. You trying to squeeze me for more?"
"Keep the errand money, Old Ma."
Lin Mu didn't stand. Instead, he pulled a chair over and settled himself across from Old Ma with complete ease.
He tilted his bamboo hat back slightly, revealing a pair of clear, deep eyes. The corner of his mouth curved into a smile that carried a particular weight:
"I came here tonight for something else. Something I'd like to buy."
"Buy something?" Old Ma looked baffled, glancing at his nearly bare shelves. "I thought you cleaned me out last time?"
"Not Gu worms. Not materials."
Lin Mu leaned forward slightly, and spoke each word with deliberate calm: "That story you told me last time — about the 'Flower Wine Monk' and the Liquor Worm. I liked it."
"It's the middle of the night. Long night ahead, and I'm not sleepy."
His fingers tapped a slow, light rhythm on the tabletop.
"You must have more — stories about the Southern Border's hidden history, or strange tales of ancient powerhouses. Am I wrong?"
"Let's hear them. One by one. We can talk price."
Old Ma stared at him.
He looked at the perfectly serious Lin Mu sitting across from him. He looked at the Primeval Stones pushed back in his direction. His mind turned the situation over several times before it clicked.
A brief, stunned silence.
Then, across that face carved deep with a lifetime of wrinkles, a grin broke open — wide, brilliant, and carrying a roguish, freewheeling energy that hadn't been seen there in a long time.
"You little devil! Paying good hard Primeval Stones for stories?"
Old Ma reached up and rubbed his bare chin, his one remaining eye sparkling with something that looked almost like finding a kindred spirit:
"You've come to exactly the right man!"
"This old body of mine — missing an arm, missing a leg, short on virtue, short on money — the one thing I have never been short on is stories!"