What were the odds of finding a heaven-defying treasure in the middle of a pile of trash?
Lin Mo Chen already knew the answer. Unless you were the protagonist, you could try for ten lifetimes straight and still find nothing.
He'd spent almost an hour walking between stalls, pretending to tell snake root apart from rotten root, when a voice rose louder than the rest.
"Ten gold coins?" he argued with a round-faced vendor holding a small jar of grayish powder. "How can a jar of Qi Condensing Powder cost ten gold coins? Are you serious?"
The vendor scowled, snatched the jar from his hand, and tucked it away. "If you don't have money, go look somewhere else, brat," he snapped. "This isn't charity."
Snorting, his dignity bruised, Lin Mo Chen turned away and kept walking, hands shoved deep into his sleeves.
Qi Condensing Powder was the most basic of basics. It barely qualified as cultivation medicine. Even so, it was that expensive. One jar would last him maybe four days with his awful talent.
Still grumbling, he pushed through the crowd. He'd seen everything — strange herbs like Nocturnal Dragon Tongue, an old man selling dubious talismans to repel ghosts, mosquitoes, and even mothers-in-law. Almost no one was actually selling real pills.
With trash-tier talent, if he wanted to truly advance, he needed something that genuinely sped up his progress, not chalk-flavored dust.
The Spirit Reunion Pills he'd used before came to mind. With just one, he'd almost condensed a fragment of his ring. But they were far too expensive — a single bottle of four cost two hundred and fifty gold coins, completely out of his league.
First-grade pills were priced for Ling Zhe-level cultivators — Spiritual Practitioners. For someone in his position in the family, they were a luxury.
Lost in calculations, trying to figure out how many years he'd need to save for even one decent pill, he looked up and spotted, through the crowd, a young man in the Lin family's blue robe.
His heart lurched, and the blood drained from his face.
Lin Xuan… It's him. He found me.
Without thinking twice, he dropped down and hid behind the stall of a bald old man selling dried gourds, holding his breath and clutching the gold pouch to his chest as if that alone might turn him invisible.
Crouched there, he prayed the world's protagonist wouldn't turn around.
The bald man stared at him like he'd just seen a strange bug. Back pressed to the wood, Lin Mo Chen peeked around the corner, his eyes locked onto the blue-robed figure.
The old man blinked, glanced at his gourds, then back at him — but Lin Mo Chen didn't spare him a second look, his gaze fixed entirely on that back as he counted the seconds until the youth turned.
When he finally did, turning to haggle with another vendor, the face became clear.
It wasn't Lin Xuan at all — just a round-cheeked kid he'd never seen.
A long, shaky sigh escaped him as all the air he'd been holding rushed out at once.
He stood with calm, absurd dignity, as if hiding behind gourds were a perfectly normal occurrence, and brushed the dust from his robe.
"Excellent quality," he told the vendor, nodding seriously at the dried gourds. "The drying is very uniform."
Then he walked off, hands behind his back, without so much as a glance behind him, leaving the bald man bewildered, staring at his gourds, then at the empty space, wondering what had just happened.
After putting several li between himself and that embarrassment, he passed a man who looked like a vagabond. An old cloth lay on the ground, covered with what looked like junk — strange stones, unlabeled jars, a book with no cover.
He could feel the paranoia creeping in. Every blue robe felt like a threat. As he walked, he tried to talk himself down.
Nothing's going to happen. Relax. This is one of the city markets under the Lin family's influence — it's full of guards. What are the chances that at this exact time of day, in this exact place, I run into Lin Xuan, and on top of that, a protagonist-level event? Zero. Absolute.
Just as a satisfied smile began to form, his lifted foot froze mid-step. A voice a few stalls away made his blood run cold.
It was strangely familiar — calm and confident, just as he remembered.
"Young Master Shan Mingze," the voice said, quiet but authoritative. "If you have nothing better to say, get out of the way."
Almost instantly, as if his body had developed a survival instinct from reading a thousand bad novels, Lin Mo Chen dropped in front of the vagabond's stall and began pawing through the trash laid out on the cloth.
Dull stones, a chipped piece of horn, a coverless book. Head lowered, he pretended to examine them while trying not to listen.
The part of him that was still a reader didn't want to miss it. Reason screamed at him to leave. Curiosity won.
An offended voice responded immediately. "Move aside? How dare you? Do you really think you can give Miss Yao Er something so cheap and tasteless? A five-gold-coin earring! It's an insult!"
So he'd stopped Lin Yao Er in the middle of the market just to give her a gift.
Without looking up from an ugly black stone, a grimace formed on Lin Mo Chen's face. Yeah, right. As if he just wanted to be generous. That shameless bastard clearly just wanted to flirt with the jade beauty and ended up making a fool of himself.
He knew he shouldn't keep listening. Every second he stayed there dragged him closer to disaster.
Tuning out the old vagabond's rambling — something about a "hidden treasure" he didn't catch — he grabbed one of the black rocks like a seasoned appraiser.
The old man was startled, especially by the sudden urgency. "How much?" Lin Mo Chen asked, without hesitation.
The vendor had just opened his mouth for his best toothless sales pitch when a gold coin flashed through the air and landed in his palm.
Over his shoulder, the blue-robed youth was already running. "Keep the change!"
Maybe it was the haste, maybe the panic — he wasn't watching where he was going. He slammed straight into a muscular man carrying a sack of rice and landed hard on his ass in the dust.
The black stone slipped from his grip and rolled… and rolled… before stopping right between two groups.
Scrambling to his feet and brushing himself off, his eyes followed the stone — only to lift his head and find three pairs of eyes staring straight at him.
Lin Mo Chen's face went instantly pale. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to disappear, dig a hole, and crawl inside.
Lin Xuan stared at him, puzzled, his brow slightly furrowed as if trying to recall where he'd seen that face before.
The girl clinging intimately to his sleeve tilted her head with curiosity. It was Lin Yao Er, the jade beauty who always stood at the protagonist's side.
And someone he didn't recognize at all — a young man in an elegant red robe embroidered with gold, a fan resting in his hand — looked at him with open irritation and disdain.
A crooked, nervous smile spread across Lin Mo Chen's face as the one who had to be Shan Mingze crouched down with a mocking laugh and picked up the black stone between two fingers, as if it were dung.
"Well, well," he said, turning the stone as he addressed Lin Xuan. "No wonder they say everyone in your Lin family is so mediocre and poor. How does it work? One of you buys Miss Yao Er a five-gold-coin trinket, and here comes another, running like a madman for a worthless stone off the ground."
Then, with clear arrogance, he turned his gaze to Lin Mo Chen, still half-crouched, and held the stone up.
"You there. Stone guy. If this is yours, why don't you come get it?"