My dao to eternity

My Dao to Eternity

Chapter 147 — The Price of a Question

He spent his first full day inside Myriad Beast City simply walking it, the way he'd once walked Quiet River Town in his first days there, learning a place by moving through it rather than by asking it questions it hadn't offered to answer.

The main street ran wide and straight from the gate, lined with shopfronts painted in bold, confident characters — spirit stones by the pouch, common talismans, medicinal ingredients laid out in neat wooden trays, a blacksmith's stall ringing with hammer on spirit iron loud enough to carry over the general noise of the crowd. He saw it before he reached the central square, rising above the rooftops the way a mountain rises above lesser hills — a single curved rib bone, pale as old ivory and easily forty feet at its highest point, arched across the open plaza like the frame of some vast, vanished doorway. Two more ribs, smaller and half-buried, flanked it on either side, and market stalls had grown up around all three the way moss grows around standing stone, awnings strung between the bone and the surrounding buildings as though the carcass had simply become part of the architecture generations ago. He did not need anyone to tell him what it was. Something had died here, once, on a scale the current city couldn't have built around by accident — and whoever had founded this place had chosen to build beside the bones rather than clear them away, as though the reminder itself was worth more than the ground it occupied.

He already understood, without needing to be told, why a city like this existed at all. A wilderness too rich to ignore and too dangerous for any single power to hold outright produced exactly this kind of arrangement — neutral ground, jointly kept, built on the simple principle that everyone profited more by trading than by fighting over who controlled the trade. He had seen enough of the world by now to recognize the shape of it on sight. What he didn't know was the shape underneath the shape — how the arrangement actually held together day to day, who watched whom, and where a man with no sect behind him could stand without becoming someone's business. That was worth paying for.

By evening, he found a tavern two streets back from the main road, modest enough not to draw notice, busy enough that one more traveler taking a corner table would trouble no one. He ordered a simple meal and ate slowly, watching the room the way he watched every room he sat in. Loose cultivators traded stories over cheap wine at the long table nearest the door. A pair of merchants argued quietly over a ledger in the corner. A waiter moved between tables with the practiced, unhurried rhythm of a man who had worked this floor long enough to have stopped noticing most of what passed in front of him. Li Fan noticed him differently. The waiter's eyes moved over each table for a fraction longer than serving required — reading customers, Li Fan suspected, the way a physician reads a patient before the patient has said a word about what ails them. His qi, when Li Fan let his attention brush past him once, carried the faint, unremarkable signature of a Qi Sea cultivator, unsurprising in a city where he had seen almost no true mortals at all since walking through the gate. A man who watched a room that closely, in a city built entirely on trade and passing strangers, was very likely selling more than food.

When the waiter came to clear his bowl, Li Fan set a single spirit stone on the table beside his empty cup, not sliding it forward, not drawing attention to it, simply letting it sit where a man paying proper attention to his tables would notice it without anyone else needing to. The waiter's eyes flicked to the stone, then briefly to Li Fan's face, and something in his manner shifted — not surprise, but a kind of quiet recalibration, the look of a man deciding which version of himself the moment called for. "New to the city," he said. It wasn't quite a question. He drew the empty stool from the neighboring table without being invited to and sat, unhurried, the spirit stone already vanished into his sleeve with a practiced motion Li Fan noted and said nothing about. "One stone buys you the small answers. Nothing that could get either of us killed for saying it out loud."

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"Then I'll ask small," Li Fan said. "The three districts. What actually separates them, beyond price."

"Outer city's turnover," the waiter said. "Cheap, crowded, half the district changes tenants every season. Easiest place to disappear if you've got no coin and no reputation — also the easiest place to get robbed or noticed for the wrong reasons, since nobody's watching closely enough to notice trouble until it's already happened. "Inner city's the opposite. Quieter, costs more, and the people living there mostly mind their own business, because they've got more to lose by prying into somebody else's. Established cultivators, successful merchants, independent masters. Fewer eyes on you, but the ones that are there tend to actually be watching, if you follow me." "And the core district." "Sect ground. Each of the seven keeps its own compound back there, walled off from everything else. You've no business there unless you're wearing one of their banners." He glanced, briefly, at Li Fan's plain, unmarked traveling clothes. "And I'd guess you aren't."

"I'm not," Li Fan agreed. He set a second stone on the table. "That's the shape of it. I want to know what holds the shape together."

The waiter considered the stone a moment before it disappeared the way the first had. "That one costs more because it's actually worth something," he said. "Everyone tells newcomers the seven sects cooperate to run this place. That's true, as far as it goes. What they don't usually say is that none of the seven trusts the other six enough to let any single one of them hold it outright. That's the actual reason nothing here belongs to anybody. Not shared virtue. Shared suspicion. "Each sect keeps a Foundation elder here on rotation. Officially, they're keeping order. Actually, half of what they do is watch each other — make sure nobody's compound is quietly buying up more influence than the arrangement allows, make sure no elder's been here long enough to start treating the place like home. The city runs peacefully because seven different powers are each too busy watching six others to risk making a move themselves. Pull one thread out of that balance and you'd learn fast how unfriendly this neutral ground can turn."

Li Fan turned that over without letting it show on his face. It explained, more precisely than anything he'd have guessed on his own, why the gate stood open and unwatched and why no one had so much as glanced at his sect affiliation, or lack of one — a city that policed itself through mutual distrust had no attention left over for a single unremarkable traveler.

"One more," Li Fan said, "and I'll let you get back to your tables. Where does a man rent a residence, if he intends to stay."

"Residence office, near the district boundary. Everyone calls it that — Residence Affairs Office, if you want the full name. Nobody owns land here outright, remember, so everything's rented through them. You look, you pay, you get a token. Simple enough that it doesn't need a stone to explain." He rose, tucked the two stones away, and paused before returning to his tables, something almost like genuine warning entering his voice for the first time since he'd sat down. "That's the free part, since you didn't have to pay to hear it. Don't go asking questions like the second one too loudly, or to anyone but someone you've already paid to keep quiet. A stone buys you an answer here. The wrong question, asked the wrong way, tends to charge a different kind of price entirely — and that one doesn't always let you choose what you pay with."

He returned to his tables without another word, the conversation folding itself back into the ordinary noise of the room as though it had never happened at all. Li Fan sat a while longer over his empty bowl, turning everything he'd just bought over in his mind the same patient way he turned over everything worth keeping — three districts, and beneath them, seven powers holding each other still through nothing more than shared unwillingness to be the first to move. He thought of the great curved rib arching over the market square, bones too vast to clear away and too old to explain, and wondered, without any particular urgency, what exactly had died here to leave something that size behind, and whether the answer to that question would cost more than two spirit stones as well. He walked back to the Amber Lantern under a sky gone fully dark, the city's noise thinning as the hour grew later, most of the outer street's stalls shuttered for the night. He had arrived here with nothing but what his own eyes had shown him. He left the tavern with something closer to a map — purchased cheaply enough for the parts that were safe to know, and priced, he understood clearly now, far higher for anything that wasn't.

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