Xiao Jian stood in the cold courtyard, staring at the gleaming black-gold card in Lin Mo’s hand.
Tears cut clean, pale tracks through the thick layer of soot on the sixteen-year-old boy’s face.
For five long years, he had been called a dog, a burden, and a worthless slave. He had slept in drafty mountain stables and eaten mouldy millet crusts while the sect elders dined on roast pheasant and imported vintage wine. He had carried heavy iron broadsword chests through snowstorms until his shoulders bled through his coarse hemp shirts.
He remembered the winter his mother had died in the mountain famine. The sect had promised to care for him, only to bind him into fifty years of unpaid indenture to repay his childhood food. In five years, he had never tasted a piece of warm meat. He had never owned a pair of shoes that fit his feet.
Now, a man he had never met was offering five hundred million yuan to buy his freedom.
“Chairman Lin... I am only a sword carrier,” Xiao Jian choked out, his voice cracking with emotion. “I don’t know how to run a company. I only know how to polish steel, carry boxes, and sweep dojo floors.”
