The northern corner of the flea market was known among the rogue fighters as “Paper Grave Alley.”
It was a narrow, muddy dogleg wedged between two leaning timber warehouses, shaded by a tattered canopy of oil-cloth that dripped brown water onto the stalls below. Unlike the meat stalls or herb tables, there was no shouting here.
The vendors sat cross-legged on greasy straw mats. It was wrapped in ragged wool cloaks, their faces hidden behind low-pulled hoods. Before them, laid out on battered pieces of cloth, were the scraps of the training world’s written knowledge:
Yellowed bamboo slips tied with frayed hemp string. Charred fragments of beast-skin scrolls salvaged from burned sectarian ruins. And chipped, cloudy jade slips whose spiritual soft glow had long since leaked into the damp earth.
Pei Jing walked slowly down the alley, his cone-shaped bamboo hat tilted to shield his eyes from the dripping oil-cloth.
His wicker pack was slung over one shoulder, but his hands were tucked deep into his sleeves. In his left sleeve rested four uncut low-grade spirit stones—drawn from his emergency reserve beneath the slate bed—and thirty loose spirit shards earned from Butcher Tu’s processing block.
He stopped before a stall run by an old fighter with a withered left arm and milky, clouded eye-clouded eyes.
