The underground air of the Red Mist Valley Market didn’t circulate. It settled into the low ravines like cold grease, thick with the stench of stale sulfur pools, damp limestone fungus, and the rancid fat used by desperate rogue fighters to waterproof their straw sandals.
Pei Jing walked with his weight resting evenly over the balls of his feet. His heel-to-toe stride made no sound against the wet flat stone slabs, a habit formed across eight years of mortal martial training and preserved through four layers of Qi Gathering. Beneath the wide brim of his woven bamboo rain hat, his eyes swept the narrow dark rock alleyway. Every doorway was cut directly into the black cliffside. It was sealed with crude wooden planks or damp straw curtains that leaked the faint hum of unstable solitude wards.
In his left leather sleeve, the spring-loaded wrist guard held twelve hardened steel flying needles, each seated against its oiled coil. Across his back hung the Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber. Its three-foot hard was dark metal spine wrapped in coarse oilskin to protect the polished edge from acidic water drops. Inside his shark-skin belt rested his liquid capital. Forty low-grade spirit stones looted from the three rogue cutthroats who had tried to corner him in the mist three nights earlier.
