To survive in the underground slums of Red Mist Valley, an enterprise needed two sets of books.
The first was the public ledger. A dreary record of low-margin misery displayed openly for the market tax guards, cartel spies, and neighborhood cutthroats. It showed twenty pots of crude sixty-percent blood-clotting salve sold each week at two spirit shards apiece, barely enough to cover the monthly cave lease, thirty sacks of coal, and coarse millet porridge.
The second was the shadow ledger. Written in midnight smoke, sealed in heavy sheet-lead, and buried beneath three feet of solid dark rock.
At noon, Old Cauldron Workshop presented its usual face of old and worn-out ruin.
Wu Xiao swept coal dust near the entrance, his clothes deliberately streaked with black soot, his face dull and cowed. Old Monster Gui sat beneath the sagging stone awning, coughing loudly into a greasy rag, complaining bitterly to passing herb dredgers about the extortionate price of sulfur coke and the ache in his bronze peg-leg.
Inside, Pei Jing spent the afternoon grinding cheap dried reeds and animal fat in an iron mortar, producing thirty pots of standard, foul-smelling gray salve to fill the front display racks.
“Let Qian Tong’s runners look through the cracks,” Gui rasped quietly when a freight clerk from Rogue Mutual Aid stayed outside the shutters. “Let them see cold ash and cracked pots. In this valley, if you look prosperous, you’re a pig waiting for the butcher’s knife.”
