The Black Bazaar of Red Mist Valley didn’t announce itself with lanterns or shop signs.
It operated during the three hours of deepest night in an underground limestone gallery behind the butcher stalls and the Rotten-Beast Pens. The entrance was a narrow drainage crevice where the stench of swamp pig offal and fermented dung was so overpowering that even market tax guards avoided patrolling the alley.
Pei Jing walked through the freezing sludge at two in the morning.
He wore a coarse hemp cloak stained with grease, beneath which his Layer 5 physical frame moved with silent, gliding steps. On his head sat a cone-shaped bamboo hat woven with lead wire and coated with crushed soul-repelling ash, blocking spiritual sense probes from anyone below Foundation Establishment.
On his back hung an ordinary willow basket filled with dried swamp reed. Hidden within a hollow compartment beneath the basket’s false wicker floor were the four lead-sealed canisters holding twenty Jade-Dew Qi-Condensing Pearls.
Inside his sleeves, his fingers rested lightly against the handle of his Cloud-Splitter Cleaver-Saber.
The bazaar was an unpaved, cavernous vault dripping with cold groundwater. Dozens of shadowy figures crouched along the limestone walls, their faces hidden behind lead hats and linen masks. Transactions occurred in silence, goods pushed across damp slate slabs, payments counted in muffled clinks of spirit stone shards.
