The East City Scrap Market didn’t smell of incense, sandalwood, or sky destiny.
It smelled of hot machine oil, damp coal melted rock waste, rusted iron ore, and stale mutton grease.
Covering ten muddy acres behind the heavy-duty smelting district, the scrap market was where broken tools, failed magical treasures, and mining tailings of the Tianxuan Principality came to die. Thousands of junk peddlers sat under stained canvas tarps. It shouted over the rhythmic clanging of nearby forge hammers.
Frank wheeled his wooden handcart through the main mud lane, his work boots squelching softly in the wet coal dust.
Behind him marched Shen Shitou, Jiang Ling’er, and Niu Mang, each pushing an empty wooden wheelbarrow. With clean linen tunics, heavy denim aprons, and hollowed-gourd hard hats resting on their knees, they looked less like a delegation from an elite martial academy and more like a town demolition crew arriving for a digging shift.
“Master,” Niu Mang rumbled, his eyes scanning the sprawling mounds of twisted iron pipes and cracked baked-clay cooking pots. “This place has more metal than the entire blacksmith district of my hometown!”
“It has more scrap metal,” Frank corrected him, checking his shopping list penciled onto the back of the golden Royal Summons. “Eighty percent of this yard is low-grade melted rock waste and rusted sheet iron. Don’t look at the size of the pile. Look at metalworking purity. We need high-copper alloys for plumbing and dense iron billets for tool dies.”
They passed through the third salvage row. Then, a raspy, oily voice called out from beneath a greasy striped awning.
“Hey there, scholar! Over here! Come inspect the true relics of the First Epoch!”
Sitting on an overturned salt pork barrel was Old Ba, a notorious junk dealer with a greasy leather vest, three gold teeth, and fingers stained yellow with nicotine and sulfur.
Old Ba’s beady eyes had locked onto Frank’s faded grey robes the instant the crew entered the row. In the scrap market, young academy teachers were legendary marks. Arrogant scholars who read three ancient poems and believed they could identify ancient treasures hidden beneath mortal dirt.
Old Ba hopped off his barrel, scurrying over with an eight-inch bronze handbell caked in green rust and pitted with rust.
“Young Master!” Old Ba whispered, holding the bell up with two trembling hands. “You possess the clear aura of a connoisseur! Feast your eyes upon this: the Nine-Deep pit Soul-Suppressing Bell, unearthed from the tomb of a Grand Saint! Ring it once, and a ghost king’s heart will shatter!”
Old Ba tapped the bell with his fingernail. A dull, muffled thunk sounded, like a wooden spoon hitting a wet cabbage.
“Look at this ancient patina!” Old Ba declared with made emotion. “Normally, an old family relic of this caliber fetches three hundred gold spirit stones at the Capital Auction! But today, because I see Master has a deep affinity with the Dao, I’ll part with it for a mere fifty silver coins!”
Behind Frank, Shen Shitou frowned, his bronze senses prickling. “Fifty silver coins? That’s enough to buy two tons of seasoned firewood...”
Frank didn’t look at Old Ba’s face. He didn’t even look at the bronze bell.
Frank’s right hand rested casually on the wooden handle of his wheelbarrow. His index finger tapped the wood twice.
PING.
His internal DAO-QA console initialized in his eyes, projecting bright, semi-clear blue mouse-hover tooltips over every single object in Old Ba’s stall.
Frank looked at the hover box for the bronze bell, then his eyes drifted down to the far-right corner of Old Ba’s stall.
There, half-buried in a puddle of black grease and coal sludge, sat a box-shaped, pitch-black brick roughly the size of a standard construction paver.
It had no ornate carvings. It had no glowing spiritual runes. It was covered in dried fish scales, grease splatters, and dog hairs, placed directly on the muddy hem of the canvas tarp to keep the wind from blowing Old Ba’s tent down the alley.
Frank took his toothpick from his mouth and pointed at the bronze bell.
“Tin-lead pewter cast in a sand mold eighteen months ago,” Frank said, his tone dry as autumn kindling. “Sound deep ring is dead because the alloy has fourteen percent lead content to fake the weight. You couldn’t suppress a housefly’s soul with that rattle, let alone a ghost king.”
Old Ba’s three gold teeth flashed as his smile froze solid.
“Ah... Young Master has a sharp eye!” Old Ba laughed nervously, quickly shoving the bronze bell behind his back. “Perhaps Master would prefer an ancient jade hairpin? Or—”
“I don’t need hairpins,” Frank interrupted. He pointed his finger toward the muddy corner of the tent. “I need a balance weight.”
Old Ba blinked, following Frank’s finger down to the dirty black rock.
“The dirty stone brick?” Old Ba asked, his brow furrowing in confusion.
“Our chicken coop door catches the northern draft,” Frank explained deadpan. He pulled five copper coins from his apron pocket. “The wind pops the latch. That black rock looks like it weighs around eighty pounds. It’ll make a decent doorstop so the hens don’t freeze.”
Frank tossed the five copper coins onto Old Ba’s wooden table with a sharp clink.
“Five coppers for the doorstop. Keep the change.”
Old Ba stared at the five copper coins, then stared at the dirty rock holding down his tarp.
In his mind, Old Ba began laughing until his ribs ached.
What an idiot! Old Ba thought in sheer, gleeful mockery. That black rock was hauled out of a dredged canal three years ago! It’s heavy as lead, hard as bedrock, and impossible to melt! I’ve been using it to weigh down this rotten tarp for two winters! And this scholar fool just paid five copper coins to carry eighty pounds of dirty mud back up the mountain!
“Sold!” Old Ba yelled, snatching the five copper coins before Frank could change his mind. “A deal is a deal! The chicken coop doorstop is yours, Master! But you have to carry it yourself!”
Frank nodded calmly. “Shitou. Load the doorstop into wheelbarrow two.”
“Student obeys!”
Shen Shitou stepped forward, his boots squelching in the grease. He knelt down beside the canvas tarp, reached down with his bare right hand. Then he wrapped his bronze fingers around the muddy black brick.
He heaved upward with twenty percent of his normal strength, expecting to lift a common stone.
CRACK.
The black cobblestone beneath Shitou’s boots suddenly split in two!
Shitou’s shoulder muscles instantly locked. His eyes widened in total shock as a huge, crushing gravity pull surged into his arm. A nearby mass so terrifyingly dense that it felt like trying to lift the cornerstone of an ancient mountain!
This isn’t stone! Shitou realized, his heart hammering against his ribs.
He right away dropped his balance point into Stance Fourteen, planted his left heel, engaged his core. Then he channeled his star-forged channels!
With a low, controlled grunt, Shitou lifted the black brick out of the muck.
The instant the brick left the soil, the puddle beneath it hissed. The ground water drained away, repelled by the metal’s dense gravity pull!
Shitou placed the brick gently into the bed of Niu Mang’s wooden wheelbarrow.
CREAK.
The seasoned oak planks of the wheelbarrow groaned under the packed load, the iron axle settling three inches deeper into the mud!
Jiang Ling’er stepped closer. She wiped a patch of grease off the brick’s upper edge with the corner of a clean cloth.
Beneath the grime, the metal didn’t gleam like iron or bronze.
It possessed a deep, endless, deep-sea black luster that seemed to swallow the morning sunlight. Sparkling with tiny, tiny golden flecks that formed natural, swirling dragon patterns!
Ling’er’s breath hitched in her throat, her royal composure fully shattering.
Deep-Sea Black-Gold!
Emperor-tier sinking metal found only at the bottom of ten-thousand-fathom Oceanic Trenches!
In the Imperial Capital of Great Da-Qi, a single thumb-sized pebble of Deep-Sea Black-Gold was valued at over a hundred high-grade spirit stones, reserved only for the personal armor of Royal Sovereigns!
Yet here, sitting in a wooden wheelbarrow like an abandoned cobblestone, was an eighty-four-pound solid metal bar of ninety-nine percent pure Black-Gold!
A treasure worth more than the entire annual tax revenue of the Tianxuan Principality!
And Master Lu had bought it for five copper coins as a doorstop for a chicken coop!
Ling’er turned to look at Frank, her soul shaking with boundless, dizzying respect.
He knew, Ling’er realized, her eyes stinging with tears of religious awe. He didn’t even look at the stone! His divine senses saw through three feet of grease and mud across the entire alley! To Master, the treasures that mortals fight wars to possess are nothing more than functional balance weights for home carpentry!
Frank checked his pocket watch, fully calm by the cosmic discovery happening three feet away.
“Good weight,” Frank muttered, tapping the black metal bar with his tape measure. “High mass, low volume. It won’t take up much space by the door frame. Let’s head to the wholesale building warehouse.”
Ten minutes later, Frank led the crew to the imposing iron gates of the East City Wholesale Supply Storehouse.
Through the open gates, vast lumber sheds were stacked thirty feet high with seasoned cedar timbers, while coils of bright red copper wire and barrels of lime mortar lined the stone courtyard.
Frank walked up to the dispatch counter, pulling his pencil from behind his ear.
“Three rolls of twelve-gauge copper wire,” Frank said to the merchant behind the desk. “Ten sacks of high-pressure lime, and twelve ten-foot seasoned pine two-by-fours. Deliver to Classroom 404, or we can load the wheelbarrows now.”
The merchant—a fat, balding man in green silk robes wearing a brass trade badge—looked down at Frank’s denim apron, then looked at the three students with their wheelbarrows.
A sneer of office disdain curled the merchant’s lips.
“Classroom 404?” the merchant scoffed, crossing his arms. “The failing class on the southern ridge? I have orders directly from the Academic Merchant Trade ring: retail sales to Classroom 404 are suspended.”
The merchant pointed to a carved wooden sign bolted above the counter:
[WHOLESALE EXEMPTION POLICY: By Royal Trade Guild Statute, wholesale tax exemptions and bulk building materials may only be purchased by approved members of the Apprentice Appraiser Guild or the Apprentice Physician Hall.]
“Unless you possess an official Apprentice Appraiser or Physician license stamped by the guilds,” the merchant smirked, “you can’t buy a single nail from this warehouse. Now take your wheelbarrows and clear the freight dock!”
Shen Shitou’s bronze fist tightened around the handle of his cart. Meanwhile, Niu Mang’s shovel blade rattled against stone.
Frank didn’t get angry. He tapped the merchant’s policy sign with his finger, reading the fine ticket.
“Apprentice Appraiser or Physician license,” Frank murmured, checking his pocket watch.
“Ten-thirty in the morning,” Frank noted calmly, turning to his students. “The Appraiser Guild Hall is two doors down the street. The Physician Hall is across the square. Leave the wheelbarrows by the hitching post, kids. Let’s go do a fifteen-minute licensing speedrun.”