On World 25 (Cinder-Vein Ice World), inside the grand velvet-lined showroom of the Eternal Frost Fire-Stone Monopoly Guild, Elder Cold-Palm was having a complete nervous breakdown.
Elder Cold-Palm was a thin, hook-nosed Rank 7 Early Nascent Soul cultivator who wore six gold rings on every finger and a robe stitched from silver fox pelts. For two hundred years, his guild had controlled the only geothermal cinder-pits on World 25, scooping up cheap volcanic slag pebbles, calling them “Sacred Fire Stones,” and selling them across all four dark-ice planets for ten thousand times their actual cost.
Usually, every morning at dawn, fifty thousand freezing miners and merchants would line up outside his iron gates on their knees, begging to trade their daughters’ dowries, their iron ore, and their own blood for a basket of his smoky red pebbles.
Today, however, the iron gates of the Eternal Frost Guild were wide open—and there was not a single customer in sight.
Instead, Elder Cold-Palm was sitting atop a literal mountain of 50,000 unsold sacks of Fire Stones that filled his showroom from floor to ceiling, blocking the windows and spilling out onto the front porch like worthless gray gravel.
“Why isn’t anyone buying?!” Elder Cold-Palm shrieked, kicking a sack of Fire Stones so hard that gray coal dust puffed onto his silver fox boots. “I dropped the price by ten percent! Then I dropped it by fifty percent! Then I offered a ‘Buy Ten Stones, Get One Stone Free’ winter promotion! Why hasn’t…
