The news took less than two hours to tear through the commercial arteries of the Iron Sword Province like wildfire through dry pine straw.
Grade-3 Feather-Pattern Essence Iron—metal normally reserved for inner-court sword-masters and core students—was sitting on the open counter of the Spirit Treasure Hall at eleven spirit stones.
By midday, the broad plaza in front of the hall was packed with over three hundred artisans, rogue fighters, pill-fire makers, and outer sect weapon smiths.
Men were waving pouches of spirit pebbles, shoving past guild guards, shouting bids, and screaming to place advance orders.
“Eleven spirit stones!” an old sword-smith from the Western Foundries shouted. It grabbed a five-pound bar to his chest as if it were a newborn child. “Look at the dendritic feathering! It has zero sulfur inclusions! It conducts Yang fire like clear water! Young Master Zhao has been charging us twenty-five stones for dirty bloom with four percent phosphorus!”
“Cancel the forward contracts!” another armorer roared from the steps. “The Grand Fortune contract has an exit rider! If the spot price of Essence Iron hits twelve stones, the forward covenants are voidable! We’re buying South Mountain iron!”
Across the square, standing on the balcony of the Grand Fortune Merchant Pavilion, Zhao Wuji stood rigid behind the red-lacquered stone railing. His jade tea bowl shook in his hand.
“Where did this metal come from?” Zhao Wuji hissed, his voice trembling with icy, high-born venom.
Behind him, Steward Pang—a gaunt, rat-faced man in dark silk—knelt trembling on the cedar planks. “Young... Young Master, the charter belongs to the South Mountain Stonemason Guild. An old, grandfathered lineage charter reactivated by Meng Shan, the quarry exile.”
“Meng Shan?” Zhao Wuji snapped, crushing the jade tea bowl in his bare fist.
The white jade shattered into jagged shards, splashing hot tea across his silk robes.
“Meng Shan is an illiterate rock-hauler! He couldn’t refine lead from grease! Who’s smelting this metal?”
“We... We don’t know, Young Master,” Steward Pang stammered. “The Seventh Ward has been officially shut down for upkeep since Elder Wu’s quarantine order. Their chimneys aren’t even smoking!”
Zhao Wuji turned slowly, his eyes burning with hungry counts.
“Thirty metal bars,” Zhao muttered, pacing the floorboards. “Three hundred pounds. It must be an accidental strike. They probably hit an ancient buried cache in the deep quarry pits—a forgotten emergency cache from the Cleansing Era.”
A vicious, mocking sneer spread across Zhao Wuji’s face.
“They think they can break my forward monopoly with thirty lucky metal bars? The fools don’t understand liquidity. They don’t understand how a merchant clan suffocates a rat.”
Zhao turned to Steward Pang, kicking the kneeling man in the ribs.
“Take three hundred and thirty spirit stones from our main vault right now,” Zhao commanded. “March into the Spirit Treasure Hall and buy every single metal bar they have on the table. Every last scrap! Don’t leave an ounce for the smiths!”
“Buy it all, Young Master?” Pang asked, blinking.
“Buy it all!” Zhao barked. “Preserve the artificial shortage! Once South Mountain runs out of their lucky cache, the spot supply vanishes. The smiths will come crawling back to my warehouses. I’ll raise the retail price of Essence Iron to thirty spirit stones to make up the difference!”
“Brilliant, Young Master!” Pang scrambled to his feet. “A masterclass in market cornering!”
While Steward Pang was running across the plaza with heavy chests of spirit stones, Lin Ke was sitting in the quiet tea loft on the second floor of the Spirit Treasure Hall. He looked down at the trading floor through bamboo blinds.
Tianfu. Branch.
At double test model speed, Lin Ke ran seventy-five market permutations.
In ninety-two percent of branches, Zhao Wuji reacted with classical monopolist arrogance: attempting a short-squeeze and supply buy-out.
Zhao believed the thirty metal bars were an anomalous, finite stockpile. He would use his liquid capital to buy up the supply, believing he could restore his monopoly pricing.
A hungry investor assuming an inelastic supply curve, Lin Ke observed with cold satisfaction.
He thinks he’s buying up a finite pond.
He doesn’t realize he’s opening the intake valves on an infinite heavy-duty river.
Lin Ke cut the mental branch.
He slipped his right hand into his pocket, pricking his left thumb against the iron metal pen.
“Branch checked: main.”
Down below on the trading floor, the crowd parted with angry murmurs.
Steward Pang strode into the Spirit Treasure Hall. He was flanked by four armed Grand Fortune guards carrying heavy brass-bound chests.
“Out of the way, you peasant blacksmiths!” Pang sneered, shoving aside an armorer.
Pang slammed the heavy brass chests onto Chief Appraiser Song’s counter, throwing the lids open to reveal three hundred and thirty gleaming, high-grade spirit stones.
“The Grand Fortune Merchant Clan exercises its right of pre-emption!” Pang shouted with arrogant triumph. “We buy all thirty metal bars of South Mountain Feather-Pattern Essence Iron! Three hundred and thirty stones, cash on the scales!”
Chief Appraiser Song looked at Meng Shan, who sat stoically on a timber bench behind the counter.
Meng Shan looked up, caught Lin Ke’s faint nod from the second-floor bamboo blinds, and simply rumbled: “Gold is gold. Take the metal.”
Steward Pang laughed victoriously.
His guards hauled the thirty metal bars off the scales, packing them into their velvet-lined crates.
Pang turned to the crowd of disappointed, furious blacksmiths with a mocking bow.
“Apologies, fellow artisans!” Pang sneered. “The South Mountain Guild’s little lucky cache has been fully liquidated! If you need Grade-3 Essence Iron for your autumn weapons, the Grand Fortune Pavilion will be pleased to accept your orders tomorrow morning... At our standard retail rate of twenty-five spirit stones per pound!”
The crowd groaned with bitter despair. Several smiths spat on the floor. Others turned toward the doors with slumped shoulders.
Pang led his guards out of the hall, strutting like a peacock.
The moment Pang’s rear guard stepped through the cedar threshold into the sunlight...
A loud, heavy, air-powered rumble shook the floor of the Spirit Treasure Hall.
The rear service doors of the hall swung wide open.
Meng Shan stood up, signaling to two burly quarry laborers who had just arrived via the underground freight ramp from the outer quarry pits.
The laborers were hauling a massive, four-wheeled iron flatbed cart.
On the flatbed sat sixty freshly cast metal bars of Grade-3 Feather-Pattern Essence Iron. Six hundred pounds of pure, shimmering, gunmetal-grey perfection, glowing with radiant silver-blue spiritual intent!
The entire hall gasped in stunned, disbelieving all at once.
Chief Appraiser Song’s glasses fell off his nose entirely, shattering against the flat stone slabs.
“Sixty... Sixty more?” Song choked out, clutching his chest. “Where did... How...?”
Meng Shan stepped up to the main counter, unrolling a fresh, stamped dispatch bearing the official seal of the South Mountain Stonemason Guild.
He didn’t yell. He spoke with the quiet, devastating gravity of an iron anvil.
“The South Mountain Guild announces its second daily production run,” Meng Shan declared, his voice echoing across the packed trading floor and out through the open doors into the sunny plaza.
“Sixty metal bars tendered for immediate spot delivery.”
Meng Shan pointed to the price slate hanging above the scales.
“And to celebrate our commercial partnership with the artisans of the outer sect... The South Mountain Guild is reducing its open spot price.”
Meng Shan picked up a piece of white chalk.
He crossed out 11 Spirit Stones.
And beneath it, in bold, heavy strokes, he wrote:
9.5 SPIRIT STONES.
Outside the hall, thirty paces away in the bright sunlight, Steward Pang stopped dead in his tracks.
The rat-faced steward turned his head slowly. He looked back through the open cedar doors at the mountain of sixty gleaming metal bars, and then at the white chalk numbers: 9.5.
Pang’s knees buckled.
The color drained from his face until his skin looked like a week-old corpse.
The three hundred and thirty spirit stones he had just spent had not preserved the shortage.
He had just paid eleven stones per pound for thirty metal bars... While the spot price plummeted to nine point five behind his back.
“Nine point five...” a blacksmith whispered in the silence.
Then, with the roar of a bursting dam, the crowd surged.
“I’LL TAKE TEN CATTIES!”
“TWENTY CATTIES! HERE IS CASH!”
“GIVE ME FIVE INGOTS!”
Up in the shadowed tea loft, Lin Ke took a slow sip of hot tea. He watched Steward Pang stumble blindly across the cobblestones toward the Grand Fortune Pavilion like an unsafe man walking to the block.
Lin Ke set his teacup down with a quiet, precise click.
“Phase one complete,” Lin Ke murmured.
“Now let’s see how much liquidity Young Master Zhao has left.”