An old rogue cultivator who has worked Qingqi Bazaar for 30 years, nicknamed 'Nine Lives'—he has walked through fire nine times and survived all nine. There's no rule of the bazaar's underbelly he doesn't know.
Background / motivation / observation stance
An old Rogue Cultivator who has drifted through the Qingqi Bazaar for 30 years, past sixty, hair gone grey. Nicknamed 'Nine Lives'—he has walked through 9 deviations and survived all 9.
He keeps to a usual seat at the East Street teahouse; the cuffs of his grey cloth robe are worn pale but washed clean, his waist bare, hung with neither talisman pouch nor wine gourd. There is no rule for survival at the bottom of the bazaar that he does not know.
He has his habitual seat at the East Street teahouse, against the pillar—back to the wall, facing the street mouth, and he will sit there most of a day. From that seat you can see both roads in and out of the bazaar, and the profile of every table in the teahouse. The faces in the bazaar have turned over several times; that stool has stayed his.
He hangs nothing at his waist. His explanation: carry things and you can't run fast when the fire takes you.
He knows the survival rules of the bottom rung—whose elixirs are safe to swallow, which alley to avoid after dark, which way to turn when someone has marked you, whose money can be owed and whose cannot. Knowing is one thing; he does not volunteer any of it.
He has a habit when dealing with people: he never asks first who you are, only what you have been busy with lately. Then he lowers his head to his tea and does not press.
The first time Lin Que truly took notice of him was beside the cold rice-ball stall at the end of East-Entry Street. The old man looked no different from any down-and-out Rogue Cultivator in the bazaar, yet the way he watched people was different—he was watching what Lin Que was watching.
Few people in the bazaar truly 'see.' He was one of them.
He invited Lin Que into the back room of the old-clothes shop—2 shallow wooden bowls on the table, a pot of tea. He came straight to the point: How many did you see today? And answered himself: 3; I saw the second one.
He told Lin Que that the Mending Art had buyers, that the buyers sat 'above the underground market,' and that this month something in the bazaar was speeding up. He knew Lin Que wouldn't believe him at once, and didn't press; he only pushed across a carved talisman wood-tag the size of a palm: Next time, you come find me yourself, carrying this.
There was one thing he didn't say outright, but Lin Que saw it anyway: on the inner lining of the sleeve over the inside of his right wrist, near the pulse-gate, there was now a faint hidden pattern—a spot only someone who cultivates would care about.
What mattered more: the old Rogue Cultivator who had sold Lin Que that fragment half a year ago came from the same lineage as this man. Where that thread led, he didn't say, and Lin Que hadn't yet asked.
The name Nine Lives sounds like luck. He never puts it that way—9 deviations, and each of them left something behind.
His left ear has been poor since the fourth. He takes the seat against the wall in the tea shed partly to watch the room and partly so that every sound arrives from the same side. In wet weather the old injury in his right leg goes heavy, and on those days he does not leave the bazaar.
The worst of it does not show: his meridians have been mended too many times and no longer carry him far. Rogue cultivators in the bazaar are still reckoning at forty-odd on the day they might make one trip into a rift. He is past sixty and reckons no such thing.
Someone asked whether he regretted any of it. He said 7 of the 9 were for a meal, and regret is no use.
Not many rogue cultivators last 30 years in the Qingqi Bazaar. Of those who reached his age without leaving, the bazaar can count them on one hand.
The ones who leave mostly have somewhere to go. Men a sect once took back to their sects, men with fields back to the countryside, men with enough spirit stones north to the great cities. He has none of the three.
His own answer is a light one: leave, and you have to learn a new set of faces from the beginning, and he is too old to learn faces.
The truth sits heavier than that. On this street—which stall has changed hands how many times, what is buried in the back court of which shop, which lane is empty at which hour—none of it is worth a copper anywhere else. Here it is the only capital he has left. Capital that cannot be moved.
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