Xianxia Codex

A net of watchers everywhere in the market town that nobody can account for. It watches, it records. Stepping up to seize a man, or opening its mouth to question him, is no business of its own.

The lowest grade of takeover yard in the market town. Rogue cultivators who deviate and have nobody to redeem them are carried in here, and the odds of anyone coming out are zero.

A pill shop on East Street run by a man named Zhou, a dark-gold peony stitched at his cuff. The front room sells Qi Condensation Powder; the back yard holds vat after vat of backlashed waste pills.

Where rogue cultivators gather to scrape a living. Pill shops on East Street, talisman stalls on West Street, used clothes in Well-Bottom Lane. Trade by day, and a different face after dark.

The two words cultivators fear most. Qi strikes the gap in an art and surges back wild: at the light end the qi sinks, at the heavy end the meridians choke dead and the mind warps.

A name given in private by a rogue cultivator at the bottom. The backlash rate has sat steady on one line for years, just under what could be called to account, just high enough to keep squeezing.