Qingqi Market

Where rogue cultivators gather to scrape a living. Pill shops on East Street, talisman stalls on West Street, apothecaries in the South Market, cheap wine at East Mouth, used clothes and second-hand pill furnaces in Well-Bottom Lane — trade by day, and a different face after dark.

The market town falls into four parts: East Street, West Street, the South Market, and the North Granary. East Street lays out the finished pills the sects release and implements worth the name, and even the flagstones there are swept clean. West Street has lost more than half its flagstones, and the holes hold black water off years of herb dregs; the stalls carry herbs the rogue cultivators dried themselves, old talismans worn away at the edge, waste stock sold by weight. Men who cannot afford to cultivate on East Street all shift to West Street in the end, cultivating there and waiting for the day they cannot stay on West Street either. Well-Bottom Lane runs south off the East Street entrance, past a few small shops selling low-grade spirit materials and then round a bend; there is a dry, disused well at the mouth of it, and the lane is narrow enough that two men can barely pass each other.

Some 800 rogue cultivators are on the registers, and another 200 or so are in the black market. The hall that collects the levy runs this small patch of West Street. Few people have ever seen who the hall master is; all anyone knows is that the hall keeps a set of young men whose work is collecting the levy, putting out pills, and holding down anybody who will not listen.

The market town has rules of its own. Do not go to a shopkeeper while he is eating. Do not open your mouth before he sets his bowl down. If a shopkeeper goes out of his way to tell you not to look, he has known all along that you have been looking. What runs beneath the rules is spirit stones and blood.

A day looks like this. The market opens around the hour of the Rabbit, the herb sheds unloading first, the pill-shop furnaces having been lit in the night. Midday is the thickest crush. Once the sun tilts, the herb sellers, the talisman sellers, the men collecting the pill vats are all busy putting things away. After the third watch-drum, all that is left in the streets is the tread of the night patrol. The market town at night belongs to another set of people, and the trade they do is another trade.

There are men checking at the ward gate, and going out takes a reason. To sit the outer-gate examination of a sect a man needs an examination token first — by the official road that means spirit stones plus a recommendation, and the black market takes spirit stones alone, never priced below 300. Not many rogue cultivators in a whole year manage to put that number together.

The market town is the first step up for a rogue cultivator. It is a wide step, wide enough that most men, once they are standing on it, never move their feet again as long as they live.