At the entrance of Lingxu Village, Jia Xiaoyu was squatting in front of her grocery store, sharpening her scissors with half a piece of broken spirit. The rotten account book was spread out on his knees, with a few lines of small words faintly floating on the cover: This pair of scissors costs three cents and has a market price of five cents, but if it is given to the hunter thirty miles away who is short of iron, it can be exchanged for three wolf skins.
He grinned and was about to stand up when smoke and dust suddenly rose up from the official road outside the village. A monk in white clothes covered in blood stumbled to the front of the shop, holding a bronze box tightly in his arms. His voice was hoarse: The fragments of spiritual veins are hidden... He died before he finished speaking.
The ledger turned a page by itself. The ink words covered the paper like a colony of ants, and the value chain stretched crazily line by line. In the end, all the threads pointed to one name: the Master of Tiangong Pavilion.
Jia Xiaoyu looked at the corpse, and then at the rusty iron ring on the table that had just been collected today - it had the same pattern as the bronze box. He was silent for a long time, then dragged the body to the backyard and buried it, then locked the box at the bottom of the counter.
The next day, he opened the door as usual, but there was an extra wooden sign hanging at the door: "Our store has newly arrived high-quality wolf skins, only for exchange but not for sale. Also: long-term purchase of all kinds of scrap copper and iron, the price is high."
The wind blew past the eaves of the ruined temple in Lingxu Village, causing the plaque to sway gently. The sea of clouds was billowing on the mountaintop in the distance, and there was a faint sword light passing by, but no one paid attention to this inconspicuous little shop—at least not yet.
