Good Deeds

The slums after the Black Fog, "Mud Alley." The air is always thick with the smell of rust, sour, rotten slop, and scorched grease. The daylight is a grayish yellow, as if filtered through oiled paper. Tainted energy is the only source of power and currency: three crystals can buy enough soup for three days. Lamps fueled by tainted energy hang all over the streets, and the black market runs on it, whether they burn it, melt it, or weigh it.

Those who can't pay the tainted-energy tax "crystallize": first their fingers turn gray, then their palms, then their arms, until their whole bodies become gray-white crystal statues. The corpse collectors smash them apart and sell the fragments as low-grade tainted-energy crystals. The collection station at the end of the alley has no door. A waist-high stone counter stands across the street, with seven or eight iron hooks hanging from a beam behind it. Small wooden tags marked with charcoal numbers dangle from the hooks. The brick furnace sits at the far end of the courtyard. One entry in the ledger, one item on a hook. They only light the fire once they have a full batch.

The real force controlling the street isn't the guard patrol. It's the "Law of Causal Reversal": do a good deed and part of your body crystallizes, while a piece of your memory is carved away; take the initiative to do something evil, and your sentence is reduced instead. Every morning, the people in the alley first step on an insect and crush it, then say, "Today, I struck first." No one ever asked why, until Lu Chen saw an empty hook hanging in front of a woman's chest, while the scale beam sank