“Buying…” Jared stepped closer, letting the lamplight find his face. “A public execution in Jade Immortal City, recently, a man and a woman. I want every detail… Who swung the blade, what led to it, and where the bodies rest.”
The dagger paused mid-stroke. The old man’s filmed eyes lifted and drifted over Luther before pinning Jared, lingering just long enough to note a Heavenly Immortal Realm signature where he’d expected less. A smear of amusement cracked his throat. “This information isn’t cheap.”
“How much?” Jared kept his tone even, as though inquiring after the price of bread. Three fingers rose from his scarred fist.
“Thirty thousand high-grade prime crystals.”
“Thirty thousand?” The number tasted like iron filings. Beside him Luther sucked in a sharp breath that whistled like new steel.
Jared ran the math, in level thirteen that sum could swing a fine high-grade artifact, or bankroll an ordinary cultivator’s decades of comfort. A robbery spelled out in digits, yet the old man’s face remained calm stone.
He felt his brow knit, the weight of the wrinkles equal to the weight of the price.
The coins in his spatial pouch, Cyril’s generous advance plus everything he’d converted from level twelve, barely cleared five thousand. A gulf yawned between need and means.
The brass counter felt colder than it looked; Jared let two fingers rest on it, steadying the tremor in his chest.
“Would another treasure serve as collateral?” The old merchant’s eyelids barely lifted; the movement reminded Jared of a tortoise refusing to stick its neck out.
“We trade only in prime crystals, no credit, no pawns.”
Cold light rippled across Jared’s vision before he understood it came from his own eyes. Beneath his ribs the sealed reservoir of chaotic force shifted, like storm water straining against a dam. Every tick of the hanging clock sounded louder than the last.
He could feel impatience raking its nails along his spine, urging him to drag answers out of the merchant by force.
Luther’s voice knifed into Jared’s mind before sound reached his ears. “Mr. Chance, stop… Wards layer this place. The old fool’s strength is masked, his backers unknown. Force him and we might wake Jade Immortal Manor, or worse, the celestials.”
Jared drew in air so slowly his lungs burned, chaining the reckless surge back behind bone and will.
Luther was right, this was celestial turf, where one wrong vibration could summon a tribunal.
A ragged flap of cloth snapped aside behind the counter. A bruised youth shot out foot first, stumbled, and kissed the floorboards with his cheek.
From behind the cloth came a roar thick with phlegm. “Get out! Bring fake leads again and I’ll snap your legs next time!”
The words rattled across the shelves, making dusty vials vibrate like frightened teeth.
The youth pressed a bloody lip against his sleeve, then scrambled for the door, half crawling, half sliding on panic-slick boots.
An idea flicked like tinder inside Jared’s head; he tapped the counter to reclaim the merchant’s gaze.
“We’ll revisit the price later,” Jared said, already turning toward the doorway. He caught Luther’s sleeve and slipped into the street before the old man could object.
The battered youth limped toward the alley mouth; Jared and Luther shadowed him, matching every stride with softer ones.
At the corner they stepped ahead, blocking sunlight and escape in the same motion.
The youth jerked back, eyes fever-bright behind swelling bruises. “What do you want? I’m broke!”
Jared lifted both palms, letting the alley’s weak light show he carried no weapon. “Easy, friend. No harm meant.”
He loosened a cotton pouch, muted blue glints of prime crystals spilled against the fabric.
“Answer a few questions and the bag is yours…”
Greed widened the youth’s eyes, then caution narrowed them again, he swept the street with a quick, hunted glance. He leaned in. “Not here… Follow me.”
He threaded them through seven turns that smelled of rotting fruit and colder fear.
At last they ducked into a shack so ruinous the walls argued with gravity. He latched the door, then spun, hunger and worry wrestling for space on his face.
“What do you need to know?” Even while speaking, his gaze kept hopping to the pouch as though afraid it would sprout wings.
Jared did not circle. “The recent beheading outside Jade Immortal City, a man and a woman. Tell me everything.”
Color fled the youth’s face so fast it seemed vacuumed out.
He shook his head hard enough to sting. “Know nothing! Even asking costs a head!”
Jared inched the pouch forward until the crystals’ dull shimmer nudged the youth’s knuckles. “Speak, take them, and we vanish. No one learns who helped us.”
The kid’s fingers hovered above the pouch, pupils flickering like a trapped animal watching an open gate.
Need pulsed in his face, but fear kept his heels glued to the floor.
“We only want a general hint,” Jared coaxed, letting the pouch dangle where the lamplight could kiss every gem. “For instance, where the execution is scheduled. That can’t be state secret. Give us the spot and we’ll handle the rest.”
“Soulfall Slope, three hundred li east of the city…” the youth snatched the crystals as though they were burning coal. “That’s where Jade Immortal Manor handles the worst offenders, wicked ground through and through. Anyone killed there has their very soul pinned down, doomed forever. That’s all I know, I swear! Don’t ask me for more, please!”
Before Jared could frame another question, the boy wrenched the door wide and bolted into the corridor, soft boots drumming a panicked retreat.
“Soulfall Slope… Souls chained…” Jared mouthed the phrase, tasting iron at the back of his tongue.
Unease crawled higher with every syllable, a cold vine squeezing breath from his ribs.
Mr. and Mrs. Morse were seasoned adepts, a plain beheading might still leave them a sliver of escape…
But a site designed to strangle spirit as well as flesh…
That cracked open possibilities Jared refused to name.
“Mr. Chance, what now?” Luther’s whisper barely slipped past the room’s stale air.
“We go to Soulfall Slope,” Jared said, each word a nail. “Alive, we bring them home. Dead… I’ll at least trace where they bled out.”
Neither man lingered. They slipped through the eastern gate and shot across the plains, the city shrinking to a cracked bowl behind them.
***
Three hundred feet blurred beneath their boots in less than a breath.
The first glimpse of the hollow between twin barren peaks punched the air from Jared’s chest. The slope itself sagged like a wound, no wider than a village square yet dense with a reek that felt older than bone.
A permanent veil of gray mist hovered overhead, thinning the daylight to a smoker’s cough. No grass dared break the soil, the earth glistened a dark, blood-heavy red.
Somewhere in the murk, screams drifted-shrill, hopeless, layered like old paint, voices of souls shackled so long they had forgotten silence.
At the center stood black pillars streaked with dried gore, each wrapped in rune-scored chains as thick as a man’s thigh. Even without a witness, Jared knew, this was where sentences ended. He swallowed the quake in his gut and dropped onto the sodden ground.
Mud clung, warm and slick, as if someone had just wrung it from fresh organs. Wails jabbed at his mind like sewing needles, but the chaotic force coiled in his core flicked them aside.
Jared crept toward the cluster of black stone columns, forcing each step to stay silent. Stale air pressed against his ribs, but he kept moving until rough granite filled his reach and he could study the surface up close.
Crusted blood, long dried to brown, pocked the column, yet newer gouges still bled a faint rust, as if whatever happened here refused to settle into memory.
The ground told its own story, drag tracks scoring the dust, star-shaped scorch pits where spells had detonated, and, scattered like shed petals, several shredded scraps of cloth unlike any fabric he knew.
He crouched, fingertips trembling, and lifted one scrap between thumb and forefinger.
The weave resisted even that gentle tug, Heavenly Silkworm Silk threaded with some ice-laden filament, colder than stone, yet impossibly supple, still humming with a thin, pristine aura.
That aura echoed Mr. Morse’s ageless, serene power, only now it flickered, weak, fractured, as though the man’s very spirit had been shaken apart.
Another shard, softer in color, breathed a quiet wood-tinged vitality that fit the gentle steadiness he remembered from Morse’s wife.
