The market of Nalan City lay just inside the south wall, in a wide square of packed yellow earth that had once been a parade ground, and Li Yuguo walked into it with fifty taels of silver pressed against his heart and stopped dead at the edge.
He had expected a market.
What he found looked more like a refugee camp.
There were stalls, yes. A few dozen of them, scattered across the square in uneven rows—plank tables under patched awnings, a cart of withered cabbages, a man selling clay pots, a woman with a single basket of eggs and an expression that said she did not expect to sell them. A blacksmith's hammer rang somewhere, slow and tired. Beyond the stalls, pitched against the inner face of the wall, a handful of merchant tents stood out like gaudy flowers in a field of weeds: proper canvas pavilions in red and blue, banners hanging limp, guards in leather armor lounging in their shade.
But there were far more beggars than merchants.
They were everywhere. Sitting in the dust along the edges of the square with their bowls held out. Lying in the thin shadows of the awnings. Huddled in families under scraps of reed matting propped up on sticks. Old men with their ribs showing through their skin like the bars of a cage. Women with babies too tired to cry. And the children—the children were the worst, exactly as he had described them to Nalan Meng without having seen them: thin, yellow-faced, enormous-eyed, their bellies swollen and their limbs like sticks, following every passerby with a silent, patient hunger that went straight into him like a needle.
The air smelled of dust and unwashed bodies and, faintly, of something sweet and rotting. Flies droned. The heat lay over all of it like a lid.
I wrote this, he thought. "Nalan City had suffered a long drought." One line. One line, and I moved on to the next paragraph.
He put his hand flat over the silver in his robe and felt the hard edges of the bars through the silk.
Fifty taels.
It had looked like a lot of money in Nalan Meng's study. Out here, it looked like nothing. He could hand it out to the people in this square, one coin each, and the money would be gone before he reached the far side—and tomorrow they would be just as hungry.
No. Principal. This is principal. You don't eat your seed grain.
He made himself look away from the children and toward the gaudy tents.
The common people of Nalan City had no money. That was obvious. You could not get rich selling to a starving town. But the merchants who came through this town—the caravans from the south, fat with silk and tea and salt, on their way to the capital—those were a different matter entirely.
Those were sheep.
Fat, wealthy, well-fed sheep, wandering into his pasture one after another, wool heavy with silver.
All he needed was a pair of shears.
He found a patch of shade behind a broken cart at the edge of the square, glanced around to make sure no one was paying him attention, and cleared his throat.
"System," he said quietly.
The air in front of him lit up.
It was the same pale gold panel as before, crisp-edged and rippling, cool against his face. But it had changed. The two little boxes of Shop and Status were gone, and in their place, across the top of the panel in bright cheerful characters, a banner unrolled itself with an almost smug flourish:
[ ALIMAMA — Your Online Shopping Platform! ]
Below it, the window filled with neat rows of little pictures, each one framed in gold, each one with a name and a price beneath it. Categories ran down the left side. A search bar glowed at the top. In the corner, a small icon shaped like a person's head blinked at him.
An online shopping platform.
Li Yuguo stared.
It looked like—it looked exactly like—the shopping apps on his old phone. The ones he used to scroll through at three in the morning, filling his cart with things he could not afford and then closing the app without buying anything. The layout was almost identical. Only the colors were different, gold and cream instead of orange, and the pictures shimmered faintly as if they were very slightly alive.
He touched the little head icon in the corner.
The panel rippled. A new page opened.
[ Personal Account ]
Holder: Li Yuguo
Balance: 50 taels silver
He put his hand to his chest. The silver was still there, five hard bars wrapped in blue cloth.
Synced, he realized. It's synced with what I'm carrying.
That was strange. That was very strange. But strange was not the same thing as useful, and the only way to find out whether this thing actually worked was to try it.
He scrolled. The pictures slid past under his finger—soaps, combs, tea, rope, needles, a hundred things he didn't need—and then, in a category labeled Beverages, he saw something so familiar that he laughed out loud.
A red can. White letters.
Soda — Iced Cola. 3 taels.
He hadn't had a cola since the night he died. In the furnace heat of Nalan City, the thought of one was so overwhelming that his mouth flooded with saliva. He did not even hesitate. He jabbed it.
[ Purchase: Soda — Iced Cola × 1. Confirm? ]
[ YES ] [ NO ]
Yes.
Nothing happened.
He waited. A fly landed on his wrist and he shook it off. The panel hung in the air, serene and unhelpful. He was just beginning to feel very foolish when he heard a faint whistling sound overhead—
Thok!
A small wooden box dropped out of the empty sky and landed in the dust at his feet.
This time, at least, it hadn't hit him on the head.
He crouched and opened it. Inside, nestled in a bed of curly wood shavings, lay a single red can. When he picked it up, it was so cold it burned his fingers. Beads of condensation were already forming on its sides, rolling down in fat drops and darkening the dust where they fell.
He cracked the tab.
Tsssss—
The sound was the most beautiful thing he had heard since he arrived in this world. He tipped the can back and drank, and the cola hit his tongue like a mouthful of sweet ice, fizzing and sharp and achingly cold, and it poured down his dry throat into his stomach and spread out through his chest, and for one blissful moment the heat and the dust and the flies and the beggars all ceased to exist.
Glug. Glug. Glug.
He drank until he had to stop to breathe. He leaned against the broken cart, panting, the can sweating in his hand, and looked back at the panel.
Balance: 47 taels silver.
He reached into his robe. The five bars were gone. In their place was a smaller, heavier lump: four bars and a few loose pieces of silver, exactly forty-seven taels' worth.
Li Yuguo stood very still.
This is a golden finger.
This is a real golden finger.
He knew golden fingers. He had written them for a living. And he knew—better than anyone—just how ridiculously, unfairly powerful an online shopping system was. He had given one to Ye Qiong, after all. The moment Ye Qiong arrived in this world, it had been the engine of his entire rise. He had used it to climb from nobody to outer disciple, outer disciple to inner, inner to elder, until he stood at the summit of his sect and the pinnacle of his generation, and every reader had followed along drooling.
But Ye Qiong's system—Alibaba, the father—had been a lottery.
Liu Mang had designed it that way on purpose, to make the protagonist's growth more dramatic. Ye Qiong could never choose what he got. He spent his points on a draw and the system spat out a random prize—sometimes a priceless pill, sometimes a broken sandal—and half the tension of the early chapters had come from waiting to see what the wheel would land on.
Alimama was not a lottery.
He could browse. He could choose. He could see the price and pick the thing he wanted and have it fall out of the sky three breaths later.
It was better than the protagonist's.
Li Yuguo stared at the panel, the can of cola forgotten in his hand, and felt surprise and delight crash into each other somewhere in his chest. Alibaba and Alimama. The father and the mother. Of course they were alike. Of course they were the same kind of system. But the mother was the one that let you pick.
Is this… Lord Yama's doing? Is this his idea of a benefit?
He thought of the bearded face, the round glaring eyes, the giddy little postscript squeezed into the margin. I'm not as bad as you think.
Then he thought of the other line in his status.
Life Span: 69 days.
And the warmth drained back out of him.
He sat down on the end of the broken cart and turned the cold can slowly in his hands.
Sixty-nine days. A little less now. The cola had not changed that. No amount of cola would change that. He could buy all the cheat items in the world and he would still drop dead at the end of the summer, unless—
Unless he did what Lord Yama wanted.
Change the world's plot. And the only currency the system would accept for his life was cuckold points.
He knew what that meant. He was not stupid. He had a terrible, sinking certainty about what kind of "plot" the King of Hell had been hoping for when he spent a year reading his novel by the light of a jade mirror. And when he tried to imagine it—when his mind tried, against his will, to picture what a cuckold point might actually look like in practice—it did not picture some abstract heroine from his book.
It pictured Nalan Meng.
Nalan Meng, in her scandalous crimson silk. Nalan Meng, with someone else's hands on that narrow waist. Nalan Meng's round ass in someone else's lap, on someone else's horse, and her ears going red—
His head throbbed. A real, physical pain, stabbing behind his eyes.
He pressed the cold can against his forehead and shut his eyes.
It made no sense. She was not his wife. Not really. He had met her a few hours ago. She had whipped the ground at his feet, threatened to cut off his cock, and dragged him to kneel in front of an altar. In his old life, he would have called a woman like that a nightmare.
But this body remembered her.
That was the problem. Li Yuguo's memories had come up through the flesh, and with them had come Li Yuguo's feelings, and buried among all the resentment and the cowardice and the self-pity, there was something else, something the original had never once had the courage to say out loud. She was his wife. His. However empty the marriage, however many years they had slept in separate wings, some stubborn, possessive, pathetic part of him had always thought of her that way. And that part of him was now part of Liu Mang, too.
He liked her. Gods help him, he liked her. That body. That fury. That straight back kneeling in the incense smoke. He did not want any other man laying a finger on her.
And he had no choice.
If he wanted to keep living, he had no choice at all.
And even if he somehow found another way—even if he scraped together a few weeks, a few months—there was still the half-year deadline hanging over everything. Because in half a year, even if the protagonist didn't come to kill him, something else would.
He remembered the name, and his stomach turned cold.
Ximen Lang.
There had been a bloody storm in Nalan City in the original story—the beginning of the end, the first domino. And it had not been Ye Qiong who started it. It had been the man Ye Qiong was chasing.
Ximen Lang was Ye Qiong's senior brother in the True Yuan Sect. He was also Ye Qiong's love rival. Liu Mang had written him as the perfect antagonist for the early arcs: handsome, gifted, arrogant, and twisted all the way through—the kind of man who never forgot a slight and spent his whole life paying back every one of them, with interest, in blood. A revenge-driven personality to the bone. When he lost the woman he wanted to his junior brother, he did not grieve. He went hunting.
And his cultivation was terrifying.