The offices of Crimson Sky Trading occupied the second floor of a building near Redstone City's western gate, accessed through a narrow staircase that smelled of old wood and expensive incense.
Wang Ben climbed the stairs with measured patience, feeling the weight of the spirit stone pouch at his belt. Five thousand medium-grade stones. More than enough to purchase forty units of shadow-drinking crystal, if the merchant proved reasonable. And if not... well, he would find another way. He always did.
The reception room was decorated in the fashion of the domain capital, all crimson silks and lacquered furniture. A young attendant in matching robes looked up as Wang Ben entered, her expression shifting from professional welcome to poorly concealed surprise.
"Young Master Wang." She rose, bowing precisely. "Master Qian did not mention expecting visitors this morning."
"I don't have an appointment. But I believe he'll want to hear what I'm offering."
The attendant's eyes flickered to the spirit stone pouch, calculating its weight with the practiced eye of someone who dealt in wealth daily. "One moment, please."
She disappeared through an inner door. Wang Ben waited, letting his gaze wander across the room's decorations. A painting of the Crimson Bastion's famous Gate of Ten Thousand Flames. A jade carving of the Azure Crimson Kingdom's crest. Subtle messages about where this trading house's true loyalties lay.
The sensation came without warning. A prickling at the back of his neck, the faint awareness of being observed. Wang Ben turned toward the window, but the street below showed only the normal morning traffic. Merchants. Servants. A few cultivators in clan colors moving between shops.
Nothing out of place. Nothing that should have triggered his instincts.
[OBSERVATION: Anomalous sensory input detected]
[Analysis: No identifiable threat in immediate vicinity]
[Note: Host displaying elevated alertness. Cause unknown.]
The attendant returned before he could examine the feeling further.
"Master Qian will see you now."
The negotiation took two hours and accomplished nothing.
Qian Weishan was a middle-aged man with the soft hands of someone who had never worked a day of physical labor and the sharp eyes of someone who had bankrupted dozens of competitors. He listened to Wang Ben's proposal with polite attention, asked probing questions about the Wang Clan's involvement in formation arts, and ultimately declined to sell a single unit of shadow-drinking crystal.
"The contract is with the Crimson Bastion's defensive array commission," he explained, his tone apologetic in a way that didn't reach his eyes. "Even if I wished to divert materials to a private buyer, the political complications would be... substantial."
"I'm prepared to pay above market rate."
"I'm sure you are." Qian's smile was thin. "But spirit stones aren't the only currency that matters in our line of work. Reputation. Relationships. Trust. These take years to build and moments to destroy. I'm afraid I cannot help you, Young Master Wang."
Wang Ben left the trading house with his spirit stones intact and his frustration carefully contained. Five weeks until the deadline. No source for the shadow-drinking crystal. And now, walking through the crowded streets toward the eastern market, that prickling sensation returned.
Someone was watching him.
He paused at a tea vendor's stall, accepting a cup he didn't want, using the moment to scan the surrounding crowd. The streets were busier than they had been before the war, refugees and merchants and cultivators all competing for space. Any one of them could be observing him. Or none of them.
The feeling didn't fade.
Wang Ben finished his tea and continued toward the Wang Clan compound, taking a route that led through narrower streets where a watcher would be easier to spot. But the sensation remained constant, neither strengthening nor weakening, as if whoever observed him knew exactly how to maintain distance.
By the time he reached the compound gates, the feeling had vanished entirely.
INTERLUDE
He watched the boy enter the Wang Clan compound, and something dark stirred in his chest.
Xue Feng pressed himself deeper into the shadow of a merchant's awning, keeping his face angled away from the street. The hood of his traveling cloak was pulled low, hiding the features that might still be recognized despite the months of change. Despite everything they had done to him.
Everything he had let them do.
The compound gates closed behind Wang Ben, and Xue Feng allowed himself to breathe. Not yet. Not until he understood the patterns. The routines. The weaknesses.
He had learned patience in the months since his escape. Learned it in the cold caves where his new masters made their home, in the rituals that had reshaped his cultivation, in the slow burn of hatred that had become the only thing keeping him alive.
The Wang boy. Sixteen years old. Qi condensation, stage one. A child who should have been nothing, who should have been crushed beneath the weight of his betters.
Instead, that child had destroyed everything.
Xue Feng's hands clenched inside his cloak, and he felt the wrongness in his veins pulse in response. The dark lines that traced beneath his skin, visible only if someone looked closely, were a constant reminder of what he had sacrificed. What he had become.
The demonic cultivation techniques they had given him were effective. His qi condensation had stabilized, even strengthened, despite the trauma of his escape and the months of desperate survival. But the cost... the cost was written in the slight pallor of his skin, the way his eyes seemed to catch light differently now, the hunger that never quite faded.
They had promised him revenge. Power enough to destroy the boy who had taken his family, his clan, his entire world.
All they asked in return was his service. His loyalty. His soul, piece by piece, fed into rituals he didn't fully understand.
A fair trade, as far as Xue Feng was concerned. What use was a soul to a man with nothing left to live for?
He remembered the night of his escape. The screams echoing through the Xue compound as Wang Clan cultivators breached the outer walls. His grandfather's cultivation signature flaring and then vanishing, snuffed out like a candle in a storm. The underground passage that his father had prepared for emergencies, leading to a drainage channel that emerged beyond the city walls.
He had crawled through that passage on his hands and knees, covered in filth, listening to his family die above him.
And afterward, alone in the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on his back and the hatred in his heart, he had found them. Or they had found him. The distinction hardly mattered now.
"The Wang Clan." The voice of his master echoed in his memory, cold and amused. "Yes, we know of them. And of the boy who serves as their... unexpected asset. You wish to destroy him?"
"I wish to destroy everything he loves. And then, only then, I will destroy him."
"How delightfully thorough. We may have use for you after all."
Use. That was what he was to them. A tool. A weapon pointed at an enemy they had their own reasons to harm. Xue Feng understood this. He simply didn't care.
Let them use him. Let them extract whatever price they demanded. As long as they gave him the power to make Wang Ben suffer, nothing else mattered.
He had spent the past week studying the Wang Clan compound. Learning when the guards changed shifts. Which gates were most frequently used. Where the family quarters were located.
The father. Wang Tian. Restored to health somehow, advanced to foundation establishment if the rumors were true. A secondary target, but a satisfying one. The man who had once been crippled by Xue Clan schemes, now thriving while the Xue Clan rotted in unmarked graves.
The mother. Li Mei. Qi condensation, stage three. Stagnant, according to his observations. Weak. Vulnerable.
The infant brother. Wang Chen. A year old, perhaps less. Innocent of everything, guilty only of sharing blood with the one Xue Feng hated.
And the friend. Zhao Yu. The blacksmith's son who followed Wang Ben like a loyal dog. Body refinement, but close to breakthrough. Another connection to sever.
Xue Feng had learned their faces. Their routines. The way Wang Ben walked through the market with that careful awareness, as if he sensed threats that others missed. The way the father emerged from his workshop at specific hours. The way the mother carried the infant in her arms when she visited the compound gardens.
He knew them now. Knew where they were weakest.
And when the time came, he would show Wang Ben exactly what it felt like to lose everything.
The dark lines beneath his skin pulsed again, and Xue Feng felt the hunger stir. Soon, his masters had promised. Soon he would have the strength to strike. But not yet. Not until every piece was in position.
Patience. He had learned patience.
He could wait a little longer.
Evening painted the Wang Clan compound in shades of amber and shadow.
Wang Ben sat in his family's quarters, reviewing the day's failures with the detached frustration that had become his constant companion. Qian Weishan's refusal. The soul-affinity jade still unavailable. The deadline creeping closer with every passing hour.
"You're brooding again."
He looked up to find his mother watching him from the doorway, Wang Chen balanced on her hip. The baby was awake, bright eyes taking in everything with the curiosity of the very young.
"Thinking. There's a difference."
"Is there?" Li Mei crossed to the low table where he sat, settling onto a cushion with practiced grace. Wang Chen immediately reached for the papers spread before Wang Ben, and his mother gently redirected those grasping hands. "Your father broods. I've had decades to learn the signs."
"The material acquisition isn't going as planned."
"It rarely does." Li Mei's voice was quiet, understanding. "When your father was building his reputation as an alchemist, he spent three years searching for a single herb that a senior cultivator had promised to a rival. He found it eventually. Not through wealth or connections, but through patience and creativity."
"I don't have three years."
"No. But you have resources he didn't. A clan behind you. A father who can help. Friends who would do anything you asked." She caught his eye, something serious beneath her gentle expression. "Whatever this project is, Ben'er, you don't have to solve every problem alone."
The words echoed what his father had said days ago. What Zhao Yu had implied in the training courtyard. Everyone seemed to think he was carrying burdens by himself.
Maybe they were right.
"Something strange happened today," he said. "In the city. I felt like someone was watching me. Following me."
Li Mei's expression sharpened. "Did you see anyone?"
"No. Just a feeling. It came and went."
"Your instincts have proven reliable before." She was quiet for a moment, adjusting Wang Chen's position on her lap. "I'll mention it to your father. And to the compound's patrol captain. If someone is watching the family..."
"It might be nothing."
"It might be something." Li Mei's voice carried an edge he rarely heard from her. "We didn't survive a war just to ignore warnings now."
Wang Chen chose that moment to grab a corner of Wang Ben's notes, crumpling the paper with delighted enthusiasm. The tension broke as Li Mei laughed, gently extracting the document from tiny fists.
"Your brother has opinions about your work."
"Strong ones, apparently."
They sat together as the last light faded from the windows, mother and sons in the warmth of the family quarters. Outside, the compound bustled with the evening routines of a clan putting itself to bed. Guards changing shifts. Servants completing their duties. Cultivators returning from training or business in the city.
Safe. Familiar. Home.
Wang Ben couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere in the darkness beyond the walls, something was watching. Waiting.
But there was nothing he could do about shadows he couldn't see.
Xue Feng watched the lights go out in the Wang family quarters, one by one.
He stood on a rooftop three streets away, far enough that even a qi condensation cultivator's senses wouldn't detect him. The demonic techniques they had taught him included methods for suppressing his presence, for blending with shadows in ways that normal cultivation couldn't achieve.
The mother had looked worried when she'd listened to the boy. Good. Let them feel the first stirrings of fear. Let them wonder what hunted them in the darkness.
This was only the beginning.
He would strip away everything Wang Ben loved, piece by piece. The father first, perhaps. Or the friend. Someone close enough to hurt, far enough from the core that the boy might think it was coincidence. Bad luck. The natural dangers of the cultivation world.
Only when Wang Ben stood alone, surrounded by the graves of everyone he had ever cared about, would Xue Feng reveal himself.
Only then would the boy understand what it felt like to lose everything.
The dark lines beneath his skin pulsed with hungry anticipation, and Xue Feng smiled for the first time in months.
Soon.
END OF CHAPTER 62