Chương 56: 55. I Tried to Find a Hidden Dragon but Only Found a Mad Senior and His Candle-Hat

I establish a set of commandments for myself for this expedition. Internalized and made into instinct. Never buy too much from one shop. Never buy only rare things. Make ten mundane transactions for every unusual one. Use different districts. Spread the purchases. Spread the attention. Build relationships before moving large value. Let them remember your face before they remember your stones. Create visible income before visible spending. The new mine vein. A few good trades. Nothing that invites questions.

Assume every merchant talks to someone. Act as though someone is watching you at all times. The lower-end shops are clustered near the eastern wall, where the buildings are older and the streets are narrower and the merchants have been selling the same basic supplies to the same local customers for decades. The prices are fair. The quality is modest. Nothing here would interest a major sect or a wealthy cultivator.

'Perfect.' I buy salt first. Twenty pounds, coarse grain, packed in oiled cloth. The merchant is an old woman with missing teeth and a sharp eye for hagglers. I let her win on the first round, push back on the second, settle on a price that makes her feel clever. She wraps the salt without comment. Ling'er plays bored servant girl beside me, one finger already assigned to signals. She looks distracted. A servant girl bored by errands. But I gave her orders.

The Sacred Cosmic Bone is working, sweeping through the crowd, reading threads, cataloging faces. She scratches her nose—a signal. All clear. I move to the next stall. Cloth. Bolts of undyed cotton, suitable for training robes or bandages. I buy twenty. The merchant asks if I'm outfitting a small army. I tell him I have a large family. We settle on a price that is fair for both of us. Ling'er touches her ear. Someone watching, but not with ill intent. A passerby, maybe. A merchant from a neighboring stall.

No threat. I buy more books. Basic educational materials. History, geography, the kind of foundational knowledge that every sect should have but mine has been lacking. The bookseller is a young man with spectacles and the particular intensity of someone who loves his stock more than his customers. He tries to sell me a treatise on the migration patterns of spiritual beasts in the eastern provinces. I buy it. He looks pleased. I look like a minor sect leader building a library.

Ling'er scratches her nose as she pores over the book I gave her. All clear. I buy cooking oil. Dried beans. A sack of rice. Old Chen will appreciate the variety. I haggle over the price of the beans for five minutes, not because I need to, but because the man across the street has been watching us for too long and I want to see if he follows. He doesn't. He yawns and walks away. The eastern side of Celestial Jade City is no less crowded, but the texture of the crowd changed. Fewer cultivators. More mortals.

The auras here are Qi Condensation at best; laborers, minor merchants, families who have lived in this district for generations and never seen the inside of a sect. This is where craftsmen work. Not the ones with waiting lists of cultivator clients. These are ones who repair pots and sharpen blades and sell wooden bowls to people who cannot afford jade. I ask the first shopkeeper, a woman selling iron nails from a barrel, if she knows a craftsman named Wei Zheng.

"Wei Zheng?" She wipes her hands on her apron.

"There's a Wei Zheng three streets over. Tell him Liu sent you." His shop is small, crammed between a dye-maker and a tea house. The window displays elaborate porcelain, vases painted with cranes, bowls glazed in celadon, a teapot shaped like a sleeping cat. The man behind the counter is middle-aged, with clay under his fingernails and a kind face.

"Are you Wei Zheng?"

"I am." He smiles.

"Looking for something special? I just finished a set of tea cups inspired by the—""I'm looking for a craftsman who works with spirit tools. Weapons. Artifacts." His smile fades.

"Oh. Apologies, cultivator. No, that's not me. I do pottery. Decorative, mostly. I've fixed a few low-grade formation lamps, but nothing like what you're describing."

"I was told you were a craftsman."

"I am a craftsman. Just not that kind." He gestures at his wares." This is my craft." I look at the porcelain vases. The painted cranes are lovely. The glazing is even. This man is good at what he does... but it's not what I need.

"Apologies for the confusion. Do you know anyone in the district who works with spirit tools? Named Wei Zheng?" He thinks.

"There's another Wei Zheng. Further east, near the tannery. He builds... devices." His face makes an odd expression, like he's eaten something sour.

"Are you sure you want to find him?"

"I'm sure." He gives me directions. I thank him and leave. The tannery is easy to find, the smell announces it from two blocks away. The workshop is a shack behind it, leaning against a wall, its roof patched with mismatched tiles. A sign above the door reads "Wei Zheng's Wonder Emporium: Inventions to Rival the Heavens." I knock. The door swings open. The man who stands there is wild-haired, wild-eyed, wearing a robe covered in pockets and straps. He is missing two fingers on his left hand.

"Ah! A customer!" He grabs my arm and pulls me inside.

"You've come at the perfect moment. I've just finished my latest masterpiece—""What do you make?"

"Everything! Anything! The heavens themselves will tremble before my genius!" He gestures at shelves lined with... objects. I use the Gaze on the nearest one. Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators! Candle-Hat – Grade: Junk Content: A hat with a candle holder. Lights the area immediately in front of the wearer's face. Blinds the wearer. Verdict: Counterproductive.

"You're Wei Zheng?" I ask, as I assess him with the Gaze. Perhaps it's best not to judge a book by it's cover. Senile Old Man - Mortal Name: Wei Zheng Age: 61 Spirit Root: None Cultivation: Mortal Verdict: This is not the Wei Zheng you are looking for. No latent potential. No hidden genius behind the madness of his works. … I suppose that sometimes, there is no hidden dragon to be found.

"Thank you for your time." He looks disappointed.

"At least take a candle-hat. Free of charge. I have too many." I decline and leave. The door closes behind me. The smell of the tannery settles back into my lungs. Two Wei Zhengs. Neither of them right. I stand in the street, staring at the tannery, and try not to feel defeated. The sun is past its peak. The afternoon is fading. I have been searching for a ghost for hours now, following the trail of a dead man's journal, and I have found nothing but potters and madmen.

"Master?" Ling'er's voice is quiet. She is not looking at me. She is looking across the street. I follow her gaze. A tool repair shop. The sign is old, the paint faded, the letters worn by weather. But through the window, I can see the owner. A man. His hands are gnarled, his shoulders hunched, his face hidden in shadow. He is working on something. A blade, maybe. The light catches the metal.

"We should try there," she says. I nod. We cross the street. The workshop is unimpressive. No grand sign. No heavenly forge. Just a narrow building wedged between a tailor and a closed-down bakery, its wooden doors warped by weather, its windows filmed with dust. The sign above the door is so faded that the characters barely read: Wei Tool Repair, the paint flaking, the wood cracked. I stop outside. Ling'er waits beside me, silent, her eyes scanning the street. The interior is dim.

Shelves line the walls, crammed with tools in various states of repair. Knives, shovels, axes, shears. Things that belong on a farm or in a kitchen, not in a cultivator's hand. There are no spirit weapons here. No gleaming blades. I sigh internally, going through the motions. At the very least, I should confirm before disregarding Ling'er. Perhaps she sees something I didn't. A man sits at a workbench near the back. Middle-aged, gray streaking his hair, his face lined in ways that have nothing to do with age.

His hands are still but I can see the calluses, the scars, the particular thickness of fingers that have spent decades gripping tools. He looks up. His eyes are ordinary. Brown, tired, set in a face that has seen too many days of the same thing.

"You a cultivator," he says. Not a question.

"Yes."

"I don't deal in weapons. Go to the Heavenly Craft Guild in the northern district. They'll take your stones and give you something shiny." I look at the tools. The Gaze flickers. Farm Axe (Repaired) – Grade: High Quality: Perfect. The blade is balanced to the wielder's specific strength and grip. The handle has been shaped to fit hands that have swung it for decades. Verdict: It is a regular, mortal tool. It is the best possible version of that tool. Kitchen Knife (Repaired) – Grade: High Quality: Perfect.

The edge is aligned to the angle of the cook's wrist. The weight is distributed for someone who stands on their feet for twelve hours a day. Verdict: He learned who would hold it and made it fit their hand. Shovel (Repaired) – Grade: High Quality: Perfect. The handle is wrapped in cloth worn smooth by grip. The blade has been re-forged to a specific curve: specific, for the soil of one garden, the strength of one digger. Verdict: He knows their work. He made their tools better. I dismiss the Gaze.

Wei Zheng is still watching me. He does not care that I am a cultivator or that I have stones. He just fixes things that break. That is his craft. This is the understanding Frostheart wrote about.

'The tool serves the user. The craftsman serves the tool. The weapon, if he made weapons, would be the same.' I cannot sense any spiritual aura from him. No qi. No cultivation. He is a mortal, as far as my senses can tell. An old man with tired eyes and a cold furnace. But I know, without the Gaze, that Frostheart's trail ends here.

"You're Wei Zheng?" I say. He nods.

"A spirit tool craftsman named Ling Shuang recommended you," I say.

"He mentioned a Wei Zheng near the eastern wall. Selective. Only takes work that interests him." The man's jaw tightens. He mutters something under his breath; a curse, maybe, or a prayer. I catch the name Ling Shuang and a word that sounds like "mouth." I point at the axe on the shelf.

"I can see this isn't amateur work. Someone who looks down on mortals would see nothing more than a simple tool. But for its purpose, as a tool, it's perfect. The balance, the grip, the curve. You made it better." He says nothing.

"So why is someone like you here? In a shop like this? Fixing axes for farmers?" He looks at me. His expression hasn't changed, but something behind his eyes shifts. A wall, maybe. Or the shadow of one.

"I told you. I don't deal in weapons. Go to the Heavenly Craft Guild."

"You could be working on spirit tools. You could be wealthy. Respected. You have the skill."

"I have the skill for this." He gestures at the shelves.

"This is my craft. These are my customers. I don't need cultivators in my workshop, asking questions, bringing trouble." I activate the Gaze. Wei Zheng — Mortal Age: 51 Cultivation: None Constitution: Tool-Heart (B-grade, dormant) — A rare constitution that manifests as an intuitive understanding of tools and their relationship to the user. Unlike his ancestor Wei Song, who could hear weapons speak, it is through touch. When he holds a tool, he feels what it needs and becomes an extension of himself.

Verdict: He has talent. It manifests differently from Wei Song's lineage. He is deliberately hiding from the cultivation world. Wei Zheng is still watching me. His hands have not moved from the bench. His face has not changed. But I can feel it now; the shape of his fear. He has seen cultivators before. They have asked questions before. They have brought trouble before. I consider pressing harder. Asking about his lineage, about Wei Song, about why he refuses to work on weapons when he clearly has the gift.

But the afternoon is fading. Ling'er is quiet beside me.

"I'll leave," I say.

"But I may return. I have a tool that needs someone like you." He doesn't answer. I turn. Ling'er follows. The bell chimes as we step back into the street. The door closes behind us. I stand for a moment, breathing the city air. The eastern wall is visible at the end of the street, gray stone and iron lamps. The crowds flow past. No one looks at us.

"Master," Ling'er says quietly.

"He's afraid."

"Yes. I know. It likely stems from past interactions with people like us."

"What do we do?"

"Investigate. Fear has reasons."