Chapter 725 — Double the Price

CHAPTER 725

Double the Price

Tang Wenbo came on the second morning, before the first batch was out of the cauldron.

He walked down Lantern Row in a dark blue robe with two clerks behind him, carrying a lacquered box. He was as neat as Shi Feng remembered him from Wanhe, and just as polite. He stepped over the drain without looking at it and bowed at the counter.

“Master Shi,” Tang Wenbo said. “Or should this one still say Master Feng?”

“Shi is my name,” Shi Feng said. “Feng Shi was what I could afford at the time.”

“Then congratulations on your Mark, Master Shi.” Tang Wenbo opened the lacquered box and took out a sheet of heavy paper. “The Tang family would like to make an offer. A simple one, this time.”

“The last one was simple too,” Shi Feng said. “Until I read it.”

Nearly sixty people stood around the stall, most waiting to see a 4 Mark refine outdoors rather than buying yet. Tang Wenbo’s arrival drew them closer. Shi Feng waited for him to open the box where everyone could see it.

“Harmony brings wealth, Master Shi,” Tang Wenbo said. “The Tang family will buy your whole stock. Every pill on this counter. Every pill you make here for the rest of the seven days. At two thousand stones a pill. Double your price.”

Somebody in the crowd gasped.

“Double!”

“Twice what stall forty-one charges!”

“Is the Tang family mad?”

Shi Feng took the paper from him and read it. Then he turned around, faced the crowd and read it again, out loud.

“The buyer, the Tang family, will purchase all Spirit Tempering Pills produced at stall forty-one, Lantern Row, for the period of the princess’s round,” Shi Feng read. “The seller will not offer said pills to any other buyer. Delivery to Golden Abacus Hall each evening.”

He lowered the paper.

“Do you all understand that?” Shi Feng asked the crowd. “He’ll pay me double so that none of you can buy them. So that the pills stop being sold here.”

The crowd went quiet. Then people started to look at each other.

“That’s right! If he takes the money, there’s nothing on this counter!”

“And the Tang get to keep selling their nine-hundred pills.”

“My brother bought one here yesterday. It’s the best pill he’s ever eaten!”

Tang Wenbo kept his polite smile, but sweat appeared at his temple. Reading the offer publicly had put the customers inside a discussion he’d meant to conduct with one alchemist.

“Master Shi,” Tang Wenbo said evenly. “It’s a generous offer. You’d make more in seven days than any other stall in the row will make in a year. And the household ledger counts silver.”

“Does it?” Shi Feng asked. “Have you read it?”

Tang Wenbo hesitated for half a breath.

“That leaves me one customer in the princess’s book: the Tang family,” Shi Feng said. “You’d wrap my pills in your gold paper and sell them across the lane. I’d earn money, but stop building this stall.” He returned the sheet. “That isn’t what I came to do.”

“Well said!” the old candle woman shouted from the top of the row.

Tang Wenbo folded the paper carefully, along its old creases, and put it back in the box.

“Then the Tang family has been refused,” Tang Wenbo said. He didn’t raise his voice. “This one will report it exactly.”

“Please do,” Shi Feng said. “Report the part where I read it out loud as well. Your master will want to know why the queue got shorter.”

Tang Wenbo bowed and walked away up Lantern Row. His clerks followed him, carrying the empty box. He didn’t go into Golden Abacus Hall. He went past it, toward the Tang family’s carriage at the top of the lane.

A young man laughed in the doorway of the shop.

Tang Mingyu stood under the gold abacus, rolling one of the beads on his wrist between two fingers. He’d watched the whole thing.

“You should have taken it,” Tang Mingyu called across the lane. “With enough money, you can make a ghost turn the millstone. Uncle Wenbo is soft. He likes to pay people. I don’t.”

“You heard my answer from there,” Shi Feng said. “The pills stay on this counter.”

“Let me explain the West Market to you, alchemist.” Tang Mingyu smiled. “The market is a family game. The Tang family has played it in Tianjing for two hundred years. You paid the princess half a million stones to come and sit beside a drain for seven days. You didn’t pay to play. You paid to lose.”

“Seven days is enough for your customers to judge mine,” Shi Feng said. “I’ll keep refining while you explain why I should lose.”

Tang Mingyu laughed again, as if that was the funniest thing he’d heard all year, and went back inside his shop.

The second batch came out at noon, at six clouds again. The crowd bought all six before the cauldron had cooled.

Ji Yuanhe went out with the empty herb basket to buy more. He came back an hour later with the basket still empty.

“Seven herb houses,” Ji Yuanhe said. “Seven doors. Closed.”