Shang Clan Inner City
Fang Yuan pays two hundred primeval stones for himself and Bai Ning Bing and enters Shang clan city’s inner city, where the crowd thins to less than half the outer city’s. Gu Masters at rank one and two now fill wide paths built for ten carts abreast. Walls hold charcoal stone that burns a long time without smoke, warming and drying the air against the outside. Buildings here share one style, built of heat-resistant red lava stone. Round pillars every five hundred steps carry spiral stairs linking the city’s many levels, since the inner city is shaped more like a sphere than a flat grid of streets. ch. 261
At a checkpoint deeper in, a higher-ranked guard asks for a token. Fang Yuan has none. He pays two hundred primeval stones for each of them, and the two pass into the fourth inner city. Shang clan has divided the mountain into five inner regions beyond the outer city: a central inner city holding its political and military heart, a second inner city for clansmen only, a third inner city for the wealthy, and a fourth and fifth for the middle and lower classes. ch. 261
The fourth inner city is cooler and damper than the fifth, lit by a vine called Moonlight crawling mountain tiger whose wide blue leaves cover the walls and blend into a soft light, thick enough that mist gathers near the ground. Rank two Gu Masters are now the common sight. The streets grow quieter. At the gate to the third inner city, a guard, himself rank three, names the price as six hundred primeval stones, this time without saying whether that is per person as the earlier tolls specified, and Fang Yuan pays it. ch. 261
The third inner city is built entirely of star stones, a material used in Gu refinement that glows in the dark, so the streets and buildings alike shed starlight and the air stays clear of mist. Bai Ning Bing calls it rich and extravagant. She guesses the visible construction alone cost an astronomical sum. Fang Yuan judges this third inner city’s construction alone could match the wealth of tens of Gu Yue clans put together. Even rank two Gu Masters are now rare; almost everyone here is rank three, and this is where Fang Yuan means to be. ch. 261
Past this lies the second inner city. Reaching it takes a Shang clan token of sufficient standing; primeval stones alone are no longer enough. Fang Yuan and Bai Ning Bing instead enter Tong Ou shop, a Gu worm trading house, and are shown to a private room despite their plain, worn clothes. An elderly rank two Gu Master lends them two bookworms, a rare rank one Gu that stores knowledge rather than objects, so that browsing the shop’s stock floods their minds with information on almost tens of thousands of Gu worms, ranked one through five. ch. 261
Fang Yuan wants to buy in bulk, but even the more than ten thousand primeval stones he carries will not cover everything he needs, since some of the rarer Gu worms take a token he does not have, so he returns the bookworm. The elder offers a bulk discount and turns more respectful once he sees their high-grade primeval essence, but Fang Yuan says he also has Gu worms to sell. He hands over a bone spear Gu and invites the elder to test it himself. The elder has never seen one before, since it is a Gu made by Grey Bone Scholar that has never reached the open market. Testing it, he judges it rank one, hard to raise, with an attack power he calls high and unusual, and worth its price. He holds out his palm and shows a number. ch. 261
