Chapter 72: Spoils (2)
Grandmother Lu and all of her workers were waiting inside the shop. When he stepped back inside, all of them bowed to Sen. He knew they meant it to convey their respect, but it mostly just made him uncomfortable. No wonder Master Feng tried to keep a low profile when he went away all those times, thought Sen. Sen supposed that some people might crave that kind of attention all the time, but he could do without it. Still, there was no getting around the people in the shop. He gave them a shallower bow in return, setting them all free to return to doing whatever they had been doing before the excitement outside. Some of them looked like they would linger, but Grandmother Lu shooed them away. Sen nodded to the back room they had been in before. When Grandmother Lu nodded in return, he made a hasty retreat to the relative privacy of the space.
While Grandmother Lu tended to her employees, Sen pulled out the storage ring he’d taken off the other cultivator. While he’d imagined some kind of minor wealth in the ring when he’d grabbed it, he’d also done it as a minor act of spite against the townspeople and their judgment. Faced with the reality of actually taking whatever was in the ring didn’t sit entirely right with him. It’s not like you can give it back, he reminded himself. When curiosity finally got the better of him, Sen accessed the ring and emptied its contents onto a table. It was mercifully free of truly personal items. The most personal items were just some spare clothes in the ring. It was a habit that Master Feng and Auntie Caihong had strongly encouraged Sen to adopt. He found a small cache of pills that he couldn’t readily identify. He supposed that he might be able to sell those. It was even possible he could use them, although he had no intention of ever using any pill he hadn’t at least seen getting made.
There were other odds and ends in the ring. Basic camping supplies that he already had and a strange, enchanted object that seemed to channel environmental fire qi. He supposed it would be useful for starting campfires without using one’s own qi. He found several more daos, at least one of which he thought was a spirit-level weapon. He lingered over that sword for a while. He didn’t know exactly how rare spirit-level weapons were, but he knew they were far rarer than mortal-grade weapons. Sen vaguely wished that he’d trained with the dao, but it was a passing thought. He knew he could learn to wield one, but he also knew what it would require from him. He already had a firm foundation with the jian and the spear. That was enough. He would build on those skills. He would wait until he reached a larger town or city and then sell the dao or all of them if he could. It might even be possible to make a trade for another spirit-level jian. After a moment of deliberation, he pushed the weapons and the enchanted fire starter into his larger storage ring.
Then, he turned to the last thing that had been in other cultivator’s ring. It was a plain canvas satchel with nothing to make it stand out. Sen opened it up expecting to find food or possibly some kind of document. What he hadn’t expected to find was gold. The satchel was half full of golden taels. The sight of so much money, just sitting there, had a certain unreal quality for Sen. He didn’t know how to process that kind of wealth. Then, he started to wonder where a foundation formation stage cultivator could have gotten that kind of money. Sen supposed that the money could be the man’s life savings. Yet, it rang hollow to him. Sen couldn’t imagine a scenario where he’d want to carry around that kind of wealth for any length of time. He’d have found somewhere to hide it, as insurance against a future disaster. Auntie Caihong had even told him about things called banks where people could put their money for safekeeping. No, there were no good reasons to carry around that much money. Sen suspected that the man had either stolen the money or been told to hold it for someone else.
If he’d stolen it, there wasn’t much Sen could do about that. He wouldn’t even know where to begin to look for the victims. He’d seen enough about people to know that if he just announced that he’d found stolen money, everyone would come running. He didn’t have the resources to find out quietly. That would take delicate questions asked of discrete people. Sen didn’t know those people, nor did he have the experience to figure out how to phrase those delicate questions. Of course, if the cultivator had been holding the money for someone, that was a different problem. They’d want that money back. When Sen considered who might have that much money or access to it, it was a depressingly short list. In fact, the most likely suspect was someone that Sen was very ready to never think about again. He found himself wishing that he had let someone else loot that corpse. It might have spared him some trouble. Then again, it might not have spared him anything.
Uncertain about how best to proceed, he closed the satchel and waited for Grandmother Lu. Sen could recognize when he was in over his head with a problem. With that much wealth on the line, he was absolutely out of his depth. He worried that it may well be out of Grandmother Lu’s depth, too, but she at least had more experience with the world and politicians. Even if she couldn’t tell him exactly how to handle it, she likely could at least point him in a direction. That was more than he had now. Perhaps half an hour passed with Sen staring daggers at that bag full of unwanted trouble before Grandmother Lu came back to check on him.
“What’s all this?” She asked, gesturing at the table.
“That other cultivator had a storage ring. Those are things I can’t use,” he said, gesturing at the pile of clothes and camping equipment. “I thought you might know someone who could use them.”
Grandmother Lu cocked her head to one side for a moment, thinking, before she nodded.
“Yes, I think I know some people who could use them. They can’t afford much,” she warned Sen.
“Just give it to them. I don’t need money from people who don’t have it. Besides, that’s not the problem. That,” he said, pointing at the satchel, “is the problem.”
He reached over and flipped the satchel open. Grandmother Lu’s eyes went as wide as they could. She reached out a shaking hand and grabbed a handful of the golden taels, letting them run through her fingers. Sen watched as the inevitable happened. For most of a minute, he could see the dreams of wealth running through the older woman’s mind. He could almost guess at the content of those dreams. She was imagining her trading empire expanding by leaps and bounds, stretching clear to the capital, and then raking in profits by the bushel. Slowly, though, he saw her start to frown. She looked down at the satchel and started to really consider it. The longer she studied all of that gold, the more unhappy she looked. She glanced at him, almost as if to check and see if he had understood the dangers. Reassured by whatever she saw, she went back to frowning at the gold. Then, much as Sen had done, she closed the satchel.
“Put that away somewhere before anyone else sees it,” she ordered, her eyes distant as she thought through something.
Sen did as she instructed and put the satchel into his storage ring. He idly tossed the other cultivator’s storage ring to Grandmother Lu. She caught it and offered Sen a briefly puzzled look until she realized what she held. She immediately tried to give it back. Sen waved her off.
“You can use it. I already have one.”
“These are expensive, Sen. You could sell it.”
Sen shrugged. “Consider it a few years’ worth of back new year gifts.”
She rolled her eyes, but eventually slipped the ring into a pocket.
“They’ll come looking for that gold,” she said.
“You think it’s the mayor’s?”
She nodded. “Who knows where he got it, but yes. I think he imagined that cultivator you fought was the safest place he could keep the money. The mayor probably never imagined that someone would wander through town that could kill the man. Probably never even considered the possibility when he sent the fool here.”
“Probably not. When do you think they’ll come?”
“I’m surprised they aren’t here already. I suppose it’s too much for them to simply raid my shop in the middle of the day without a very good excuse.”
“Tonight then?”
Grandmother Lu sighed, then scowled, and then nodded. “Tonight.”
“Well, since we have time, I have gifts for you, Grandmother. Courtesy of Master Feng, Uncle Kho, and Ma Caihong.”
She looked both excited and apprehensive at the prospect of gifts from the elder cultivators. “Well, who doesn’t love presents?”
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