The lord of Jinyang City was a man named Fengji — a cat-tribe cultivator of near-Sky-rank strength.

In any other part of the world, that level of power would have made him easy prey for a bandit captain. In the outer ring of Tianhua, with the active combat zones drawing all the genuinely strong fighters toward the center, he was one of the five most powerful people in the surrounding area. The pattern held throughout the domain: the closer to the fighting, the stronger the city and country lords; the further out, the weaker, sometimes falling below Sky-rank entirely, occasionally as low as Ground-rank tier six.

Fengji hadn’t come to Tianhua as a ruler. He’d come as an adventurer, for the training and the opportunity. The city’s previous lord had been killed in battle; the captain of the guard who should have succeeded him had followed shortly after; then the steward. With no one else willing or able, Fengji had simply stayed and done the job — not because he wanted it, but because the alternative was watching everything collapse.

This was not unusual in Tianhua. Many outer cities were currently administered by exactly this kind of accidental ruler. Some positions remained completely vacant, with small military garrisons doing the minimum to maintain order. A large merchant consortium sending a representative to take the lord’s seat was actually considered a desirable outcome — the upper factions didn’t much care about strength or background at this level, only that the assigned responsibilities got handled. Beyond those responsibilities, the outer lords were left entirely alone.

Jinyang and nearby cities like Yangtimid — a particularly desolate place with poor soil, scarce minerals, and nothing to recommend it — had effectively been forgotten by anyone with the power to improve them.

“Where exactly do you expect me to produce grain from?” Fengji was in his hall, shouting at his steward Shatong. He was not a composed man under pressure, and he’d been under pressure for a long time. “I’m not refusing to help the people — I can’t. The last of the seeds went to them for planting. How was I supposed to know a fraudulent merchant had roasted them? I don’t know anything about agriculture. I was a mercenary — I fed myself, that was the extent of my agricultural experience. I came here because I wanted to do something for Aicao’s hometown, not because I knew how to run a city. Now you want me to produce grain? Seeds? What do you think I am?”

“My lord.” Shatong’s face had taken on the expression of a man who has been making the same impossible request for weeks. “If we have nothing within a month, this city loses half its people.”

“I know that! I’ve been hungry for three months. Three months. I haven’t had a full meal since I took this position. A city lord who can’t feed his people and can’t feed himself — what’s the point? Find someone else. Anyone who wants this seat can have it. I genuinely lack the ability to feed several hundred thousand people and I am tired of pretending otherwise.”

Shatong exhaled.

He had nothing to offer. He couldn’t feed several hundred thousand people either.

The grain shortage wasn’t unique to Jinyang. It was the domain’s condition. The labor force that would normally work the land was dead or conscripted — sent to the combat zones to fight a war that had no end in sight. What remained in the outer areas were the old, the young, the injured, and those too vital to specific non-combat functions to be moved.

The seeds were roasted. The harvest would be nothing. Within a month, after the last animals were eaten and the roots and bark ran out, the people of Jinyang would begin experiencing what people in cities like Yangtimid had already experienced.

Shatong had seen it before. He did not want to see it again.

“MY LORDS, GOOD NEWS—”

Ouba the grain merchant burst through the door at a speed inconsistent with his body type, knocked Shatong entirely to the floor, and stood there radiating joy like a man who had found the solution to everything.

“Are there merchants?” Shatong asked from the floor, grabbing Ouba’s leg. “There are merchants?”

“Where?” Fengji asked. Then, more quietly: “We have no money.”

“They don’t want money!” Ouba was vibrating. “No gold coins. No magic crystals. And before you ask — yes, a merchant who doesn’t want money sounds impossible, but I have personally seen the convoy, and I am telling you it is real. Fifty grain ships. Full. One hundred meters each, wide-hull. Ten more ships of wine.” He was gesturing now, big emphatic gestures that weren’t quite matching his words. “If those ships made it to the active combat zones, the country lords would fight each other for access. But they came here. Five hundred merchant containers of grain and wine, and they came to us. And they don’t want money. They want battlefield salvage — weapons recovered from the fighting.”

“We’re the outer ring,” Shatong said from the floor. “We don’t have battlefield salvage. And weapons trading is a capital offense — they execute people for that.”

“Yes! Exactly! That’s the thing — they don’t want the weapons. The weapons are just the container for what they actually want, which is Electric Flower Ore. We process the weapons as scrap, the Electric Flower Ore comes out in the refining, and we present it to our new friends as a gift of goodwill. No transaction. Just friendship.” Ouba spread his hands. “And friendship is not illegal.”

Shatong’s heart was beating very fast. He noticed it was beating fast. He did not get up from the floor.

Was there anything more terrifying than starvation? He couldn’t think of one. Between an execution order and watching a city eat itself — he knew which one he was more afraid of.

“I want to be very clear,” Shatong said carefully, from his position on the floor, “that I am deeply skeptical of this plan.”

“Your skepticism is noted,” Ouba said, “and the city is starving.”

Fengji stood. “Where are they?”

The convoy was more than Fengji had prepared himself for.

Fifty ships, every one of them exactly as described, sitting in the water like a statement about what the world could contain. He swallowed once, involuntarily, standing on the dock.

If he were still the bandit he’d been before all this — if none of the intervening events had happened — his first thought would have been to take it. Clean job, no witnesses. Simple.

Then he saw the escorts.

Five Sky-rank cultivators. Openly armed, obviously capable, arranged in a pattern that said they had done this before and were comfortable with whatever happened next.

The fantasy dissolved immediately and completely.

Five Sky-rank escorts on a merchant convoy wasn’t a merchant operation. It was a declaration that the convoy would arrive at its destination under any circumstances. He’d heard of the top ten merchant organizations in Tianhua — this group, if it wasn’t already on that list, belonged there.

“Let me make our position clear,” Baoguo said, when the city lord’s group arrived. “We need Electric Flower Ore. You provide that, we provide grain and seeds.”

“Seeds?” Fengji’s pulse jumped.

In Tianhua, seeds were survival. You could lack everything else and find a way. Without seeds, there was no way.

“Our Electric Flower Ore reserves are limited,” Shatong said, forcing himself to be honest. “And the country lord collects them every three months. Current stock is low.”

“Small inventory doesn’t interest us. We need large quantities.”

The deflation among Fengji’s group was visible and immediate.

Jude let the silence settle for a moment, then presented the alternative: “Mining partnership. We provide the capital and technical expertise. You provide the labor. Workers receive compensation in food. We also bring seeds as additional goodwill. In return, your people mine Electric Flower Ore on our behalf. We handle refining. You don’t need to worry about purity.”

“Done,” Ouba said, before either Fengji or Shatong could hesitate.

Fengji looked at the convoy, then at the escorts, then at himself — hungry, tired, wearing armor that was three grades below what any of these people’s guards wore.

He took the city lord’s ring off his finger.

He pressed it into Jude’s hand.

Then he took Baoguo’s hand in both of his. “Can I work for you? As a guard? I’m not a good city lord. I’ve never been a good city lord. I’m very bad at the things city lords need to do. But I’m an excellent tracker and scout. If you need someone who can find a path through territory that shouldn’t be passable, I am that person.”

Baoguo and Jude stared at him.

“—You can’t do that!” Shatong found his voice. “You can’t just resign in the middle of a food crisis—”

“I just did,” Fengji said. “I’m not your city lord. I haven’t been a functioning city lord for months. The position requires skills I don’t have, and maintaining the pretense isn’t helping anyone. Someone with actual resources and actual organizational capacity should be running this city. These people qualify.” He looked at Baoguo. “Please. I’m asking to be useful.”

“Loyalty is part of the assessment,” Baoguo said, with the measured tone of someone who had been taught to evaluate people carefully. “You just abandoned a city full of people because you were hungry. That’s a concern.”

“I can speak to this,” came a voice from the direction of Baoguo’s communication device — a message delivered by a heavenly dragon-woman from the luxury airship. Fengji recognized, immediately, that this woman’s status exceeded that of any of the visible guards. He straightened.

The message was relayed: “The master says: if you can find a path through the Windstill Swamp, you may be hired provisionally. Three-month trial.“

Fengji accepted this with a bow.

Baoguo and Jude exchanged a glance. Their employer, observing from a distance, had apparently reached a more nuanced assessment of the cat-tribe man than the surface behavior suggested. On reflection, it wasn’t unreasonable. Most city lords in a situation like this one would have been feeding themselves from the city’s remaining reserves. Fengji had been starving alongside his people. That meant something. As a city lord, genuinely unqualified. As a scout — willing to go first into places that killed other people — possibly exactly right.

And having Baoguo and Jude administer Jinyang directly was a better outcome than working through an intermediary anyway.

The Electric Flower Ore deposits in the surrounding mountains were substantial — the problem had always been extraction difficulty and insufficient labor and expertise. With Thunder Fortress mining techniques and an actual workforce, the production capacity would climb. The ore wouldn’t be refined to weapons-grade, but for War Beast Bracelet manufacturing it would be more than adequate.

“The Windstill Swamp.” Fengji’s expression changed when the task was named. “That’s a dead zone.”

“We don’t hire cowards,” Jude said.

“I’m not a coward. You picked the right person for this — most people couldn’t survive the Windstill Swamp once. I’ve done it, and I’ll tell you honestly: thirty percent chance. That’s what I give us. The swamp is genuinely a place that kills people. Getting through it requires strength and experience and luck, in roughly equal proportions.” He looked at the dragon-woman, respectful and direct. “And one more thing. To cross the Windstill Swamp — I’m not sufficient alone. There’s someone else we need. Someone in another location. Without both of us, the odds drop to essentially nothing.”

He held up two fingers.

“Both of us are indispensable.”