"Rest assured, sir. This pill formula came from a perfectly legitimate source. No one will give you trouble over it." Seeing Xiao Yan's slight hesitation, the stallholder assumed he was worried about the pill formula's dubious origins and hastily added this reassurance.
"Didn't you say you stole it from your family? That counts as legitimate?" Xiao Yan toyed with the scroll in his hand and glanced at the stallholder, who looked somewhat embarrassed by his remark. "All right, name your price," he said mildly.
"Three hundred and fifty thousand drops of Supreme Spiritual Liquid will do," the stallholder said.
"Three hundred and fifty thousand..." Xiao Yan nodded. The price was within his means, but just as he was about to pay, he noticed some odd little trinkets laid out nearby. His eyebrows rose. "You sell this sort of thing too?"
"I'm just following the crowd," the stallholder said awkwardly. After finding that he could not sell anything, he had copied the other vendors and put out a few such objects. His techniques for making them look old were clearly no match for those of the professionals, however. Their flaws were obvious at a glance, which was why no one had come to browse his stall. "If you like them, I can throw the whole lot in for free."
"Oh, I couldn't possibly." Despite his words, Xiao Yan put away every last one of the objects, then handed over three hundred and fifty thousand drops of Supreme Spiritual Liquid with a smile. As he paid, however, something puzzled him, and he could not help asking, "If you can produce things like these, you must have a powerful background. How did you end up selling things here?"
At Xiao Yan's question, the stallholder gave a dry laugh. "I slipped away from home