The Coarse Porcelain Bowl

Two days had passed. It was now the 13th.

Su Wu had been run off his feet these past two days, with only enough time at night to run a few simulations.

In the simulated future, he had tried escaping the Shadow Fiend's pursuit using only the Imperial Bell. He had eventually succeeded and mastered the method.

Every simulation after that had begun with him exploring outward from the save point at the Little Temple.

But each time, before he could get very far, his head would be severed from his body beneath the glow of the red lanterns, bringing him to a violent end.

In fact, as long as someone was within the Lantern Fiend's territory when the red lanterns appeared, they were highly likely to be killed even without being touched by the red light.

The grocery store owner had hidden in a lightless room, yet still could not escape being decapitated;

Su Wu had hidden in a basement for half an hour, but he, too, had been unable to avoid death.

That was what made random killing so terrifying.

There was no pattern at all.

It was like rolling dice. No one ever knew what number they would roll next-life or death?

Without a pattern to grasp, there was no way to respond effectively.

Fortunately, Su Wu could take shelter in the Little Temple.

He suspected that the main reason he could survive inside the temple was the flame burning on its lamp stand.

The next time he entered a simulation, Su Wu planned to light a candle from the temple's flame and see whether carrying it through the Lantern Fiend's territory would keep him from being killed.

Before that, he needed to make as many preparations as possible in reality to face the supernatural resurgence two days from now.

The crisis ahead was precisely why Su Wu had been rushing around these past two days.

Only today had he finally found some free time and thought to browse Mingzhou's most famous antiques market.

With his blue Koi Blessing talent, he wanted to see whether he could pick up a mysterious item or two.

Not every mysterious item necessarily had the ability to counter supernatural entities.

Some items, however, were belongings left behind by their original owners. Buying something like that would give Su Wu an opportunity to explore its owner's past life.

He browsed the stalls around him.

Every so often, he picked up an item from a stall and asked what period it was from and how much it cost.

The answers were always either "Warring States to Han" or "Han to Tang." Even items supposedly from the Ming or Qing dynasties were rare.

The stallholders' asking prices ranged from three hundred to three hundred and twenty thousand.

After wandering around for a while, Su Wu finally crouched down in front of a stall.

On display were several crudely made snuff bottles, a row of "silver" ingots made from a copper-nickel alloy, two tokens bearing the words "Embroidered Uniform Guard," and various other items.

Su Wu first picked up an Embroidered Uniform Guard token lying beside a coarse porcelain bowl. After turning it over in his hands for a while, his fingers were coated in rust dust. He rubbed his hands together and asked the stallholder, "How much for this token?"

"Five thousand!" The stallholders here never lacked the nerve to name a price.

He rubbed the token in his hands, getting even more rust dust on his palms.

Su Wu tossed the token down. "Five thousand for this?"

Then he sifted through a few more items at the stall, asking the price of each, before finally picking up the coarse porcelain bowl beside his hand.

The porcelain bowl was crudely made, with a painted design that looked like a fish.

The colors had bled beyond the outlines.

Even a dog might refuse to use a porcelain bowl like this as its food dish.

"How much for the bowl?" Su Wu asked the stallholder, holding it up.

Seated on a folding stool, the stallholder glanced at the coarse porcelain bowl in Su Wu's hand and said with unruffled confidence, "I'll let you have that one for five hundred. It's a piece from the modern period..."

"Five hundred even for this?" Su Wu clicked his tongue and shook his head. He put down the bowl and stood to leave.

"Then how much are you offering? You have to name a price, don't you?" the stallholder called after him.

Su Wu turned around and held up one hand, all five fingers spread.

"Fifty? Well..." The stallholder's eyes flickered, but before he could finish,

Su Wu cut him off. "Five!"

"No, no. Five is too little. Can't sell it for that."

"Hey, how about adding another five? Add five and you can take the bowl. It really is an old piece!"

"I wouldn't even buy it if I didn't think it looked unusual. Eight at most. Are you selling or not?"

"Sold!"

For eight yuan, Su Wu bought a coarse porcelain bowl.

When he had first passed this stall, he had felt inexplicably drawn to the bowl, but had resisted the urge to buy it on the spot.

Even when he returned to the stall, he had first asked about several other items to conceal his true intentions.

If he had picked up the bowl straight away and said he wanted to buy it, the stallholder might not have described it as merely a piece from the modern period.

If pottery from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties had not been so rare and primitive, the man might well have claimed the bowl dated back that far!

After packing away the bowl, Su Wu left the antiques market.

He took a taxi to the street in front of Peaceful Garden, then got out and walked along it. He had already memorized the locations of most of the supermarkets and food shops on both sides.

The Cake Shop, called "Imperial Pastries," was closed that day.

There was no sign of the Little Temple beside it.

But in the future, a temple would indeed appear next to the Cake Shop.

Su Wu had already rented a small storage room behind the Cake Shop and stocked it with compressed biscuits, instant noodles, ham sausages, drinking water, and other supplies.

When the time came, he could quickly move those supplies from the storage room into the Little Temple, reducing the risk of being killed by the Lantern Fiend while exposed outside.

Su Wu rounded the street corner and followed a side road toward Peaceful Garden.

Just then, the phone in his trouser pocket vibrated several times.

He took it out. A deposit notification appeared on the screen: "A transfer deposit of 1,643,072.56 was completed to your account ending in 6239 at 9:43 on April 13. Balance: 1,649,321.86."

When his parents passed away, they had left Su Wu two homes.

One was in the capital of his home region, Pingyuan Commandery, bought in preparation for his future career there. His family had rarely stayed in it.

With the supernatural resurgence imminent, Su Wu planned to return to his old family home after escaping Mingzhou. There was no way he would keep traveling back and forth between the capital and his hometown.

There was no telling what the property market would look like by then. If supernatural incidents occurred, a crash would be inevitable.

So Su Wu had chosen to sell the home in the provincial capital ahead of time.

Property was already difficult to sell, and he had only found a buyer after lowering the price.

Now that the money had finally arrived, Su Wu breathed a sigh of relief.

Over the past few days, he had spent most of his savings. The bulk had gone toward gold, with a smaller portion spent on food. He had asked a childhood friend back home to stockpile the food in his house, while the gold was stored in his rented place.

After all, a few tens of thousands of yuan could not buy much gold.

In the future, that gold might well become hard currency.

Now that this payment had arrived, Su Wu needed to buy another batch of physical gold and put it away. In the foreseeable future, as supernatural entities reemerged, all sorts of antiques and cultural artifacts might also acquire supernatural properties.

Collectors might scramble to sell them off when that happened.

By then, even if money lost its value, gold should still hold firm.

He could use that gold to buy ancient objects that had once been completely beyond his reach!

Gold in troubled times, antiques in prosperous times!