Barely had the seventh-day rites for Old Qin passed when the atmosphere in Soot Alley began to change.
First, a brand-new vermilion-lacquered wooden sign went up outside the Heavenly Craft Workshop, bearing enormous gold-powder characters: "Anniversary celebration! Twenty percent off all ironware! Swords, sabers, spears, halberds, woodcutting blades, kitchen knives-we have them all." Beneath them was a line of smaller print: "Any item from our workshop damaged within three months will be repaired or replaced free of charge."
Then the prices came crashing down in earnest.
Qin Tiexin sat in his shop, listening to the workers across the street hawking at the tops of their lungs:
"Refined-steel kitchen knives! Originally forty wen, now thirty-two!"
"Thick-backed knives for splitting firewood and chopping bones! Just twenty-eight wen!"
"Custom willow-leaf sabers for martial arts schools! A flat hundred and fifty wen! Saber tassel included!"
He silently calculated his own shop's costs. Even the most ordinary woodcutting blade needed fifteen wen's worth of good iron. Leaving aside charcoal and labor, once the losses from quenching and grinding were added, the cost sat firmly above thirty wen. Across the street, they sold one for twenty. That really was the price of the raw materials, with charcoal and labor thrown in for nothing.
He could not afford to sell at that price.
Never mind the swords and sabers. The Heavenly Craft Workshop's forging furnaces burned day and night, and the mechanical clang, clang of hammering carried across the narrow street with a rhythm so even it made his heart uneasy. At night, the red glow from those three furnaces shone through the glass windows, bathing the storefront opposite in bright, warm yellow, with an almost scorching presence. That light slanted across the street and spread over the floor of Qin Tiexin's dim shop. The boundary between light and darkness lay right beside his feet.
He knew what they were doing. They were not merely stealing his business; they meant to wear him down. Wear him down until he could no longer hold out and packed his bedding to leave of his own accord.
The old neighbors in the alley began coming more often. Aunt Wang brought a plate of pickled radish, Uncle Li left two cabbages he had grown himself, and Tofu Xishi quietly slipped him several firmly pressed pieces of dried tofu. They said little, setting things down and leaving. Shopkeeper Wang from the wine shop occasionally brought over a small jar of the cheapest cloudy wine at dusk. He did not drink any, merely left it beside the threshold, patted Qin Tiexin's shoulder, and departed with a sigh.
Qin Tiexin accepted everything, then carefully recorded each entry in his thin ledger: such-and-such month and day, one plate of vegetables from Aunt Wang; two cabbages from Uncle Li...
He would not take them for nothing.
Master Liu from the martial arts school and Escort Chief Chen from the escort agency also visited once. Both had been Old Qin's drinking and feasting companions. Now, standing in the shop and looking at its utterly empty weapons racks, neither could quite keep his composure.
"Tiexin," Master Liu said, rubbing his hands, his expression deeply awkward beneath his full beard, "those lads at the school... you know how young people like things new and shiny. They keep insisting on those patterned sabers from across the street... I..."
Escort Chief Chen was more direct. He took a small purse from inside his robe and set it on the anvil. "The old man may be gone, but the rules still stand. These fifty wen are the deposit we used to pay him each year for maintaining the agency's weapons. You... take it for now. As for business... ah, I don't have the final say at the agency. The chief escort has given orders: this year's equipment purchases have to go through a 'unified channel.'"
Qin Tiexin looked at the purse, then at the two elders' evasive eyes. He bent down, counted thirty wen out of the purse, and pushed the rest back.
"Uncle Chen, I understand the rules. These thirty wen are the balance for that ring-pommel saber. They're mine to take. Please take the rest back. The shop can still stay open, and the craft is still here." His voice was calm, without any audible resentment.
The two men exchanged a look, ashamed and helpless. In the end, they could only shake their heads and leave. As he crossed the threshold, Escort Chief Chen glanced back. Inside the dim shop, the youth was carefully wiping an old pair of scissors he had just repaired. In the faint furnace glow, his profile was as still as mountain rock.
That afternoon, Qin Tiexin went to the storeroom in the rear courtyard. When he emerged, he carried a long, somewhat worn wooden board. With a charcoal pencil, he carefully wrote on it in neat, deliberate strokes:
"Farm tools and cookware repaired. Sickles, hoes, and kitchen knives forged. Fair prices."
Once he finished, he went outside and propped the wooden sign against the wall. He brushed the charcoal dust from his hands, turned back inside, pulled the bellows open, and added charcoal to the furnace.
The fire blazed anew.
Business did come. Though there were no longer large weapons orders worth hundreds of wen apiece, the little jobs from neighbors and farmers outside the city gradually increased.
An old man who sold oil on East Street brought in a broken iron hook from his carrying pole. Qin Tiexin not only joined the broken ends but reforged the worn hook tip into a curve, making it less likely to slip free.
Butcher Zheng, who slaughtered pigs in the west market, had two bone cleavers he had used for years, their chipped edges like saw teeth. Qin Tiexin reheated and forged the blades thinner, adjusted their balance, and used a special quenching method to give their hard edges resilience. When Butcher Zheng tested one, a single chop severed a leg bone with a crack, while the edge showed only a faint white mark. Delighted, he kept exclaiming that it "handled even better than a new one" and insisted on giving an extra ten wen.
Granny Zhang, who grew vegetables outside the north gate, had a small hoe with a rolled edge. Qin Tiexin forged her a replacement, deliberately making the handle three inches shorter. "Granny, you're not tall. The old handle was too long and strained your back. This will suit you better." Granny Zhang tried it and found it much easier to use. She praised the young man from the Qin household for his thoughtfulness to everyone she met.
These jobs were fiddly, and the pay was meager. Five wen to repair an iron hook, two to sharpen a kitchen knife, no more than twenty to forge a small hoe. But Qin Tiexin took exceptional care with them. Whenever he accepted a piece, he first asked exactly what it was used for, then studied the user's grip and strength, sometimes even asking them to demonstrate a few movements. Once an item was repaired or forged, he always tested it himself, making sure nothing was wrong before handing it to the customer.
The warmth of everyday life seemed to return to Soot Alley little by little. Yet mixed into that warmth were always the endless mechanical hammer blows from across the street, and the bright, glaring gleam of cheap blades.
The rice jar at home gradually began to show its bottom. Fortunately, knowing his staggering appetite, Old Qin had stockpiled a full three hundred jin of brown rice while he was alive and stored it in the rear courtyard cellar. Relying on that grain and the neighbors' occasional help, Qin Tiexin ate two meals of solid rice and one of thin gruel each day, barely managing to keep his belly half full. Meat, however, had become an extravagant hope, and even a few flecks of oil were a rare sight. His already tall, broad frame visibly grew leaner, but the lines of his muscles became ever sharper and more defined, like iron repeatedly forged beneath life's heavy hammer, stripped of everything superfluous.
He was running out of iron.
Early one morning, Qin Tiexin tucked away the few copper coins he had saved over the past days, locked the shop, and headed for the iron market in the west of the city.
The market lay at the foot of the city wall and covered a considerable area. All kinds of ore, pig-iron billets, and wrought-iron bars were laid out in the open, and the air smelled of metal and coal smoke. Ordinarily, at this hour, it should have been boiling with voices, the bargaining unceasing.
Today, however, it was much quieter.
Qin Tiexin made his familiar way to Old Sun's stall, where he often did business. The pig-iron billets on display were clearly a grade worse than usual, riddled with gray-black impurities, yet their marked prices were two wen higher than before.
"Uncle Sun, do you have any better wrought-iron bars?" Qin Tiexin asked.
Old Sun was squatting behind the stall, smoking a pipe. He looked up at the voice, and a bitter smile appeared when he saw who it was. "Ah, Tiexin. Wrought-iron bars... all gone. The Heavenly Craft Workshop's people hauled away the last two loads yesterday. This is all that's left." He pointed his pipe at the inferior stock on the stall. "And even these can't go any cheaper. Most of the good material from the mines upstream has already been booked by the Heavenly Craft Workshop. Small dealers like us are lucky to get a few dregs of the broth."
A middle-aged materials seller nearby leaned over and lowered his voice. "Have you heard? Wang's Iron Shop on South Street couldn't hold on. Closed yesterday. Both of Master Wang's apprentices went straight into the Heavenly Craft Workshop as apprentice laborers. Tsk, these times..."
"It's not just Wang's," another man cut in, sounding indignant. "All the big orders from the prefectural office this year, for repairing the city walls and making equipment for the patrol soldiers, went to the Heavenly Craft Workshop! 'Good quality, low prices, swift delivery,' they said. Who even gives our old craftsmanship a second look anymore?"
"A second look? Even if they did, we couldn't afford their materials! They control all the good stock and push the prices sky-high, forcing you to use inferior stuff. Naturally, what you make can't compare with theirs. It's a vicious cycle!"
"Keep your voice down! People from the Heavenly Craft Workshop come here all the time..."
The murmurs buzzed like a swarm of flies trapped in an iron cage. Qin Tiexin listened in silence, bending to pick up a pig-iron billet. He weighed it in his hand, then examined its broken face against the light. Too many impurities and plenty of pores. It would barely do for ordinary farm tools; forging anything with resilience was an extravagant hope.
He set down the billet, counted out his copper coins, and bought thirty jin of the lowest-grade wrought-iron bars-even these nearly exhausted the money he had brought. He tied the bars together with straw rope and held them as though they weighed nothing.
As he turned to leave, a commotion rose at the market entrance. Several two-wheeled carts creaked in, piled high with blue-black iron ingots of excellent quality, their surfaces giving off a deep, steady sheen in the sunlight. Every worker pulling a cart wore the same blue short jacket, with a small character for "Heaven" embroidered on the chest.
"Make way! Make way! Materials for the Heavenly Craft Workshop! Keep clear if you've no business here!" shouted a man at the head who looked like an overseer, his manner arrogant.
The stallholders turned to look, their eyes full of complicated feelings: envy, jealousy, and, more than anything, helplessness. The crowd silently cleared a path.
With the iron bars on his shoulder, Qin Tiexin stood by the roadside and watched those cartloads of fine material pass before him. The wheels rolled over the uneven dirt, leaving ruts of varying depths. That deep metallic sheen stung his eyes.
He tightened the rope on his shoulder and set off home.
He had barely reached the entrance to Soot Alley when he saw several people blocking his shop door again.
Their leader was Zhao Ming once more. This time, he had brought four workers, two more than last time, presumably to bolster his courage. With his hands behind his back, he was studying the wooden sign outside the door, an undisguised sneer on his lips.
Seeing Qin Tiexin return with the iron bars on his shoulder, Zhao Ming turned. His folding fan snapped open, and he waved it leisurely, his gaze first sweeping over the bundle of dull, inferior bars, then settling on Qin Tiexin's sweat-damp temples and plain, coarse-cloth clothes.
"Well, young Brother Qin, been buying materials?" Zhao Ming drawled, gesturing loosely at the wooden sign with his fan's tip. "'Farm tools and cookware repaired'... tsk, tsk. If Old Master Qin's spirit in heaven saw the Qin Household Blacksmith Shop's name reduced to this, I doubt his coffin lid could be held down!"
The workers behind him obligingly snickered.
Qin Tiexin stopped and gently lowered the iron bars from his shoulder, standing them against the wall. He straightened, brushed the rust dust from his hands, and looked at Zhao Ming without much expression.
"Need something?" he asked.
His bland reaction left Zhao Ming momentarily at a loss. Then his smile broadened, though there was little warmth in his eyes. "Nothing much. Just passing by, seeing how your new business is... getting along. Not too well, by the look of things. What sort of materials are these? Making broken-down hoes and lousy pots-you probably can't even fill your belly, can you?"
He strolled two steps closer and lowered his voice, his tone growing still more cutting. "I hear your rice jar's almost empty? Boss Liu at the pawnshop mentioned someone came to pawn Old Master Qin's old clothes a while back... ah, why put yourself through this? A young man should know which way the wind blows. My earlier offer of six hundred taels still stands. Take the money and leave Ink City. Where couldn't you make a living? Surely that's better than staying here, guarding a wreck of a shop with no tomorrow and dealing with this scrap iron. Wouldn't you say?"
As he spoke, he actually reached out to pat Qin Tiexin's shoulder, his manner flippant.
At the very instant his fingers were about to touch the cloth over Qin Tiexin's shoulder-
Qin Tiexin moved.
He did not dodge. His shoulder merely dipped and rose almost imperceptibly. Zhao Ming's fingers seemed to strike a slightly tensed block of hard rubber, gently bounced away by a resilient force that permitted no intrusion.
Zhao Ming froze.
The next instant, Qin Tiexin's right hand shot out like iron pincers, so fast it left an afterimage, and clamped around the wrist Zhao Ming had yet to withdraw.
"You..." Zhao Ming's expression changed. His wrist felt as though a red-hot iron band had cinched viciously around it. Even his bones seemed to groan, and the agony drained his face white in an instant.
"I told you," Qin Tiexin said, his voice still quiet, yet seeming to reverberate from deep within his chest, carrying the heat of a furnace, "the shop is not for sale."
With apparent casualness, he lifted his arm and thrust it out.
Like a weightless dead leaf, Zhao Ming was lifted by an irresistible force, both feet leaving the ground. His startled cry stuck in his throat as he traced a short arc and landed with a solid thud on the dry dirt in the middle of the alley. He sprawled there covered in dust, his folding fan flying far from his hand.
The four workers stared, stunned. Once they recovered, they charged in with howls.
Qin Tiexin did not even look at them. His left hand reached out and caught the first worker by the front of his clothes. A pull to the side and a downward push sent the man crashing helplessly into the second, and the two tumbled into a heap. A casual sweep of his right foot tripped the third. When the fourth swung a fist at him, he tilted his head slightly aside, letting it pass, and drove his elbow beneath the man's ribs in the same motion. The worker grunted and crouched down, clutching his belly.
The whole thing took no more than two or three breaths. Swift and effortless. Qin Tiexin had not moved a single step from his spot, nor had his breathing faltered.
He brushed nonexistent dust from his hands and looked at Zhao Ming, who was struggling to rise.
Zhao Ming's topknot was disheveled, his brocade clothes dusty, and a clear ring of red, swollen finger marks encircled his wrist. His face showed pain, shock, and anger, but above all, incredulous horror. He had never imagined that beneath this youth's silent exterior lay such terrifying strength and such clean, decisive skill.
"You... you dare lay hands on me! I'll report you to the authorities..." he shrieked, fierce in appearance but faint at heart.
Qin Tiexin took a step forward.
Just one step, and Zhao Ming and the workers who had only just climbed to their feet recoiled together like frightened rabbits, retreating a considerable distance with terror written all over their faces.
Qin Tiexin stopped before them, crouched, and picked up the exquisite folding fan from the ground. He examined it, then gripped both ends of its ribs.
He exerted a little force.
Crack.
A crisp snapping sound rang out. The hard ivory fan ribs broke easily in two in his hands, like brittle dead twigs.
He tossed the broken fan at Zhao Ming's feet, straightened, and looked down at him, his gaze as calm as an ancient well:
"Bother me again," he paused, each word clear, "and it won't just be the fan that breaks."
With that, he spared the ashen-faced Zhao Ming no further glance. He turned, bent to shoulder the heavy bundle of inferior iron bars once more, pushed open his shop door, and went inside.
Clang.
The door closed behind him, shutting all the panic, humiliation, and scheming outside into another world.
The alley fell quiet, leaving only Zhao Ming's heavy breathing and the workers' muffled groans.
The red glow of the Heavenly Craft Workshop's furnaces across the street continued to shine tirelessly over, tracing the outline of Qin Tiexin's old wooden door, clear and silent.
Inside, the furnace fire was fanned high again. Its dancing light illuminated the youth's sharply defined profile and his steady arms as he began skillfully hammering a wrought-iron bar.