Yo! Soft Rice King Arrives

They found the fat merchant near the caravans, where a crowd of traders had gathered around the wagons, talking about current affairs and bargaining and swapping rumors about the roads.

"Yo! Here you are!" Shi Dacheng's voice boomed across the square. He came waddling over, beaming—and then his little eyes fell on the thin white-haired girl walking close at Li Yuguo's side, and his smile turned sly and knowing.

"Tsk, tsk," he said, with a wink. "As expected of Brother Yuguo. Picked yourself up a little pet already, eh? Your tastes are special enough, I'll give you that."

Jun Xue flinched at the look on his face, and shrank behind Li Yuguo's back.

Li Yuguo's smile did not move. But his eyes went very flat.

"She's a child, Brother Dacheng," he said pleasantly. "And she's under my protection. Mind your mouth."

There was something in the way he said it. Shi Dacheng blinked, and the sly look slid off his face, and he laughed a little too loudly and waved his fat hands.

"Ah—of course, of course! Just a joke, brother, just a joke! A man needs a little fun in his life, eh, or what's the difference between living and dying? Haha!" He turned hastily toward the nearest wagon. "Come, come—this is my good brother Wang Youcai's caravan! He's got some low-level magic tools here. They're not mainstream, mind you, but they'll make do…"

---

Wang Youcai turned out to be a thin, tanned, friendly man with a wispy beard and a cheerful gap in his front teeth, and his wagon was a treasure trove of the strange.

"Now, don't think this is just a straw sandal!" Shi Dacheng declared, snatching up an ordinary-looking straw sandal from a crate. "It's actually a fan. A magic fan! You hold your shoe up close to your face like this, and the wind blows out of it—very cool, very refreshing!" He demonstrated. A faint breeze lifted his topknot. "Of course," he added, "if you've been wearing it for a long time, the wind that blows out of it smells like your feet…"

Li Yuguo coughed.

"And look at this!" Shi Dacheng put down the sandal and picked up a small, palm-sized, curved vessel of glazed brown pottery with a long neck and a wide spout. "Looks like a urinal, doesn't it? But it's not a urinal. It's actually a water bag! A spatial water bag! You can fit five whole pounds of water inside, and drink from it whenever you like." To prove it, he lifted the spout to his lips and began to drink.

Glug, glug, glug…

"Wait—wait a moment!" Wang Youcai had gone pale. He hurried over with his hands out, his face a mask of embarrassment. "Boss Shi… that's not a magic tool. That really is a urinal."

Shi Dacheng's face went dark.

The whole caravan fell silent. It was the silence of a graveyard. Even the mules seemed to stop chewing.

For a long, long moment, the fat merchant simply stood there with the urinal held to his lips and his eyes very wide. Then, slowly, he lowered it.

He turned to Li Yuguo.

"You," he croaked. "You… look around for yourself, brother. I'm sorry. Excuse me…"

He ran to the side of the wagon and began to retch violently.

Guan Yunfan's shoulders were shaking. Jun Xue had both hands pressed over her mouth. Li Yuguo bit the inside of his cheek so hard he tasted blood, and stared fixedly at the sky.

---

Wang Youcai, red-faced, leaned in close to Li Yuguo.

"So you're Master Li," he said, recovering his good humor. "Since we're all friends here, pick whatever you like from my wagon. Anything that takes your fancy, I'll let you have it at cost."

"There's no need for the urinal," said Li Yuguo.

He looked up and down the wagon for a while. Crates of junk. Bundles of rusted blades. Bolts of moth-eaten silk. Jars of murky liquid. A cracked bronze mirror. And then, at the very back, nestled in a basket of straw, his eyes found something that made his breath catch: six round fruits, each about the size of a plum, with smooth skin of a pale, translucent, glacial blue. Faint frost clung to them, even in the heat. When he looked closely, he could see a slow swirl of white mist moving under their skin, like snow falling inside glass.

At the same moment, he felt Guan Yunfan's body go rigid beside him.

He glanced sideways. The King of Thieves was not looking at the fruit. He was looking at something lying next to the basket—a small, cheap, battered fruit knife with a stained wooden handle. His one eye was locked onto it. His fingers were twitching.

Li Yuguo shook his head, very slightly. Don't. Not yet.

Guan Yunfan's fingers went still.

"Shopkeeper," Li Yuguo said casually, pointing, "I think these fruits are rather nice."

"Ah! Good eyes, Master Li, very good eyes!" Wang Youcai brightened. "These are Snow Spirit Fruits. For anyone with an ice-type bloodline, they're a treasure—they nourish the blood, help it grow. Even for ordinary cultivators, they're a good tonic." He rubbed the back of his neck. "But they're not cheap, I'm afraid. One thousand taels of silver each. If Master Li likes them, though, you can take all six together for five thousand."

Li Yuguo did not glance at Jun Xue, standing quietly at his elbow with her white hair and her ice-blue eyes. He did not need to.

An ice-type bloodline.

"Done," he said, and clasped his fists. "And thank you, Brother Youcai. Since I've bought such spirit fruits from you today, I think you and I are kindred spirits. Why don't we have a drink together tonight?"

"Ah, thank you for your kindness, Master Li! But tonight—" Wang Youcai looked regretfully at the sky. "The weather's clear, so we have to press on. We'll be leaving tonight. If it weren't for a problem with our axle today, we'd have been gone already—we only stopped in Nalan City to repair it."

"Then there'll be another time." Li Yuguo smiled. "Nalan City is the road that runs through everything, after all. When you come back through, Brother Youcai, we'll eat and drink together!"

"Definitely!"

Wang Youcai beamed. He liked people like Li Yuguo. Master Li hadn't bargained over a single coin. A straightforward man.

The silver changed hands from the bracelet on Li Yuguo's wrist. The six Snow Spirit Fruits went into a padded box. And—almost as an afterthought—Li Yuguo pointed at the battered little fruit knife beside the basket.

"Throw that in too," he said. "I'll need something to cut them with."

"Ha! Take it, take it, it's yours! Free!"

---

They said their farewells to Wang Youcai and Shi Dacheng—the latter still pale and wiping his mouth—and set off back toward the mansion, the three of them together.

"Master," Jun Xue said timidly, walking at Li Yuguo's side, "why did you buy those useless fruits? They were so expensive…"

"Haha!" Guan Yunfan laughed. "Elder Brother is a clever man! The drunkard's intent is not in the wine." He tapped the side of his nose. "This little knife here has a great background."

"All right, King of Thieves," said Li Yuguo, grinning. "Tell her."

The King of Thieves took the battered fruit knife from Li Yuguo's hand.

He gripped the stained wooden handle between his fingers—and snapped it.

The cheap wood split cleanly down its length and fell away. And inside it, where there should have been nothing but a stub of iron tang, lay a hidden blade. It was impossibly thin. Thin as a cicada's wing, thin as a breath, so fine that it was almost transparent, a sliver of dark silvery metal that shimmered with a faint, strange starlight. When Guan Yunfan bent it, it did not break. It curled. It wound around his finger like a ribbon of water, twice, three times, and lay there wrapped around it like a ring.

"This," said the King of Thieves, and his voice had gone hushed and reverent, "is one of the top ten hidden weapons in the world. Zhuozhirou. Circling Finger Softness." He turned his hand slowly, and the coiled blade glittered. "I've walked the thieves' road for many years, and I'd long heard that the Circling Finger Softness had vanished from the world. It's forged from star-iron—a meteorite that fell from beyond the sky. Thin as a cicada's wing. And sharp beyond compare."

Li Yuguo looked at the blade wrapped around the big scarred finger, and something clicked in his mind.

This is the halo.

That was what it meant. The halo was luck. Fortune. The favor of the story. If your halo was strong enough, the world would arrange itself around you—you would stumble into hidden opportunities, find heavenly treasures in junk carts, meet the right person in the right market on the right day. He had four and a half percent, and already a legendary weapon had fallen into his lap disguised as a fruit knife.

And Ye Qiong had ninety-five and a half.

No wonder the boy had gone so far, so fast, in the original story. No wonder every door had opened for him. It had never been talent alone. It was the halo. The protagonist's halo.

He opened the status panel again.

And stopped.

The numbers had changed.

[ Halo ]

Current Villain Halo: 5% — Owner: Li Yuguo Current Protagonist Halo: 95.5% — Owner: Ye Qiong

Wait. That's wrong.

Five plus ninety-five and a half was a hundred and a half.

Where did the extra half percent come from?

He tapped the bar quickly, and a short description scrolled out beneath it. He read it—and understood.

The Circling Finger Softness had never belonged to Ye Qiong. In the original story, Ye Qiong had never found it. It had lain hidden in a fruit knife in the back of a junk cart and passed out of the story entirely, unseen. It was not part of Ye Qiong's original luck at all. So when Li Yuguo found it, he had not taken that half a percent from the protagonist. He had taken it from nowhere. From outside the story. And it had been added directly to him.

Li Yuguo stood still in the middle of the road.

So if I find more things like this—opportunities that were never in Ye Qiong's path, treasures he never touched—

Then I don't have to steal from him to grow.

I can just… keep growing.

A slow, giddy excitement began to rise in his chest.

Shhhk.

Something flashed at the edge of his vision. He turned.

A few paces off the road stood a young tree, its trunk as thick as the mouth of a rice bowl. And it was falling—very slowly, very gracefully, toppling sideways in a rustle of dusty leaves—cut clean through in the middle. The stump it left behind was smooth as a mirror. It shone in the sunlight.

Guan Yunfan stood beside it, holding the thin blade lightly between two fingers like a willow leaf, testing its edge.

He looked at the stump. Then at the blade. His one eye was shining.

"All right," said Li Yuguo. "From now on, this Circling Finger Softness is your magic weapon."

---

Guan Yunfan turned to stare at him.

In this world, weapons and magic tools were graded the same way as cultivation techniques: good, fine, top-grade, perfection, holy. For techniques, the highest grade was called a holy method; for weapons, a holy artifact. A top-grade weapon was already a treasure that most warriors would never see in their lifetimes. Holy artifacts existed only in legend—the supreme heirlooms of the great clans, locked in vaults and almost never used.

The Circling Finger Softness was top-grade.

"Brother," said the King of Thieves, "this is too precious. Far more precious than my family's saber. Take it back—"

"Brother." Li Yuguo cut him off, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Don't forget. You and I are brothers now. And there'll be times when I need you to deal with some wicked people for me. Quietly." He nodded at the coiled blade. "With something like that, you'll be even better at it."

The King of Thieves stood there in the dusty road with the treasure wrapped around his finger.

His one eye filled with tears.

"Brother," he said hoarsely. "If you hadn't stopped me back there, I would have grabbed for it—and Wang Youcai would have seen, and he'd never have sold this treasure, not for any price. Your way of buying things—" his voice cracked— "it's a peerless martial art. A peerless martial art! I'm so moved, I'm—" He sniffed loudly. "I'm so admiring, I'm crying tears, and my nose is full of snot—"

He was, in fact, crying tears. And his nose was, in fact, running.

Li Yuguo looked at him and shook his head in genuine wonder.

He had to admire it. He really did. Even when the King of Thieves was flattering him, the man did it so beautifully, so elegantly, so wholeheartedly—and never, ever said the same thing twice.

That was a skill, too.