Yunxu Market sat beside the Slag Highlands in the Fifth Ring of the Demon Realm.
It had once been a mine, but was abandoned midway through its use.
Over the decades, due to war, famine, and fleeing slaves, refugees had set up shacks here to survive.
Residents came and went in waves, and the huts collapsed only to be rebuilt.
Thanks to trade demands from the native inhabitants nearby, Yunxu Market gradually developed into a tripartite haven of black market, grain market, and intelligence hub.
When Xue Yin stepped into this ring-shaped depression, the moment her Domain of Stillness strings spread out, she sensed that the flow of magic here was sluggish, as if even the wind had been filtered by some force.
The entire depression was covered by a layer of illusion.
Since this was a gray zone, were they deliberately erasing traces?
It seemed this place was indeed as Ryan had said—not simple.
Xue Yin turned her head and murmured to Jin, “Be careful. This place is far too clean.”
Jin nodded and surveyed the depression.
The market bustled as usual, but it had its own underlying order.
A hulking horned demon walked bare-chested carrying an iron ingot, his shoulder blade branded with an old slave number.
The brand had been burned over so many times that the original digit shape was no longer legible.
His eyes were wary but no longer evasive.
As he shouldered through the crowd, others unconsciously stepped half a pace aside.
Here, a brand was not a mark of shame—it was a badge of survival.
Every scar told a story, and every story carried blood and tears.
An elderly cat-eared woman crouched beside her stall selling medicinal herbs, her eyes darting as she calculated weights.
Her bony fingers flew nimbly over the bundles of herbs.
Behind the stall hung a wooden sign, crookedly scrawled with:
“Barter only, equal exchange.”
A half-horse girl carried a basket hawking salt blocks, the tip of her tail gently swaying, yet she dared not stray too far from the main road.
Her gaze flitted through the gaps in the crowd.
Clearly, it was her first time at Yunxu Market—her every move reeked of inexperience.
Yunxu Market’s “Code of Conduct” was carved into the stone tablet at the central plaza.
These basic safeguards of human dignity were also etched into everyone’s hearts:
“The wounded shall have porridge; the dead shall have a grave.”
Those who violated it would be ostracized by the entire market.
No one would hit you.
No one would curse you.
But from one day onward, no one would trade with you, speak to you, or sit at the same table as you.
In this desperate land, isolation was the most brutal form of execution.
Xue Yin and Jin blended into the morning market crowd.
Both were plainly dressed with simple travel gear, carrying only two rough iron hammers and a few iron plates, posing as peddlers here to barter.
“Let’s first get a clear picture of the market’s various sections,” Xue Yin passed the word to Jin.
“The east side is the grain market and medicine stalls. The west side is the ironware and tool shops. The north high ground is the merchant guild area. The south lowland is the refugee camp and temporary workers’ shacks. Let’s split up and investigate from the outskirts. Don’t get near the core area of the north guild yet.”
Jin caught on immediately, his tone as steady as ever.
“Understood, Master. Noon, at the plaza. I’ll wait for you by the stone tablet.”
After Xue Yin and Jin parted ways at the plaza, she followed the crowd toward the east side.
The east grain market sat on relatively flat ground at the bottom.
The wooden racks of various stalls displayed black rye, rock potatoes, dried beans, and a few bags of white rice smuggled from the Human Realm.
The prices, however, were astonishingly high.
After talking with a vendor, Xue Yin learned that one small bag of white rice required an equal weight of refined iron in exchange.
Her face remained expressionless, but she noted it in her mind: here, grain was a luxury, and metal was hard currency.
Deeper in the crowd, more faces layered out.
Mercenaries gathered in groups of three or five, casting dice beside a tavern awning.
Here, no one asked about your past.
As long as you could pay the price, you could hire a life.
Xue Yin stopped before a wooden board—the adventurer guild’s request board, covered with all kinds of notices:
Escorting caravans, procuring supplies, hunting monsters, searching for relatives.
Her eyes paused for an instant on one notice marked “Missing Person.”
The signature area had a rough scrawl describing the missing person’s features.
It seemed the families of the missing from the Slag Highlands were also silently struggling in their own way.
Unfortunately, similar missing notices were piled chaotically on top of each other.
Trying to find a clue here was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
An intelligence broker huddled in a shaded corner stall, with a few Source Crystal shards displayed as a decoy.
As Xue Yin passed him, she heard him muttering to a customer, “Another one gone? Don’t worry about it. These days, who knows—maybe they just went to another ring of the Demon Realm for a better life.”
His tone was casual, as if discussing the most trivial of matters.
Here, people were accustomed to sudden disappearances.
Accidents, refugees, debt evaders were everywhere.
Everyone was too busy trying to survive to spare a thought for strangers.
Xue Yin watched it all and thought silently to herself:
‘These people are too used to it. Used to hunger, used to danger, used to disappearances, numbed to the point of apathy. That’s truly terrifying.’
Jin made his way through the narrow alleys on the west side and came face to face with a row of forges.
Fires flickered dimly under the gray sky, sparks flying without clamor.
The rise and fall of hammers had a steady rhythm of their own.
Standing before these forges were all Stoneborn.
Their bodies were stocky, skin tinged with bluish gray, and from their right shoulder down to their collarbone, they bore natural stone-pattern birthmarks—each line unique.
A Stoneborn blacksmith was sitting with his eyes closed, listening to the sound of molten iron flowing.
He didn’t watch the fire; he relied solely on his ears to judge temperature and impurities.
Jin stood by and watched for a moment—this was the “Fire Listening Art” that Ryan had mentioned.
A Stoneborn ancestral smithing technique;
They wouldn’t make a mistake even with eyes shut.
The hammer turned in the blacksmith’s hands, each strike landing exactly where it needed to be—a rhythm passed down through generations.
Jin shifted his gaze to a porridge stall beside the forges.
The stall was set up on an open space between the forge area and the main road, not particularly conspicuous.
Under the awning sat three large clay pots, charcoal fires blazing beneath them, porridge bubbling on the surface with wisps of steam.
The queue stretched from the stall’s entrance all the way to the alley mouth.
Roughly counting, there were no fewer than forty to fifty people.
The line moved slowly, and no one cut in.
Everyone shuffled forward in silence, eyes hollow, fixated on the large clay pot.
Their faces showed no impatience—only a numbness and orderliness honed by repeated hunger.
Jin stepped closer and peered through the gaps between the waiting people.
The porridge was very thin.
The grain had almost melted away, with only a few scattered, unground chaff floating on the surface.
“One bowl per person, no second servings.”
The ladle wielder inside was a venerable old Stoneborn, mechanically repeating the same words in a hoarse voice.
His hand steadily scooped up a ladle of porridge, no more, no less—exactly half a bowl.
To stand at that position, he had to be absolutely fair.
Jin noticed a wooden sign nailed to one of the stall’s poles.
The calligraphy was neat, not like the crooked signs elsewhere.
It read:
“Yunxu Merchant Guild · Bai Li.”
He then observed people as they walked out of the queue with their bowls.
The portion was strictly controlled—enough to barely satisfy a child, while adults only got a few mouthfuls of thin porridge to keep them alive.
Jin looked at those in line and seemed to see his former self.
He knew what hunger felt like.
Before meeting his master, he too had suffered from starvation day in and day out, teetering between life and death, scrambling for his next meal.
Hunger could make the kindest heart turn murderous, turn the most honest person into a thief, and make the proudest soul kneel and kiss the toe of a benefactor.
If not for his master, he might have been standing in that line too, eyes hollow, waiting for that ladle of thin porridge.
Jin took a deep breath, tore his gaze away from the porridge stall, touched the scarf around his neck, and turned to walk toward the plaza in Yunxu Market.