If time here could be measured in modern earth standards, I would say it was 6:30 something in the morning when me and my sister were finished taking baths.
The inn charged 4 and a half silver kins for staying a night. Add the noodles we ate last night and the bath we had (water was expensive, especially clean water), the total amounted to 6.5 silver kins for one person. However, I had decided to stay in that inn for a week, so the price of spending a night was lowered to 3 silver kins.
"Big brother, you paid so much money to that innkeeper!" My sister complained when we exited the doors of 'hebi to su-pu'.
She wanted to change inns the moment she came out of the bathroom. Apparently, last night's 'noodles' had really bothered her.
"My dear sister, what did the male attendant tell us when he brought us to our room?" I asked as we walked on the left side of amtalg 8mali street. The street was mostly empty except for a few tipsy individuals, who didn't know where they were headed towards.
"That the fair will be held a month later?" She started stroking her chin only to awkwardly drop her hand a few seconds later. It was amusing how she tried to imitate me from time to time.
"Yes, and how many days would it last?" I laughed.
"Four... no, five, but what does that have anything to do with the money you paid?" She scrunched up her eyebrows. Oh, is that a pebble? She started kicking it, much to my bemusement.
"Listen here," a hint of seriousness was present in my voice.
"This southern Shang Fair is a big thing for people in this desert. It happens once every year, so the inns would specifically reserve rooms for merchants. We are neither merchants nor are we the residents of this town."
"But aren't we paying money? Brother, you told me that customers are like gods to bus-busnis..."
"Businesspeople," I corrected her.
"Little Nu, it makes a difference when there are lots of customers who want your service or product. I call it demand saturation. When this happens, customers either need to build some kind of trust or stuff the sellers with more money. One example of such a scenario would be in an auction house..." I went on talking until we had crossed several streets.
The reason I was telling her this was because I planned to turn her into a merchant. I just realized that the identity of a merchant would be useful while travelling in Shang desert. I knew we couldn't reach the peak of cultivation in this world without travelling to other places.
At higher levels, power was everything but at lower levels, one had to know the sufficient knowledge and wits to avoid unnecessary trouble.
'Showing her the ropes early on would yield good results,' I thought.
"We are here, brother! It reads 'Yellow Rocks Mansion'. Just like what the attendant had told us." Tugging my robes, she pointed at a particularly large four-storey building whose architecture was totally alien to me.
Thank the portal, that it had a function to provide the complete understanding of the language used in a mortal world, to whoever descended in there. Otherwise, it would've been a hassle to go about learning the said language.
I nodded at her and climbed the stairs of the mansion. It was one of the rare buildings which was made of bricks and... cement? I think not. It was some kind of yellow compound that worked like a cement.
That aside, as soon as we entered the mansion, a large antechamber presented itself in front of us. At the center of that was a small statue of a man wearing wide-sleeved robes.
'Probably the owner of this establishment,' I didn't pay much attention to it and looked around. Chunu spotted a wide array of weapons displayed behind glasses. She pulled me over there but my eyes were searching for something else.
'Not in this room,' I figured and let myself be dragged. For a while, we glanced at each and every weapon on display.
Swords, spears, shields, daggers, steel folding-fans, axes, even hammers...
Little Nu couldn't touch any of them, so she would stretch out her hands from time to time, only to feel the cold glass that obstructed her.
I also checked them out but after seeing that they were just normal weapons with no inscriptions on them, I quickly lost interest. Also, they were too pricy for us currently. Once such weapon cost at least 50 silvers.
At this moment, two young men approached us as we finished our window shopping. One was at the fourth rank of body tempering while the other one at third rank. In simple brown robes, the practitioner at fourth rank wore an aloof expression while the one beside him had a flirtatious smile plastered on his face. He was clad in striking green robes, that made him look like a large... grasshopper.
"Hello, beautiful young lady. Are you lost? Why don't you let us show you around?" the guy wearing green robes opened a conversation, trying to act all elegant with his goose feather fan. He was a tall boy and his looks were okay.
"Ah, little brother grasshopper, my sister isn't lost; she just doesn't know which way to go," I cut in, quite rudely and hurriedly, as if trying to shoo him away. We didn't have time for touring this place right now.
"Who are you?" he asked. It was obvious he was angry at being called as 'grasshopper.'
"Who I am is none of your concern. You are interrupting us," I said dissmissively. Sigh, I really couldn't stand annoying mortals.
I wasn't afraid of offending those two young men, even though one person was a rank higher than me. What type of divine prince would I be, if I couldn't even beat someone just one minor rank higher than me?
I was waiting for him to make the first move but the other one sensibly stopped him. He whispered, "Guoguo, don't forget why we came here. Such a generous mission is rarely placed on the mission table. For this, I even woke you up so early. You can deal with him later."
His speech was a little weird. I kept feeling like it was missing something but couldn't put my finger on it. As they started walking away, I couldn't hear their whispers even with the help of my spirit sense.
Although it was not a complete one, this much was more than enough to for me eavesdrop on people from 3 meters away, much less someone who was right before me.
"Little Nu, what do you think about that grasshopper?" I suddenly asked. She had been a little too quiet.
"Who?" she asked.
"Uh... the boy in green robes," I corrected myself.
"I think he's a good person. You were just mean to him," she said, trying to roll her hairs with her index finger.
'Looks like that 'beautiful young lady' compliment got to her head. Well, I cannot blame her. This child is inexperienced. With time, she will mature,' I turned my attention from her to a different entrance in the lobby.
The reason I came here was not to ask for trouble but to cultivate. According to the attendant, this mansion had many cultivation chambers that anyone could rent as long as they had enough money.
The price of renting was cheap enough for me and my sister that we could spend three to four days inside those cultivation chambers, before we ran out of what little money we had left.
Those chambers' function was not to gather qi inside them to increase a cultivator's cultivation speed. No, that type of place couldn't be accessed with the currency of normal people.
To be honest, 'cultivation chambers' was just a name. It would be more practical to call them as just 'practice rooms'. Practice rooms which had all kinds of body tempering tools and simple healing reagents in fancy bottles.