"Just to broaden your horizons," the attendant said, gesturing at the nearest rack with a sweep of her hand, "these dresses were woven by the maidens of the golden weave sect. They spend day and night creating each one. Just a single dress can go for a whopping 50,000 gold coins."

The smirk was back, sitting comfortably on her face.

What she didn’t say was that these dresses were typically considered the same quality as Ceda silk. They were made by genuine experts, infused with mana during the weaving process, and could take direct hits without tearing. Durable in a way that most clothing simply wasn’t.

In some aspects they were actually better than the Ceda silk dresses. They were impervious to flames entirely, a quality the Ceda silk couldn’t match.

But store policy was store policy.

The attendant presented them this way specifically to inflate the perceived value of the Ceda silk dresses by comparison. Make the golden weave sound impressive, make the Ceda silk sound even more out of reach, and the customer either stretched their budget or left feeling like they had missed something. Either outcome worked.

"I don’t expect you to pay upfront," the attendant continued, turning to look at the two of them with the patient expression of someone explaining something obvious to someone slow. "However, if your eyes are on the city lord banquet like so many others, we can arrange a ten year payment plan."

She let that land.

Her eyes moved over the two of them again while she waited for the reaction.

Aside from the invited guests, there would be a flock of women heading to the city lord manor’s outskirts around the time of the banquet. Women with no formal invitation and no particular talent, looking to position themselves near young men with money and prospects. It was a predictable pattern. It happened every time an event like this came around.

The attendant had seen that type walk through the door before. She was fairly sure she was looking at two of them right now.

She kept the patient expression in place.

"No need."

Arian reached into her side without hesitating and pulled out a bag. She held it out and the attendant caught it on instinct before she had fully processed what was happening.

The bag was heavier than expected.

"Those are Carnite Gems," Arian said, her voice easy. "One goes for around a thousand gold coins. There are fifty in there."

The attendant’s hand tightened around the bag.

"Hold on!!"

Her eyes snapped up as she noticed Ember reaching toward one of the dresses on the nearest rack. Her voice came out sharper than she intended.

Ember paused. Looked at her.

The attendant turned her attention back to the bag. She opened it.

The gems caught the light immediately, a clean concentrated glow spilling across her face and the front of her uniform. The color was unmistakable. Deep and even, the kind of luminescence that didn’t come from surface treatment or cheap imitation work. It came from the interior of the stone itself.

She stared at them.

Her brow pulled together.

Then, slowly, the rational part of her mind started working against what her eyes were telling her.

"I have to check if this is real," she said, looking up at the two of them with narrowed eyes.

She was aware, somewhere in the back of her thinking, that she had never actually seen anyone capable of faking the glow native to gems from the five elements school. The glow wasn’t a surface quality. It wasn’t something that could be painted on or replicated with cheap mana work. It came from a specific cultivation process that took years and specific conditions to produce.

But she couldn’t bring herself to accept it.

’They have to be scammers. There’s no other way.’

She looked at them both. Arian standing there with a calm smile. Ember standing slightly behind her, arms crossed now, watching the attendant with an expression that had been flat for the last several minutes.

’No other way,’ she repeated to herself. ’People like this don’t walk in with fifty Carnite Gems.’

"That’s fine," Arian said. "We can go with you."

The smile didn’t waver.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,

At the same time, at the front of the store, a different figure walked in through the entrance.

A man in a long black robe moved through the doorway at an unhurried pace. A pair of what appeared to be glasses sat on his face, thin frames, slightly dark lenses that caught the light from the display fixtures overhead. He walked forward without stopping to look at the displays, without pausing to take in the layout, without doing any of the things people normally did when they entered a shop for the first time.

He walked like he already knew where he was going. Like the store was something he was passing through rather than somewhere he had arrived.

An attendant moved to intercept him, glancing quickly at the woman walking beside him.

"Hello, sir. May we help you?"

The man in the black robe didn’t slow his pace.

"I want to buy a Ceda silk dress." He said it the way someone states something that has already been decided. No question in it. No browsing implied. "Take me to your boss."

The attendant blinked.

There was something in the way he said it that didn’t leave room for the usual back and forth. No hesitation in the voice, no softness around the edges of the request, no acknowledgment that this was an unusual thing to walk in and say to a junior staff member.

Just the words, delivered like they were obvious.

The attendant felt himself flinch before he had consciously decided to.

He looked at the man again. At the particular way he was standing. The way his eyes, behind those glasses, had already moved past the attendant to the interior of the shop like the conversation at the front was already over.

"Of course, sir." The attendant turned. "Please follow me."

He started leading the way forward, moving deeper into the store.

The man in the black robe followed without a word.

His wife walked beside him, quiet, the two of them moving through the rows of silk and light like they belonged in the most expensive section of the building, because as far as the man in the black robe was concerned, that was the only section worth his time.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​