The air of Coldvale changed once you passed the last tanners’ stalls, where the hides hanging from hooks grew sparser and the sharp tang of quicklime gave way to something thicker, more alive.

  This wasn’t a border drawn on any map. It was a tear in the city’s fabric—a place where the rules of the burg ceased to exist, where prices weren’t haggled in copper, but in desperation.

  The Grey Market had no signs, no cobblestones—just rotting planks laid over black mud, patched tarps nailed between leaning posts, and that signature stench: a mix of burnt tallow, rust, and meat left too long in the damp. Compared to the tanners’ ammonia, it was almost refreshing.

  Adrian moved with calculated caution, each step sinking into the black, viscous sludge that clung to his soles. The cold had hardened the surface into a deceptive crust, but beneath it, the mire waited, ready to swallow his boots to the ankle.

  His senses, sharpened since ingesting the Anchoring Elixir, picked up the ambient ether’s fluctuations more acutely—a dull, almost physical pressure, like static before a storm. It crackled around the flickering magic lanterns hung on the leprous walls of nearby warehouses, their fissured glass globes pulsing with blue light.

  Farther on, near a patrol of militiamen, the ether clumped into dense pockets, like fat floating on broth. He had to clench his jaw to push past the interference, refocusing on what mattered: the stalls.

  Klara supplied the clean ingredients—dried Sylva root, purified etheric salt crystals, anything that passed through the shop’s official channels. But for his personal experiments, the ones requiring components even the least scrupulous apothecaries refused to touch, he had to come here. Into the guts of the Grey Market. Where prices were measured in risk, and a few copper coins could buy either a meal or a poison.

  His stomach clenched—a brutal reminder that his remodeled body demanded more than before. Hunger was no longer mere discomfort; it was pain, an acidic bite in his gut, as if his fragile new nerve connections fed directly from his reserves. He had no time to sit, no time to choose.

  The first stall was nothing more than a blackened oak plank balanced precariously on two half-rotten brine barrels. Behind it, a man with a pockmarked face grilled chunks of meat on a rusted iron plate heated by a brazier burning damp wood shavings. The smoke, thick and acrid, stung the eyes. The smell was a punch—rancid fat, charred flesh, excess salt.

  —Two skewers, Adrian said without preamble.

  His voice was flat, mechanical, as if ordering reagents rather than food. He placed two copper coins on the sticky counter without waiting for a response. The vendor, a man with nicotine- and burn-yellowed fingers, handed him two roughly carved wooden spikes, each loaded with fibrous muscle and yellowish fat, all swimming in a murky juice flecked with black particles. Adrian didn’t hesitate. He bit directly into the wood, tearing off the meat with his teeth, indifferent to the grease dripping onto his fingers or the salt burning his chapped lips. The taste was vile—metallic, oversalted, with a moldy aftertaste that hinted at questionable preservation. But it didn’t matter.

  The first bite settled like a dead weight in his stomach, then exploded. Brutal heat radiated from his solar plexus, spreading through his veins like a wave of pure ethanol. His cold-numbed fingers regained painful mobility. The throbbing in his temples ceased.

  [NOTIFICATION: CALORIC INTAKE DETECTED.]

  IRIS’s message flashed orange in his vision, followed by a data cascade—450 kcal, glycemic stabilization in progress, protein quality poor, but it didn’t matter. This wasn’t a meal. It was fuel. Nothing more.

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  He tossed the half-gnawed skewers into the black mud at his feet, where they sank with a muffled plop. The dizziness receded, replaced by cold clarity, the surgical precision that finally let him focus. The Grey Market’s stalls were waiting. And among them, Old Grenn’s—the only place where one could still find Ether-Ox adrenal glands at a price that wouldn’t bankrupt his reserves. Or what remained of them.

  He finally reached Grenn’s stall. The butcher was little more than a mass of flabby muscle beneath a bloodstained apron, carving carcasses with brutal indifference.

  On his greasy wooden block, beneath a swarm of flies the cold hadn’t yet thinned, piled the organs even the desperate scorned: swollen glands, purple spleens, the glassy eyes of beasts of burden. To locals, it was carrion barely fit for dogs. To Adrian, it was a hormonal treasure trove.

  —I need gelatin-rich tissues. Glands and offal will do.

  He pointed at a heap of Ether-Ox thyroids and adrenal glands. Grenn let out a greasy laugh.

  —Ten copper for the lot. Saves me burying ‘em before the bailiff complains.

  Adrian knew it was worth less, but to him, it was gold. He paid, feeling the cold, viscous weight of the organs in his bag.

  [ANALYSIS: SAMPLES ACQUIRED. ETHER CONCENTRATES, ADRENALINE, AND CORTISOL PRESENT.]

  [POTENTIAL: CATALYSTS FOR STABILIZATION ELIXIRS. ACQUISITION COST: NEGLIGIBLE.]

  His second stop took him to Marta, a woman whose skin seemed made of burnt parchment, smoking a tar-scented pipe amid a yard of broken tools and rust-eaten metal. His enhanced perception guided his fingers to copper wire fragments and, more importantly, yellowish crusts at the bottom of old smelting cauldrons.

  —How much for this copper and sulfur residue?

  Marta eyed the yellow crystals with disdain.

  —The sulfur? That’s mine slag. Take it for three copper. The copper’ll cost you five.

  Eight copper. Good. The sulfur would serve as a preservative for his Leech venom, stabilizing the molecular chains his latest protocol struggled to fix. The copper, meanwhile, would become the framework for his future cooling systems.

  He finished his rounds at the One-Eyed Herbalist, deep in an alley where the ether seemed to stagnate like a stagnant pond.

  The stall was covered in "dead" plants—medicinal herbs whose mana had evaporated, rendering them useless for traditional remedies. To official herbalists, these plants were worthless. Adrian knew the alkaloids didn’t vanish with the mana. They remained trapped in the fibers, waiting for an organic solvent to liberate them.

  He paid fifteen copper for the entire lot of withered Shadow-Root.

  As he packed away the dried herbs, his gaze drifted to a group of outcasts huddled beneath a nearby porch.

  They were pale, their bodies wracked by tremors his new perception identified as micro-shocks of rejection. The ambient mana assaulted them like a permanent allergy.

  They were, like him, anomalies in the weave. "Empty vessels." If he could use these cheap ingredients to create a chemical "anchor," he could turn their vulnerability into a technological advantage. They wouldn’t be sick—they’d be the first operators of his future production system.

  [SUPPLIER DATABASE CREATED. 3 ENTRIES.]

  [AVERAGE COST OF RAW MATERIALS: -60% COMPARED TO OFFICIAL CHANNELS.]

  Adrian left the market as shadows lengthened over the pale stones of Coldvale’s high quarters. The cold bit sharply. He cut through an alley toward his bunker, his muscles protesting slightly under the weight of his copper- and offal-laden bag.

  Suddenly, he sensed a drop in etheric tension. It wasn’t an immediate physical threat—IRIS detected no biological signatures in pursuit—but a sensation of weight. Of attention. As if the air itself had thickened behind him.

  He didn’t spin around. He stopped in front of a crumbling wall, pretending to adjust his bag’s strap. His nerves fired warning signals.

  There, at eye level, nestled between old mining recruitment posters and nitre stains, a mark caught his attention. A crude chalk drawing: a spiral with an open eye at its center.

  The symbol was identical to the one carved on the stone he kept on his workbench. It looked fresh, the red dust still flaking slightly in the wind.

  This was no coincidence. Someone else in Coldvale knew this symbol—a geometry absent from the Pioneer’s Almanac.

  Adrian quickened his pace, clutching his bag to his chest. The Grey Market had given him the means to build the first step of an empire he was beginning to glimpse.