Jianzhou was not like Greenwood Village. Jianzhou had cultivators.
Chen Xi felt them before he saw them — his vortex detected the Qi signatures the way a radio picks up broadcasts, each cultivator a distinct frequency in the ambient noise.
Some were faint: low-level practitioners with cultivation barely above mortal baseline, attending the Sword Conference as spectators or hopefuls.
Others were strong enough to distort the local energy field, creating ripples that Chen Xi tracked from two hundred metres away.
The city itself was built for the occasion. Permanent structures — grey stone buildings with the blue-grey reinforced foundations he had noticed in Greenwood — were supplemented by temporary pavilions, tent complexes, and elevated platforms where martial demonstrations were already underway.
Banners marked the territories of attending sects: the Azure Dust Sect's grey and silver, the Crimson Lotus Sect's red and gold, Iron Mountain Hall's black, and dozens of smaller organisations Chen Xi did not recognise.
The economic implications were immediate and significant.
"Spirit stones are a unit of energy, not currency," he told Wu Zheng as they walked through the market district.
"But they're being used as currency. Which means there's an arbitrage opportunity."
"A what?"
"The exchange rate between spirit stones and cultivation services is inefficient. A spirit stone's energy content is fixed and measurable.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
But the price people pay for techniques, pills, and equipment varies by a factor of ten or more depending on the seller, the buyer's perceived desperation, and a collection of social signals that have nothing to do with the actual energy value of the transaction."
"That's called commerce."
"Commerce is applied thermodynamics. And I can optimise it."
He approached the Heavenly Treasures Pavilion — the largest commercial operation at the Conference, a multi-storey building staffed by cultivators in matching robes who radiated an air of professional competence and moderate avarice.
What he offered them was simple: an optimised version of a standard Qi circulation technique, with mathematical proof that it increased energy retention from 4% to 11%.
The woman who received him — a senior clerk with the flat eyes of someone who evaluated propositions for a living — listened to his explanation with visible scepticism that eroded, incrementally, as he presented the numbers.
She called for a superior. The superior called for a testing chamber. The testing chamber confirmed the numbers.
They paid him fifty thousand spirit stones.
It was, Chen Xi calculated, approximately one-tenth of what the technique was worth.
He accepted it because he needed capital, not because he needed a fair deal, and because the information asymmetry was temporary — once he had established a track record, his negotiating position would improve.
He also secured a secondary agreement: first-refusal rights for the Pavilion on future technique optimisations, in exchange for a guaranteed floor price on all subsequent transactions.
Wu Zheng watched this negotiation with the expression of a man who had spent a hundred and forty years in a cultivation sect and had never once seen a cultivator negotiate like a futures trader.
"Where did you learn to do that?" he asked afterward.
"Stanford's technology licensing office. I watched them negotiate patent rights for three years. The principles are identical."
"You're comparing cultivator techniques to... what is a patent?"
"A legal mechanism for monetising intellectual property. The concept translates perfectly.
Techniques are intellectual property. Sects are corporations that control that property.
The Pavilion is a market-maker that facilitates transactions between producers and consumers.
The entire cultivation economy is a technology licensing ecosystem with extra swords."
Wu Zheng opened his mouth to argue, found he couldn't, and ate a dumpling instead.
