Dao of the Deal

The next morning, Muchen arrived at the government hall with a guest in tow. Liling had once more donned the outfit of a proper young lady. Muchen certainly would have been fooled if he'd been seeing her for the first time. It wasn't just that her dress cost more than anything he'd ever owned, but that she wore it with impressive poise considering how hard she must have fought against taking etiquette lessons.

She certainly caught the eye of all the bystanders in the government hall. Muchen ignored the curious looks as he escorted her to her seat in the waiting area before making his way to the clerk who had been the source of so much trouble.

"I'm back," Muchen said.

The clerk mustered up a smile that was strained at the edges. "A pleasure to see you again."

"I'm sure," Muchen said, before gesturing with his head back toward the waiting area. "Liling wanted to introduce me to her father's drinking buddies, but I told her we wouldn't have time today. After all, I'm just making a quick stop to pick up some completed paperwork."

Muchen watched the clerk squirm. Part of him wanted to push harder, to use Liling's connections and try to get the clerk tossed out on his ear. In the end, though, he just didn't want to spend one minute longer in this hall than absolutely necessary.

There was a moment when it looked like the clerk's spite and petty greed would win out over his common sense. While it would have been a terrible risk, he could have inconvenienced Muchen by calling his bluff and refusing to issue the permit. Of course, he'd be the only one to truly suffer if he decided to go down that road.

In the end, the clerk was an official in the capital after all. Even if it was difficult to put away his greed, he was ultimately able to bend and stretch as the situation required. He bowed his head and pulled a permit from the pile of papers on his desk. When he looked back up, Muchen couldn't see even a trace of dissatisfaction in his eyes.

"Of course, sir," he said. "I just happened to finish processing your application."

He inked in his signature and then applied his official stamp to the last blank spot in the form. The clerk showed only the barest hint of reluctance as he handed over the completed permit. Muchen pulled it loose with a gentle tug, happy to finally put this frustration behind him.

Muchen didn't even pretend to reach for his money pouch. As far as he was concerned, his agreement to pay two taels on delivery had been rendered null and void when the clerk had refused to deliver. Now that he had been forced to come back with overwhelming force, he thought the clerk should count himself lucky that Muchen wasn't making him spit out the silver he'd already swallowed.

He walked out of the hall with a spring in his step. Liling fell in beside him, keeping a properly placid smile on her face that morphed into a wicked grin once they reached the courtyard and were free from prying eyes.

"Have you made enough use of my face for today?"

"I'm satisfied," Muchen said. "Do we need to go on an actual tour of the city to keep your mother happy?"

Liling shook her head. "She isn't watching us that closely. Besides, she'd be happy to see us working together to solve problems."

She turned and made a gesture, calling forth the carriage that had carried her from the Wang estate. "I need to go home and change before I can get anything done today. I won't keep you from your business any longer."

She boarded the carriage without any further ado. It lurched into motion as soon as the door closed behind her, leaving Muchen behind as it rumbled along the road back to the Wang estate.

Muchen shook his head and made his way to his cart. He'd been forced by the occasion to share a carriage on the trip out of the Wang estate, but Liling had directed one of her people to drive his cart here for him to use for the rest of the day. Huichen looked unperturbed at having had to follow somebody else's direction.

Muchen's mood picked up as he drove his cart towards his place of business as designated on the permit. He was finally ready to open up his stall, and he'd managed to do it without needing Uncle Haoyu to lift a finger. True, he'd needed help from Liling, but it hardly grated on him at all to exchange favors with a peer.

Of course, now he had to prove that he had a viable business plan. Muchen was confident. He was drawing on a model that had worked out well on Earth, after all. But he still felt a certain amount of nervous anticipation at the prospect of finally getting to put his plans into action.

The spot that he'd been allocated for his business was not bad, all things considered. The capital had multiple commercial districts. Muchen had opted to set up shop by the market near the docks. Even though the sea trade was complicated by the presence of monsters fueled by spiritual energy, moving cargo by water was still much cheaper than shipping overland. A busy harbor needed a lot of workers to load and unload the ships and drew plenty of customers eager to get the first look at the goods.

Muchen's stall wouldn't be in the market itself, nor on the docks. He was instead by the side of one of the major streets that connected one to the other. It was a road that saw heavy traffic throughout most of the day.

Muchen watched people go by as he started to set up his stall. The mid-morning traffic was largely made up of teams moving cargo from the docks to the market. He'd missed the early morning time when those same men might have been inclined to stop and buy a cup of tea on their way to work, but that didn't mean the area was completely without potential customers.

Muchen pulled a table top from the back of his cart, then dug the table legs from where they'd rolled around during transit. Slipping the carefully shaped top of each leg into the corresponding slots carved out of the tabletop was the work of a moment. The result was hardly fit to grace a banquet hall, but it would offer him a sturdy platform to do business that was a little tidier than the back of a mule cart.

He had to tap into his cultivation-assisted strength to lift the fully loaded samovar out of the back of the cart and place it on top of a ceramic stand. He'd filled the thing with well water back at the Wang estate. He could have just used local water—he'd be boiling it anyway, and it wasn't like he was aiming to sell to anybody with a refined palate in the first place—but it was just as easy to use water that he already knew was sweet tasting. It wasn't like he was actively trying to sell people a lousy product.

It took a bit of work, but he soon had the central tube loaded up with fuel and smoldering away. After that, he just had to wait for the water to boil before cutting off most of the air to the fire. He filled the tea kettle with boiling water and added a heavy handful of tea leaves along with a bit of mint.

While he waited for the tea to steep he kept himself busy lining up the mugs on the table before finally setting out the wooden menu on which he had painted the pricing system. Twenty wen would be enough to buy a mug filled with tea. Customers who brought their own cups would only have to pay six wen to fill them up. Customers who returned to the stand with a cup bearing his logo received a further discount, a refill costing them a mere five wen.

Muchen's profit margin was razor thin. Depending how you factored in all of the costs, he'd be losing money for a while before he could make things up on volume. Of course, once he established a loyal customer base there was nothing stopping him from bumping up the prices a wen or two here or there.

"Can I give it a try?"

Muchen looked to the side with a start, finding Xinyi in her human form looking at him with open curiosity. "Is this safe?"

Xinyi waved her hand dismissively. "As long as I don't start a fight with the guards."

Muchen nodded. She'd probably been itching to stretch her legs. He could use a second opinion before he started making sales to the public, even if Xinyi was probably a bit pickier than his target customer.

The kettle had been steeping for long enough. Muchen readied a pair of cups and poured a dollop of tea into each. Or tea concentrate, rather, considering that he had added an excess of tea leaves to the kettle. It would grow stronger over time, but Muchen had developed an eye for judging how strong it was by its color. He filled the rest of his own cup with hot water from the samovar, then gave it an experimental sip.

It tasted much like his test brews. Reasonably tea flavored water, with most of the problematic flavor tones obscured by the mint. He added a similar amount of water to Xinyi's cup and handed it over.

She gave the tea an experimental sniff. Her nose wrinkled involuntarily, and she hesitated a moment before she took a sip. Her nose wrinkled further, and she turned and spat the tea out on the ground rather than swallow it.

"This is a horrifying affront to the noble art of brewing tea," she said. "Surely the public will hate you for it."

"Naturally, I have to prepare them before they taste it," Muchen said.

"Oh?"

"I expect they'll be more tolerant," he said, "once I explain that this is an ancient recipe and method of tea preparation that promotes wakefulness and clear headedness."

"So you'll lie to them."

"It's called marketing," Muchen said, before adding water to the kettle and placing it on top of the samovar to keep warm.

"What's the difference?"

"Marketing is true," Muchen said, "as long as the customer believes it."

Even the factual claims he was making were true, from a certain point of view. He was using a method with hundreds of years of development behind it on Earth. If all of those years of development hadn't exactly been focused on improving the quality of the final beverage, that was neither here nor there. And while his tea might lack a certain something in flavor, it had at least as much as caffeine as the more high end blends on offer at the tea houses. Measured in terms of wakefulness per wen, he was offering a great deal.

Xinyi made a skeptical noise before vanishing from Muchen's sight. A quick glance confirmed that her shell was back on the driver's bench of his cart. No doubt she was furiously meditating to get the taste of the tea out of her mouth.

Well, he was trying to appeal to the mass market anyways, not to the particularities of ancient cultivators.

Muchen studied the bustling crowd. He'd picked this location in part for its high foot traffic, but none of the people walking by spared his little stall a second glance. It was just as well that nobody had taken note of Xinyi's reaction to his product, but he hadn't gone to all the trouble of setting up a stall just to spend all day being ignored.

Muchen usually preferred a more low key sales approach, but he could recognize when he needed to adapt to new circumstances. In those small villages out in the countryside the arrival of any kind of traveling merchant was a major event and subject of gossip. Here in the capital city it would require a bit more active self promotion to draw the customer's eye.

"Hot tea!" Muchen called out. "Quench your thirst and clear your head!"

That got him a few curious looks. Muchen did his best to project a welcoming atmosphere, but in the end nobody approached.

"Hot tea!" Muchen tried again. "Prepared in the time it takes a spark to fly off a piece of flint!"