Mediocre Master: I Can See Your Hidden Potential! (A Xianxia Sect-Building LitRPG)

61. Even in Xianxia, Ticketmaster is the True Villain

by inkadmin

“Go back to the inn,” I say. “Rest. I need to see Shen Qiao.”

Ling’er nods. Doesn’t ask questions. She’s learning when to speak and when not to. That’s more valuable than most techniques. We part ways at the corner and she disappears into the crowd. I head east, toward the restaurant where a sweeper is waiting to expand an empire. Shen Qiao is outside the kitchen, ledger in hand, his scarred nose wrinkled in concentration. He sees me approaching and straightens. There’s a lightness in his posture now, a confidence that wasn’t there a week ago.

“Senior Cultivator,” he says. “I have three more prospects. A small kitchen in the northern district. A restaurant near the arena. They need—”

“Pause the meat business.”

His mouth stops moving. His face tightens.

“… Senior Cultivator, if I performed inadequately, I can—”

“You passed.”

He blinks. “What?”

“You passed. That’s why we’re moving on.”

His ledger lowers slightly. “I… I don’t understand.”

I lean against the wall beside him. The alley is narrow, the light dim, the sounds of the kitchen muffled through the door.

“The meat business did what I needed it to do. It created visible income, built local relationships, and proved you could manage a network.”

Shen Qiao stares at me. The panic is fading, replaced by something more complicated. Perhaps he thinks I’m mad, for letting go of such a profitable business venture. He tucks the ledger under his arm.

“… Then what now?”

I reach into my robe and produce a small pouch of silver.

“Now I need everything you can learn about the Silver Hall.”

“The Silver Hall?” His brow furrows as he scrunches up his nose. “That’s a gambling house. I’ve never been inside.”

“I don’t need you to go inside. I need you to learn who runs it, who gambles there, who sets the odds, and who talks too much when they lose.”

Shen Qiao’s eyes narrow. As though he’s reassessing me. “You’re gambling.”

“No. Gambling is what people call probability when they’re bad at it.”

He stares at me as though the mysterious senior cultivator had suddenly revealed himself to be a degenerate gambler.

“That sounds like something gamblers say before losing everything.”

The words hang in the air. Shen Qiao’s expression freezes. I watch the realization dawn on him, that he has just spoken to a Foundation Establishment cultivator the way he might speak to a fellow sweeper.

“Senior Cultivator, I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant.” I wave a hand. “Most gamblers do talk that way. But I’m not gambling.”

“What are you doing, then?”

“Investing in information.” I push off from the wall. “I need that information by tomorrow evening. Silver Hall. Just how it works, how it functions.”

Shen Qiao nods slowly. His ledger is already open again, his mind already calculating.

“I’ll start tonight,” he says. Then his brows knit together. “But the restaurants will be annoyed.”

“They’ll survive.”

“One of them ordered seventy pounds for tomorrow.”

“Then they’ll survive angrily.”

He looks pained in the way only a man watching stable revenue disappear can look pained. “Senior Cultivator, with respect, this is a terrible way to run a business.”

“Good,” I say. “It was never supposed to become one.”

I leave him in the alley. The inn is quiet when I return. Ling’er is meditating on her bed, her eyes closed, the heat of her cultivation contained behind her skin. She doesn’t open her eyes as I pass. The ceiling is cracked. The paint is peeling. The room is ordinary and exactly the same as it was when we arrived. But something is missing. I lie there for what feels like hours, staring at the cracks, and realize I cannot sleep.

I trust Wei Zheng. I think I do. But trust does not quiet the part of my brain that calculates threats, that runs scenarios, that imagines the dozen ways this could go wrong.

I do not sleep. The hours crawl. The street outside grows quiet, then noisy, then quiet again. Ling’er’s breathing deepens into the rhythm of genuine rest. I watch the ceiling cracks shift in the moonlight. By the time the sky lightens, I have stopped calculating. I have simply accepted that sleep will not come. I rise. Wash my face, and straighten my robes. Ling’er stirs but does not wake. I slip out into the grey morning.

The Central Arena is not hard to find. It sits near the heart of the city, a district I rarely traverse because of how chaotic and crowded it usually is. But here, in the early morning, the streets are nearly empty. The stalls are shuttered. The crowds have not yet arrived. For a brief moment, the city holds its breath. I have seen the arena only from a distance, a pale shape rising above the rooftops, a landmark I noted and then dismissed as irrelevant. But now, as I step within a hundred paces, I realize just how small I am.

One li across, carved from white jade that glows faintly in the dawn light. A monument to scale that makes me feel like a flea on the leg of a marble elephant. The pillars around the entrance are thicker than redwoods, their surfaces covered in carvings so intricate they seem to move in the corner of my eye. Dragons, phoenixes and beasts I cannot name, their forms twisted into scenes of battle and triumph. Some are so lifelike I wonder if they are captured spirit beasts, turned to stone and mounted here for eternity.

I walk through the outer gates.

The interior is worse. The moment I step inside, I feel a wrongness in the way the space expands around me. The exterior is massive, but the interior is larger. Far larger. Someone has folded the geometry of this place, stretching it beyond what reality should allow.

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The main area opens before me. Exhibition rings, currently occupied by handlers and beasts. But in an arena like this, such exhibitions are not the kind of animals used for hunting or labor.

Armored Thunder Rhinoceros – Core Formation (First Stage)

Age: 121

Spirit Root: Earth/Thunder (B-grade)

Constitution: Thundering Hide (C-grade)

Cultivation: Core Formation (First Stage) – Sedated, unstable

Verdict: The handler is smiling because the sealing collar still works. If it stops working, he will become paste.

I know roughly what size a rhinoceros is. What I know for certain is that monster is ten times the size one should be. Wider than three trucks put side by side, with an exterior that looked closer to tank armor rather than skin. Its half-lidded eyes showed signs of intelligence and more importantly, rage. The collar around its neck glowed as the horn crackled with lightning. I glance at the others. A six-winged serpent coils around in a cage. A jade-maned lion paced its cage, each step measured, each glance toward the crowd carrying the contempt of something that knows it could kill everyone in the room and is waiting for the right moment. A mountain ape sits shackled with chains as thick as bridge cables.

I walk away as the doors to the main area are shut, breathing a sigh of relief as the pressure from those beasts disappear.

Outside again, the scalpers are setting up.

They appear as the sun climbs, materializing from side streets and alleys, their arms full of tokens and their eyes full of greed. The Celestial Ascension Tournament is days away, and demand is still high. Tickets for the Qi Condensation seats available in the form of these tokens.

At triple the price. Sometimes ten times.

I watch one man sell a token, then another, then another. His stock never seems to diminish. I activate the Gaze.

Ticket Scalper – Mortal

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