Li Wu learns the Hollow Lotus Tomb

Two weeks after the gateway, Li Wu reaches the Iron-Market of Ouyang. Coal smoke hangs over tilted stalls, and the clang of qi-forged hammers rolls through the streets like thunder under a roof.

He steps into a crossroads packed with traders, grease-stained porters, and bundles of scrap iron. The air tastes of ash, hot metal, and river damp. Every stall seems to sell noise as much as goods.

Li Wu slows, senses spreading through the market’s earth and stone. Beneath the cobbles, the ground is old and thirsty. Above it, hidden auras flicker like fish beneath muddy water.

At the mention of old bricks, a half-collapsed stall at the edge of the crossroads catches Li Wu’s eye. Its foundation leans wrong, and the packed dirt below it seems denser than the street around it.

A low tremor shivers through the market lane. Dust sifts from the stall beams as a hidden seam in the earth answers his attention, faint but deliberate.

Li Wu crouches by the cracked stall base, fingers brushing loose cloth as if fussing with his sleeve. His palm settles to the packed earth beside the seam, and Flowing Earth Essence slips outward in a thin, patient thread.

The ground answers in layers. Brick mortar, old tamping, buried iron, and beneath them a narrow rule of pressure that bends around the stall legs like a hidden brace.

The pattern sharpens. One side of the seam leans toward the market road, the other sinks toward a colder hollow under the bricks, as if something below still expects to be found.

His voice stays casual, but his shoulders stiffen. Nearby, a porter slows with a sack on his back, glancing toward Li Wu and the stall.

Li Wu’s palm presses a fraction harder, and the seam yields just enough to show a buried line of old brickwork under the stall foundation, laid in a deliberate turn rather than a proper wall.

He shifts his scrap bundle higher on his hip, eyes flicking from Li Wu’s hand to the exposed line under the stall. The porter in the aisle slows, then keeps moving.

His guarded curiosity gives way to a lower, more careful tone. The old brick turn under the foundation looks less like damage now, and more like a door that never finished becoming one.

Li Wu straightens from the seam and gives a small, dismissive shake of his head. The gesture reads like refusal, but his qi slips low through the packed earth, threading past brick, ash, and bootprint to taste the foundations around the stall.

Three presences answer from the shadowed underwork, not speech, but watchful pressure. One is close and disciplined, one drifts with coin-counting patience, and one is badly hidden by a merchant's broad-shouldered posture.

The deception holds. Li Wu's face stays calm, even bored, while his sensing reaches deeper and catches a hollow seam running under the stall line, then beyond it into the lane.

A faint scrape answers from beneath the bricks, and the hidden watcher shifts. The movement is small, but it betrays a second layer of footing under the market floor.

The Scrap Vendor sees Li Wu's attention sharpen. His grip tightens on the scrap bundle, and his wariness turns a shade more careful, as if he realizes someone else is listening.

Li Wu stills his breathing and lets his attention sink inward, as if the market noise has nothing left to offer him. Beneath the stall, the old brickwork answers his will, ownership and release cycling through each hairline crack until the seam tightens shut.

The floor loses its telltale draft. Dust stops sifting from the joints, and the hidden underwork goes mute, its watchful pressure suddenly blind where the breaks have vanished.

The Scrap Vendor freezes, then looks from the sealed bricks to Li Wu with open alarm. Whatever he expected to see under there, he no longer can.

A lantern-bearing porter slows at the lane edge, and another merchant turns his head. The nearest stall row goes wary at once, drawn by the change in the ground and the vendor's raised voice.

The vendor swallows, now looking less at the floor than at Li Wu himself, as if deciding whether to report him or ask him another question.