Radeon paused under the cabinet and let the new question turn over in his mind.

He stacked what he knew of their work into clean piles.

Weapon dealing. Bounty hunting under false banners. Assassinations that wore the excuse of justice. Highway robbery dressed up as toll collection.

The whole underbelly of Goldkeep Crownmarkets fed on it. Radeon wanted it all.

But stripping the underground forces bare was more than profit. It was leverage. Eliminate their teeth bared at him, and the honest merchants would cling to his city for safety.

It was one of the keys to a political foothold in the Crownmarkets, a way to make his peak seem less like a novelty and more like a necessity.

After another sweep, the silverfish returned. The five ghosts slipped back into his hollowed form and shed their insect shapes.

They submitted their findings through the system like dutiful clerks. Radeon felt their elation, grinning ear to ear inside the link.

It was new to them. Work with a score. Work with a reward. A ladder they could climb without begging.

Radeon did not mock it. As their lord, keeping his people satisfied was part of the job. Their motivation was his efficiency. Their joy was his leash.

He reached up through the faith threads and checked the ghostly body he had left to manage Cairnlight Barterhold.

The city still breathed. No alarms. No sudden spikes of malice. For now, the peak held without him.

Then the five opened their status windows.

The prompts flashed across their minds and through the link.

[Task. Investigate the underground cartels and syndicates with the highest malice toward Cairnlight Barterhold.]

[Completed: Dark Emberhawk Syndicate] (Currently calculating reward...)

[Incomplete: Thornvine Stealthsnake Cartel]

[Incomplete: Groundshrank Armadillo Intelligence Agency]

[Incomplete: Libertybane Linx Auction Houses]

The moment the reward line appeared, Radeon felt five gazes turn toward him, hungry even through their ghostly shadow forms.

Scrutiny. Expectation. The dead could be as greedy as the living when you taught them there was a number to chase.

Radeon kept his voice quiet, almost idle.

"Won't the system dock points if we just stand around?" he asked.

It was not really a question. It was a prod. The five ghosts scrambled closer, slipping into his shadow. Their minds overlapped in the link, all impatience and appetite.

Calyx pushed first, using the message channel like a knife.

"Master Radeon, who is it we wait upon? These venerable wraiths grow slow with age. With your leave, we might proceed without them. Time has a way of rusting even the keenest mind."

"Shameless, truly," Maeron muttered. "A coarse lad. I'd wager the System will dock him for such brutish intent."

"Say that again, Calyx," Ewan hissed, "and we'll see you wake with only one eye left in your head."

The two smiths hummed in agreement. A heated quarrel unfolded in silence, a storm of thought with no sound for human ears.

Radeon did not join. He did not indulge it.

He kept his focus on the dust line under the cabinet, on the narrow strip of shadow that could hide his body of wooden ball.

He rolled himself a finger width at a time, slow enough that even a bored eye would not notice a thing shift.

Then the pressure dropped. Not a sound. Not a footstep. A heavy attention, the kind that made skin prickle even when you had none.

Radeon stopped moving. He changed shape at once.

Wood softened, then stiffened into a thick plank.

He flattened, stretched, and set himself into the cabinet's underside like a fitted panel, grain aligned with grain, edges squared as if he had always been there.

Dust settled on him. The lie became part of the furniture. A shadow fell over the cabinet.

A huge man took hold of it and lifted the whole thing with ease. Over eight feet of wood and shelves rose into the air like it weighed nothing.

Ceramic wares inside did not even clatter. His grip was gentle, practiced, careful in the way only strong men could afford to be.

Cold spiritual sense swept through every nook and seam.

It brushed across the cabinet's belly, across Radeon's wooden skin, searching for warmth, qi, or just the stench of fear.

Radeon gave it nothing. No emission. No pulse. No edge to catch on. The man's voice cut through the syndicate's shop they were fronting.

"Someone sweep the under of this damned cabinet. Now."

Radeon stayed still. The five ghosts stayed still with him, tucked into his shadow, their earlier hunger strangled quiet.

The errand boy scrambled to obey. He dropped to his knees and swept under the cabinet with frantic little strokes, bristles rasping over wood and grit.

The huge man held the weight steady until the boy was done, then set the cabinet down again with the same careful gentleness.

Silence followed. Only the hiss of the broom. Only the faint murmur of trade.

Radeon did not move. The ghosts did not move. Time stretched.

Three sticks of incense worth of waiting, measured in breaths and footfalls.

Then a gust cut through the shop, cold and abrupt, like a door opening where there should not have been one.

The cabinet rose again. This time even the five wraiths felt it, baffled and unsettled.

What kind of cultivator had the leisure to go back and forth over dust and lint?

Radeon knew the paranoidal patterns. Dilated pupils. Sweat slicking the palms despite the cool air.

The tongue clicking against teeth as if the mouth could not stay quiet. The eyes that never held still.

That was not discipline. That was anxiety, sharp enough to cut sense in half. Either the man feared the place was being censored or raided, or he was under some substance that convinced him he was always being watched.

Either way it was bad for them. A paranoid cultivator swung at nothing until he hit something real.

Radeon did not care about the man's feelings. He cared about his own exit.

While the cabinet hung in the air again, Radeon had already ate his way along the wood grain.

He collapsed. The cabinet lurched from the man's hand. Plates and cups and cutlery rattled.

A few dishes toppled off a nearby shelf and shattered against the floor. The sound cracked through the restaurant.

Every head turned. The huge man froze, eyes trembling, then snapped into motion.

His breathing turned sharp. His hands moved too fast, too frantic.

He grabbed a tablecloth from an empty table and swept it over the broken mess like he was burying a corpse. Not just the shards. Everything.

Spoons. Forks. Knives. Even the steel that had not been touched.

He wrapped it all into a bundle, knuckles white, and hurled it outside as if the broken dishes were evidence that could accuse him.

Sweat ran down his forehead in thick beads. The errand boys rushed in, eyes wide, and began picking up every shard, every sliver of ceramic, cleaning like their lives depended on a spotless floor.

Radeon had already reformed. The light bark of his false skin scuttled and tightened, reshaping into a cockroach, glossy and dark.

He slipped into the nearest seam. A cockroach belonged in filth. No one watched for it unless they were already broken in the head.

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