A door creaked as it opened, but it wasn’t the one she’d expected - it was a door behind her, from which emerged… A boy. Couldn’t have been older than fourteen, done up in downright whorish makeup and clad in glorified harem silks, some sort of metal chastity device gleaming beneath the sheer fabric. Zelsys couldn’t help noticing the makeup caked on his skin in places other than his face, or the bruises it was obviously covering. She willed her Tablet to begin a full mnemonic recording, focusing on everything she experienced moment-to-moment to ensure the recording’s quality. The Pateirian numeral for “4” was branded onto the boy’s left shoulder. A pervasive sense of disgust flooded every fiber of her being as she watched the slave look up at her with a dead-eyed stare, only for the door she’d been listening through to open and for the knight captain to step out, slamming it shut with his foot the moment he noticed her.

“Ah, Newman, was it? I- I must have lost my sense of time. Did the attendant not instruct you to wait for me in the gate room?” Von Wickten said, feigning aloofness. The tension in his entire being was palpable, however. In his right hand he gripped a teacup filled with a steaming, black liquid, atop which floated globs of white something streaked through with blood-red. He noticed her brief glance down at the cup and vigorously stirred the disparate components into an even viler-looking substance.

“I was told nothing of the sort,” she answered curtly, prompting him to sigh and look to the slave.

“Number Four, Three needs a rest. Bring him to the Red Room and take his place,” he commanded the boy. A look of abject terror washed over his features before, as quickly as it had come, it vanished, and he walked past. Zel’s inner question was answered by seeing the boy from behind - a small, purple insect was attached at the base of his neck. “A subtler form of control parasite?” she guessed, suppressing her own growing disgust and violent impulses.

Once the slave vanished into the room which Von Wickten had emerged from, he turned his attention to Zelsys, putting on a masterful, empty smile of perfect teeth as he gestured up the hallway.

“Come, let us discuss the terms of our agreement.”

Remaining on-edge, Zel followed him up the stairs and through the halls of his hilltop mansion which overlooked the town from a spot near the duke’s own home, soon finding herself in yet another opulently decorated room, lit by the warm light of tinted lightgems arrayed in a chandelier. An office, going by the placement and furniture.

“I must apologize if I seemed a bit on-edge earlier; as potent as the Dragonheart Cultivation Method is, it comes with certain draconic… Proclivities,” the knight captain faux-apologized as they walked. “You must’ve noticed that where Ser Baldwin’s horns are naturally symmetrical, mine have to be filed into shape - the increasingly wild growth of draconic tissue is an unfortunate side effect of my advancement in the Method.”

“Not just a degenerate, but one that tries to make excuses and brag in the same breath…” she thought, smiling at the walking impurity tumor before her. If they considered these draconic mutations a cultivation method, that meant it couldn’t have been purely based on those False Drakes… Perhaps they only harvested them for cultivation materials, then. But what was the root of the method? She felt the need to find out, if only so she might tear said roots out to rid the world of this filth. Even the most degraded of Dragon Descendants were strongly arcane creatures, it was such a waste to use them for a filthy cultivation method like this.

They sat down across from one another, Von Wickten behind his lacquered wood desk and Zelsys in front of it, the chair creaking under her weight and somewhat humorously undersized for her height.

“So…” he said, sipping the rest of his “tea” and setting the cup down. The played-up magnanimity was draining from him by the second. “What is it that you think I possess which you would be willing to bet that thing for, again?”

“I have it on good faith that you’ve been performing an undercover investigation of the Red Locust Bandits and their connection to the emerging slave trade in the region - is that correct?” she asked, defaulting to the same official mode of speech she used with braindead noblemen and bureaucrats, in part due to the constant focus on the present moment that was required to ensure good fidelity in the mnemonic recording. Von Wickten gave a slow, cautious nod.

“Then I would have the passphrase to access one of their private auctions.”

Von Wickten stared her down with a dubious look in his eyes, the iris of his half-squinted left eye briefly expanding and contracting in an unsettling manner. The next moment, the tension vanished from his form and, with a relaxed smile, he took a sip from that horrid accursed mixture in his cup.

“You should’ve simply told me that you wished to contend with me for direct access to the Meat Market! We could’ve avoided all that silly posturing,” he said, seemingly oblivious to his own hypocrisy. “Had you come a week earlier I would’ve bet you a useless, out-of-date passphrase. Unfortunately for me, and fortunately for you, one of my most delectable morsels somehow overpowered its control parasite and vanished into thin air with my favorite horn file, and being that the fine fol- er, detestable bandits running the operation knew better than to risk losing me as a customer, they gave me this month’s passphrase for free.”

He… Wasn’t lying. Zelsys was certain that he wasn’t lying because her gut had a track record of detecting all but the best liars, and even then, she would’ve at least been able to tell something wasn’t quite right, but why wasn’t he lying? Then, it clicked. He thought she was an equal of his, that she was just like him, one who thought herself above the rest of mankind and sought slaves for the most obvious reasons. Of course a cultivator would want to buy slaves, in Von Wickten’s mind it was a foregone conclusion. Menials, peasants, serfs, outer disciples, the name didn’t matter - Von Wickten knew that the powerful always sought to make servants of those less able or fortunate than themselves, and cultivators doubly so.

“So, just to confirm. I win, I get the ornament,” he continued speaking. “You win, you get the passphrase… And the fight is to be under what rules, again? I am not familiar with…”

“Black Horse Family Hard Sparring rules; they’re simple. Weapons and armor are permissible, as are techniques and magic, but they must not be of the type intended to cause lingering damage or harm the opponent’s cultivation,” Zel explained. She normally preferred an in-between rule set that had, in her time running the Newman Sect, come to be known as Newman Family Semi-Hard Sparring, but it was a rule set she’d conceived because Hard Sparring could still very easily result in long-term injuries… Injuries of the exact sort she intended to inflict on Von Wickten, knowing that the Black Contract wouldn’t let him renege on their agreement regardless of what happened in the pit, short of a life-or-death situation.

“Whoever concedes or becomes unable to fight first loses. The referee can call for an interruption, but this is mostly there to mitigate risk of death… So just pick out any of the traveling peddlers that’ll be halfway across the continent by next month, and odds are they’ll do a good job.”

“Sounds fair to me,” the knight captain held out a gauntleted hand, all too eager to walk face-first into what he doubtlessly thought would be a fight he couldn’t lose. His mind couldn’t conceive the possibility of losing against someone who didn’t display an even more ostentatious presence of wealth than him, who didn’t flaunt their social standing even more than him.

Looking down at his hand for a moment, Zel smiled… And pulled out the Black Contract.

“While I tend towards incaution at times, I know better than to leave this sort of thing up to a verbal agreement,” she said, unrolling the contract towards Von Wickten such that the spindle which had been attuned to him would be on his side of the table. “This contract will ensure that neither of us will try to breach the agreement - just grasp the spindle, and the agreement will write itself out on the parchment.”

He stared at her with a dubious, yet familiar expression, his pupils contracting to barely-visible slits and his scales raising slightly. “I know what this damn thing is, I hate it with my entire being, and I now consider you an enemy for having one pre-attuned to me,” his eyes said to her… And yet he spoke not.

For a good fifteen seconds, the two sat locked in a staring contest, before the knight captain finally gave and did as was asked of him. The moment both of them had a hand on their respective spindle, intense thrumming pain shot up both their arms, enough to make even the knight-captain grit his teeth. Meanwhile, Zel’s pain tolerance automatically rose to render the pain tolerable before it could even register to her conscious self, this being one of the self-alterations she’d carried out her command over her own body. It was a degree of fine internal control gained from creating a direct line of communication between the Thinking Self; the Ego, that which most people considered to be themselves, and the Primordial Self; the Id, which governed all that which was normally out of a person’s control about their own body.

The knight captain looked at her with perturbation in his eyes, a flicker of uncertainty at the total lack of a reaction. He then rationalized that, because she was likely inferior to him and thus didn’t pose nearly as much mental or spiritual resistance to the artifact, it must not be causing her nearly as much pain, and his uncertainty disappeared. From there on, it took them a good ten minutes of discussing the specifics of the bet to get the Black Contract’s golden-glowing magical writing to cease writhing about on the scroll, but when all was said and done, Zelsys had gotten exactly the agreement she had wanted, and Von Wickten lied to himself that it was much the same for him.

Once the Black Contract was back in Fog Storage where it belonged, Von Wickten took the initiative and simply said: “Let us take a few minutes, then - I need to get into my battle armor, and I am sure you would like to prepare as well. I shall come out on stage once I am ready, that should be a clear enough indication for you to come to the pit.”

“Of course,” Zel smiled venomously, rising to her feet. Von Wickten followed suit, walking alongside her all the way to the Fog Gate, keeping one slit-pupiled eye on her the entire time until she passed through. It was obvious her use of the Black Contract had instilled distrust in him, rightfully so.

With his head buzzing from the tankard of ale which Jorfr had bought for him while Zel was gone, Victor wasn’t entirely sure at first if he was seeing things correctly when Zelsys returned with a look of barely-concealed disgust plastered across her face. She sat down at the table, saying something to the others with palpable hate and disgust in her voice, prompting Jorfr’s features to harden, while an ice-cold malice took hold in Zef’s otherwise calm face. Zefaris said something back, and Zelsys pulled out her White Marble Tablet, setting it down on the table. Was that… Was that a mnemonic record playback projection? It looked like one, but Victor wasn’t sure, tipsy as he was. Both of the two others touched the Tablet for a short while, Zefaris spitting off to the side in disgust and Jorfr standing up, walking around the table for a bit and exhaling visible clouds of ice-cold air while somehow radiating waves of heat.

The Borean sat back down, uttering something about a “blood eagle” before he kicked back his tankard and downed its contents in one massive gulp.