The crimson was going out of the sky by slow degrees — as though the sky were a red canvas and some painter were drawing a fan-brush of pale grey across it, unhurried, with no particular design in mind.

Evening was coming on over the Black Earth, the harbinger of night.

Kei woke from his sleep.

He had reached Kaiser’s home around noon. A medium reed house, like the others in the village — two bedrooms, a small hall, a washroom, all partitioned with columns woven from bundled reed. In the center of the hall was a hearth, and there, after a bath, Kei had cooked some of the leftover meat.

The house stood at the farthest corner of Redweed, where the soil ran wetter for being close to the marsh. The reeds drank the water up out of the ground and kept the inside of the house damp and cold. The fire he had lit to cook spread its warmth, and Kei had fallen asleep beside it.

It was his first sleep in this transmigrated world, and waking, he was thrown for a moment to find himself here. Then he gathered himself, and got to work.

He took out everything he had brought, to make a proper inventory of it.

There was a saying in his mother tongue, and by following it to the letter he had kept himself alive more than once, back when he was Yakuza.

*Ichinen no kei wa gantan ni ari.* Preparation and planning are the foundations of success.

He smiled at the count of the currency he now held.

He had conned the third merchant shop by selling it items worth eleven sigloi — items he had acquired posing as Markus of House Tsakani at the second shop. Six sigloi had gone to the weapon parts, and five remained. Fifty thousand droqdo, at ten thousand to the sigloi. And he had kept four sigloi’s worth of goods besides, the utility things he needed.

Among them, oval bone beads — the large storage kind — in different colors for different goods, and a black bracelet set with small oval indents along its surface.

He fit the oval beads into the indents. They sat as though made for them. Then he cut his fingertip on his own sharp teeth and set a drop of blood to the bracelet, binding it to him by blood. Now he could see, in his mind, the contents of whatever bead he chose, and call any item out of it at a thought.

The beads and the bracelet had cost him a full sigloi. They were worth it. He put the bracelet on and went through the rest of what he had stored.

In the apparel bead — the one he had conned out of Saana — four sets of combat garb, four sets of domestic garb, two sets of arm-gloves. He wore one cheap set now.

In another bead, hand-drawn maps in detail: the Cruentus Rainforest, the Jagged Mountain Range, the capital of Vitium, the Black Bowels. And booklets, made of beast-skin, on the training temples and the creatures of the Black Earth. He skimmed them — and found he could recall almost everything he read, in full. His mind had sharpened somewhere along the way; the cognition of it ran keener than it ever had.

In another bead, pills. Mostly Tier-4 healing, for surface wounds. Some Tier-5, for broken bones and moderate internal injury. And a few dye pills, for changing hair color. Twenty thousand droqdo’s worth in all — two sigloi.

In another, a medium toolkit. The tools inside looked nothing like Earth’s and did all the same work: jade-stone screwdrivers, a folded length of marked beast-skin for a measuring tape, a small stone hammer, molded alloy bent into pliers and a wrench, a set of small sockets in some metal he did not know, a little jade saw, and more. The toolkit, with the maps and the booklets, had cost him a sigloi.

Kei had always been fond of tinkering. It had been one of his pleasures in the life before.

Now he meant to put it to use — and build himself a weapon.