Following the Tang Clan's aggressive price reduction, the gravitational pull of the market swung violently back toward the Jade Spring Hall. The city was a sea of shifting loyalties, and Peng Kai, driven by a mixture of ancestral pride and pure, unadulterated desperation, responded by slashing his prices by another two gold coins.
The real war of attrition had begun.
What followed was a week of economic bloodletting that Thousand Waves City would talk about for decades. It was a race to the bottom, a relentless, grinding descent where each clan tried to suffocate the other with the weight of their own margins. Every morning, the criers would announce a new, lower price, and every afternoon, the rival clan would match or beat it.
The only ones truly celebrating were the public. For the common mercenary and the starving disciple, these were the golden days of their lives. They were purchasing high-grade medicinal pills for less than the cost of a decent meal or a bottle of cheap wine. The streets were filled with people grinning through blackened tongues and twitching fingers, gorging themselves on "bargain" cultivation as if the supply would never end.
By the end of the seventh day, the Peng Clan reached their absolute breaking point.
They halted their descent at a staggering 6 Gold Coins for the Iron-Blood (Tier-0) and 55 Gold Coins for the Qi-Cyclone (Tier-1). It was a suicidal maneuver. At these prices, after accounting for the exorbitant import fees from the Golden Cauldron Merchant Union in Crimson Iron City, the Peng Clan was clearing a pathetic 50 Silver Coins, a mere half-gold per pill.
They weren't just bleeding; they were hemorrhaging. Their herb business, once the jewel of their crown, was now a hollow shell, and their treasury was screaming as they paid for the logistics of their own ruin. They were standing on the edge of a precipice, praying that the Tang Clan, with its smaller foundations, would trip and fall first.
The tension in the city reached a fever pitch, a breathless silence hanging over the merchant district as everyone waited for the Tang Clan's response. Many expected Shen Yu to finally fold, to admit that no "revived corpse" could survive such a brutal squeeze.
That silence was shattered by a single, elegant plaque placed in front of the Jade Spring Hall.
The plaque in front of the Jade Spring Hall didn't offer a further cut. It didn't need to. It simply mirrored the Peng Clan's suicidal pricing: 6 Gold for Iron-Blood, 55 Gold for Pure Flow.
It was a psychological death blow. By matching the price exactly, Shen Yu signaled to the world, and to the trembling Peng Kai, that he wasn't just surviving this war of attrition; he was thriving in it. He had looked into the Peng Clan's hollowed, desperate eyes and whispered, "I can do this forever. Can you?"
But Shen Yu's confidence wasn't born from financial stamina alone. He was watching a much more lethal clock.
Deep within the meridians of every bargain-seeker in Thousand Waves City, the invisible toxins of the Peng Clan's pills had finally reached a critical mass. The first tremors were no longer whispers; they were a growing roar in the blood. A sudden, bone-deep chill in the Dantian, a jagged flicker in the Qi that felt like swallowing glass, and a faint, sickly grayish tint creeping into the whites of their eyes. The public was waking up to a terrifying reality: their "cheap" breakthroughs were a slow-burning rot, a debt that their bodies were now calling in with interest.
Within a day or two, this quiet, fearful confusion would ignite into a tidal wave of righteous, violent outrage. It wouldn't be a mere market shift; it would be a siege. The Peng Clan would be forced to shutter their doors against the very mob they had tried to buy, watching their remaining treasury vanish into the literal flames of public fury.
But inside the Peng Estate, Patriarch Peng Kai was blissfully, dangerously unaware of the storm gathering at his gates. He was preoccupied with a different kind of venting: the brutal discipline of his own blood.
CRACK.
The sound of flesh striking flesh echoed through the cold stone chamber. Peng Bo's head snapped to the side, his vision blurring as he slumped against the floor.
"You worthless brat," Peng Kai hissed, his breath coming in ragged, heated plumes. "Because of your lust, we are bleeding. Because of your arrogance, the Tangs found a reason to breathe again!"
SLAP.
"If you hadn't crawled to the Tang Clan like a dog in heat, begging for that bitch's hand, they wouldn't have gone to the Jin Clan and secured an alliance, and we wouldn't be facing this total collapse!"
"Argh!" Peng Bo let out a strangled cry, his cheek swelling into a bruised, purple mess.
"How many times did I tell you to keep it in your pants?" Peng Kai roared, his eyes bloodshot with the pressure of a week's worth of financial ruin. "But you didn't listen. You never listen! You did the opposite of every command I gave, thinking your status would shield you from your own stupidity!"
SLAP.
"I should have broken your legs the day you were born," Kai growled, his hand stinging from the force of the blows.
He finally stepped back, releasing a long, shuddering breath he had been holding for days. He looked down at his son with nothing but pure, unadulterated loathing. Peng Bo was a pathetic sight, trembling on the floor, sweat-soaked and covered in a mixture of tears and mucus, his expensive silk robes now nothing more than rags.
For the last month, Bo had been locked in this room, a prisoner of his own father's shame. He had been fed scraps, denied the sun, and beaten whenever the sales reports turned red. But as he looked up through his one good eye, the fear wasn't alone. Deep in his gaze was a toxic, festering hatred. He hadn't learned a single lesson. Even now, through the pain, he wasn't thinking of repentance; he was imagining the screams of the Tang bastards and the look on Lixue's face when he finally broke her.
"What are you staring at, you bastard?" Peng Kai's voice cracked. He was losing it, his own state of mind fracturing under the weight of the war of attrition. "This is all because of you! Every gold coin I lose is a drop of your blood I should have spilled!"
SLAP.
He struck him again, not as a father correcting a son, but as a drowning man striking the water that was pulling him under. The Peng Clan was dying, and in the darkness of that room, the only thing growing faster than their debt was their madness.