She smiled when he said it.
Not a large smile — not the performance of enthusiasm that some vendors deployed when a customer expressed intent to purchase, the kind of smile that was more about transaction than genuine warmth. It was smaller than that, and quicker, and it reached her eyes in the way that genuine expressions did rather than the way managed ones did. She moved out from behind the counter with the easy, unhurried efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that the movements had become fluent, and she gestured for him to follow her along the length of the display counter toward the left side of the stall where the larger specimens began.
"Of course," she said, and her voice carried that same quality it had carried in the first words she had spoken to him — the high, clear register that landed somewhere before he could decide how to receive it, warm without being calculated about it. "We have a good selection in today. Fresh runs from the overnight teams, so most of what you're seeing came in within the last four hours."
Four hours.
He filed that information carefully. Four hours was good. Four hours meant the essence hadn't had time to fully settle and stagnate in the channels the way it did in older corpses. If his theory was correct, four hours was well within whatever window existed for the talent patterns to still be present at meaningful density.
'If,' he reminded himself. 'The theory is still a theory.'
He followed her, keeping a step and a half of distance, which felt like the appropriate amount of distance to maintain while being shown merchandise by someone whose voice was doing the thing it was doing.
The stall was larger than it had appeared from the front. The display counter occupied only the customer-facing section, and behind it the workspace extended back a considerable way — processing tables, storage units running quietly along the far wall, equipment hanging from ceiling-mounted racks that swayed very slightly in the draft from the cold storage at the back. The floor was reinforced and sloped subtly toward drainage channels at the edges, practical design for the kind of work that happened here. Everything was cleaner than he had expected. Not sterile — the nature of the work made sterile impossible — but maintained, organized, with the systematic cleanliness that came from people who understood that their product's quality was directly related to how well they managed the conditions around it.
She led him to the first section of the main display area with the ease of someone beginning a familiar sequence.
"We organize by tier," she said, stopping before the first grouping and turning toward him with her hands clasped in front of her in the composed manner of someone who had given this explanation enough times to have found the best form of it. "Everything in the stall is graded before it goes on display. The grading follows the standard tier classification that the Alliance established after the consolidation — nine tiers total, with each tier representing a significant step up in essence density, physical capability, and overall threat level."
He nodded, because he knew the tier system, but he did not say that he knew it, because she was doing her job and it would have been strange to interrupt.
"The easiest way to think about it," she continued, "is in groups of three. Tiers one through three are what most people call entry-level beasts — the kind that appear from Class-D and Class-C rifts, manageable for a cultivator with basic training and a decent talent. They're the most common, the most frequently traded, and they make up the majority of what you'll see in the front display." She indicated the section around them with a slight motion. "Tiers four through six are mid-rank. More dangerous in the field, more valuable in terms of the materials they yield. The essence concentration in their tissues is significantly higher and the biological structures are more complex, which matters depending on what the corpse is being used for." A brief pause, in which she seemed to be assessing whether he was following, which he was. "Tiers seven through nine are the upper range. We don't always have them available — it depends on what the high-level teams bring in — but when we do, the prices reflect the risk that went into acquiring them."
"And above nine?" he said, because the question existed and he was curious whether she would answer it the way the texts did, with the careful vagueness of someone describing something that was technically documented but practically outside the bounds of normal experience.
She looked at him for a moment with something in her expression that was not quite surprise but was adjacent to it — the look of a vendor encountering a customer who had asked a question beyond the standard script.
"Sovereigns," she said, and her voice dropped slightly on the word, not for dramatic effect but in the way that people's voices dropped when they were discussing something that carried genuine weight. "Above Tier 9. They come from SSS-Class rifts, which — in Sector 741 we've had two confirmed SSS openings in the last hundred years. The last one was forty years before I was born." She paused. "We have never had a Sovereign corpse in this stall. I don't expect we ever will."
He absorbed that.
"Now," she said, returning to the brisk warmth of the professional register, "what are you using it for? The application affects which tier and which beast type would suit you best. Are you looking for smithing material? Alchemy base? Essence extraction?"
"Smithing," he said, because it was the most common answer and the least likely to prompt follow-up questions he was not prepared to answer.
She nodded as though this confirmed something she had been leaning toward. "Then the tissue density and the essence retention in the bones and tendons matters more than the raw output volume. Let me show you what we have."
She moved to the first grouping — the Tier 1 through 3 section — and he followed, and there they were.
Goblins.
Several of them, laid out on the display with the systematic presentation of merchandise rather than the chaotic sprawl of battlefield aftermath. They were small, as goblins always were — lean, compactly built, their gray-green skin taut over musculature that was denser than their size suggested, faces that were sharp-featured and almost uncomfortably expressive even in death, mouths slightly open, showing the small, layered teeth. Their hands were disproportionately large, long-fingered, built for the kind of grasping grip that made goblins effective in the kind of close-quarters chaos they preferred. The eyes were closed on most of them, which he was grateful for, because goblin eyes in death had a quality that he had never managed to be entirely comfortable with — a glassiness that retained just enough of the shape of alertness to be unsettling.
They smelled of the essence-residue that all beast corpses carried, that specific between-mineral-and-animal quality, and beneath that of something sharper, a faint chemical signature that was specific to goblin biology and that he recognized from years of living in a sector where goblin-type rifts were among the most common.
She was explaining the grading markers visible on the small tags attached to each specimen — the tier number, the essence density reading taken at processing, the time of death and time of arrival, the condition assessment. Standard information, clearly presented. He was listening, but part of his attention had already moved ahead of her words to the thing he had actually come here to do.
'Try it,' he thought. 'Try it on one of these and see what happens.'
He let his eyes move across the goblins with what he hoped looked like the evaluative gaze of someone considering a purchase, and he let his hand drift naturally toward the nearest specimen, a Tier 2 with a good condition assessment on its tag, and he rested his palm against the creature's shoulder.
The skin was cold. The particular cold of something that had been alive recently and was no longer, a quality of coldness that was different from the coldness of an object that had never been warm — deeper, somehow, more complete. He kept his expression still and directed his attention inward, toward the inventory function of his talent, the part of himself that he had spent three years knowing as a small, quiet space where he put things.
He reached.
He reached toward the body beneath his hand the way you reached toward something in a dark room, carefully, with attention distributed across the full surface of the attempt, feeling for the particular signature of an essence pattern, the residual structure of a talent left behind in channels that had been trained to carry it.
He felt —
Something.
It was faint. It was faint in the way that an ember was faint when you came upon it hours after the fire had gone out — present, identifiable, but barely. A structure, a shape, a pattern of essence organization that was clearly not ambient and not random, that had the specific architecture of something that had been developed deliberately through use. A talent. Goblin-type, low tier, probably something in the physical enhancement category that was common in Tier 1 through 3 goblin variants.
He pushed his inventory toward it. He reached with the full intention of pulling it in, the same intention he applied when he stored an object — that specific internal movement that was less a physical action than a directed act of will.
The pattern stirred.
He felt it move, fractionally, toward the reach of his inventory, the way a loose thread moved when you caught it and pulled gently.
And then it dissolved.
Not absorbed. Not collected. Dissolved — the structure coming apart under the attempt the way old paper came apart when you handled it with too much pressure, the essence pattern disintegrating into ambient diffusion faster than his inventory could draw it in. The pull was there. The pattern simply couldn't hold itself together under it.
He withdrew his hand from the corpse.
The feeling was specific and unpleasant in the way that failure was always unpleasant when you had been genuinely hoping not to fail — a flatness, a deflation, a recalculation happening automatically in the part of him that had been running on cautious hope since last night. He looked at the goblin for a moment longer than he should have.
He felt her looking at him.
He glanced up and found that she was, in fact, looking at him — not with the polite attentiveness of a vendor watching a customer consider merchandise, but with a slightly different quality of attention, the kind that arrived when something in a person's expression gave something away. His face had moved. He had not managed to keep it entirely still when the attempt failed, and whatever had crossed his features in that moment had been enough to register.
Her ears had moved too, he noticed. Angled slightly toward him in the alert, involuntary way that rabbit-kin ears moved in response to stimuli, and her expression carried a small, careful quality, as though she was deciding whether to acknowledge what she had seen or offer him an exit from the moment.
She offered him an exit.
"If these don't quite fit what you're looking for," she said, and her tone had shifted by a fraction — still warm, still professional, but with a gentleness added that had not been there before, the gentleness of someone choosing not to press, "we have more around the back. Higher tiers, some different beast types, and a few specimens that came in this morning that haven't made it to the display yet." A slight pause. "Beast corpses for smithing have specific requirements depending on the smith and the technique — it's not unusual for someone to need to look at several before finding the right one. The back selection is more varied."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with the dark, clear eyes of someone who was extending a courtesy and was doing it without making a production of it.
'She saw something,' he thought. 'She doesn't know what she saw, but she saw that something didn't work the way I wanted it to.'
He was grateful for the exit. He took it.
"That would be helpful," he said, and he kept his voice at the register of a customer whose requirements were simply more specific than average, nothing more complicated than that. "If you have a wider selection in the back, I'd like to see it."
She nodded once, those ears settling back to their resting angle, and turned toward the rear of the stall.
"Follow me," she said, and moved toward the back.