He was almost at the stairs when something caught his eye.
A stall tucked into the corner of the second chamber, easy to miss because it didn't have much on display. No weapons, no vials, no stacked components. Just a single wooden box on a plain table, and inside the box, a row of cards that were entirely blank.
Not damaged. Not stripped. Blank in a way that looked deliberate, the surface of each one a clean matte white without a single marking, no sigil, no engraving, no chain design, nothing. Just the card itself, whatever material it was made from, sitting there looking like it was waiting for something to be written on it.
The person running the stall was a young woman, somewhere in her mid-twenties, with close-cropped dark hair and the kind of watchful eyes that moved around the chamber at regular intervals without making it obvious that was what they were doing. She wore a plain brown coat and had both hands flat on the table in front of her, relaxed but present, the posture of someone who did not need to perform enthusiasm to sell what she was selling.
She noticed Clyde looking and did not immediately say anything, which he appreciated.
He stepped closer.
His Hollow Eyes were still at their low output from moving through the market and the cards registered immediately as significant, the frequency signature coming off them unusual in a way he could not immediately categorize. They were not empty in the ichor sense. They carried something, a potential, a structured absence that had been deliberately created rather than simply left unfilled.
"Null cards," the woman said, when he had been looking for long enough that speaking made sense. "You've seen them before?"
"No," Clyde said honestly.
She nodded once, the nod of someone who had expected that answer and was prepared for it. "Most people haven't. They are not common and they are not cheap, which keeps the people who do not know how to use them from buying them by accident."
"What do they do?"
She reached into the box and took one out, holding it flat on her palm so he could see it clearly. Up close, the surface had a faint texture to it, barely perceptible, the kind of texture that suggested the material had been processed in a specific way rather than simply manufactured.
"A null card has a sealing ability built into its base structure," she said. "It can absorb an elemental crystal and hold the energy inside it. Once the crystal has been absorbed, the card becomes a single-use elemental attack. You activate it the same way you would activate any card, blood and resonance, and it releases the elemental energy in whatever form the crystal carried."
Clyde looked at the card on her palm.
So it is essentially an empty weapon waiting for ammunition.
"What kind of elemental attacks?" he asked.
"Depends entirely on the crystal. Fire crystal gives you a fire-based release. Ice crystal, ice. Lightning, wind, earth, water, there are others less common than those." She set the card back in the box carefully. "The null card itself does not determine the element. It is just the container. The crystal is what matters."
"And where do you get the crystals?"
Something in her expression shifted slightly, not quite a smile but close to one. "That is always the next question." She folded her hands on the table. "Each elemental crystal comes from a different elemental spring. There is a fire spring, an ice spring, and so on for each element. The crystal forms naturally at the spring site from the concentrated elemental energy that has been accumulating there over a very long time."
"So you just go to the spring and take one?"
"You can try," she said. "Most people who try without preparation do not come back. The springs carry an extremely dense concentration of elemental energy. The air around a fire spring is hot enough to ignite organic material at a certain radius. An ice spring drops the ambient temperature to the point where the water in your body begins to behave badly." She paused. "Some springs kill on contact for anyone who is not properly prepared or who does not carry enough Lunar Ichor to buffer the exposure. The energy is not hostile, it is simply that concentrated."
Clyde looked at the row of blank cards in the box.
Dense enough to kill. So not something you wander into.
"Is there a way to prepare for it?" he asked.
"Lunar Ichor helps significantly. The higher your reserve and the more stable your wave, the more of the elemental exposure your body can absorb before the damage becomes serious. Some experienced Ichorborn can walk into a spring directly. Most people need protective equipment at minimum." She shrugged slightly. "It is not impossible. It is just genuinely dangerous in a way that a lot of dangerous things in this city are not."
Clyde nodded slowly. Something to look into properly before attempting. Not tonight.
"Interesting," he said. "How much for a null card?"
"Three thousand shillings each."
Three thousand.
Three.
Thousand.
Clyde kept his face completely still through what was, internally, a fairly significant moment.
What the — three thousand shillings?! For a blank card?! A BLANK CARD. It doesn't even do anything yet! You still have to go nearly die at a spring to get the crystal to put in it! And THEN it is single use?!
He blinked once.
"That is," he said, carefully, "a significant price."
"The sealing structure inside a null card is extraordinarily difficult to produce," she said, without any particular defensiveness. "The material has to be processed in a specific way to create the absorption capacity. Most of the people who know how to make them do not make many. Supply is low." She looked at him with those watchful eyes. "The crystals, once you have them, are worth considerably more than the card itself. A fire crystal on the open market goes for eight thousand shillings minimum."
Eight thousand.
Right.
I need to go home.
"Thank you," Clyde said. "This has been genuinely informative."
She nodded in the same unhurried way she did everything and turned back to her box of cards, rearranging them with the care of someone tending to items they valued.
Clyde walked back through the chambers toward the stairs.
Three thousand shillings for a blank card. Eight thousand for the crystal. So a fully loaded null card costs eleven thousand shillings minimum and then you use it once and it is gone. He climbed the stairs and pushed the trapdoor open. I made two hundred and sixty shillings tonight and I felt wealthy. Two hundred and sixty shillings. Eleven thousand. Those are not even in the same conversation.
He stepped out into the dark street and pulled the trapdoor shut behind him. Clunk.
The cobalt night of Cristae settled around him, cold and sourceless, the blue light laying its quality across the empty lane. The market stalls were all packed up. The vendors were all gone. The city was doing its nighttime thing, which was mostly being quiet and letting the cobalt do the work.
He started walking home.
Still. He turned the information over as he walked. A null card with a lightning crystal. Imagine what that would do in a Howling fight. Or a wind crystal timed correctly. The tactical applications are obvious and significant and completely out of reach financially for the foreseeable future.
Unless I sell a lot more Echo Ichor cards.
Which requires finding a lot more Howlings.
Which, given recent Academy events, may not be as difficult as it sounds.
He turned onto his street. The house sat at the end of it, dark and quiet, the small garden at the front just visible in the cobalt light. He let himself in through the front door with the careful quiet of someone who has done this enough times to know exactly which floorboards to avoid and in what order.
Luchian's door was still shut. The breathing on the other side of it was still the deep, even rhythm of someone completely undisturbed.
Clyde went to his room, sat on the edge of the bed, and took the two hundred and sixty shillings out of his coat pocket. He counted it quietly in the dark, the clink of each coin barely audible.
Two hundred and sixty shillings.
He looked at it for a moment.
Matrix, he thought. That is still real. That is still possible.
He put the money away carefully in the small box at the back of his wardrobe where he kept his savings, pushed it closed, and lay down on the bed still mostly dressed.
Eleven thousand shillings, he thought, staring at the ceiling.
One day.
His eyes closed.