The great river stretched wide and brown under the morning sun, carrying the massive junk ship toward the bustling dock of Hangzhou. Merchants shouted over one another, crates of silk and tea changed hands, and the smell of salt fish mixed with incense from a nearby temple. Among the crowd of passengers descending the wooden gangplank, one figure drew no particular attention — and that was precisely as he intended.

He wore a black travelling cloak, wide-brimmed and unremarkable, the kind any weary traveller might don against the road dust. His face remained shadowed beneath the hat's brim, and his footsteps made no sound on the weathered planks. The other passengers flowed around him like water around a stone, never quite noticing they had altered their course.

The ship's captain, a round-bellied man with a greying beard and calloused hands, stood at the bottom of the gangplank collecting the final fares from those who hadn't paid in advance. When the cloaked figure stopped before him, the captain offered an apologetic smile.

"Last passenger, then. That'll be twenty copper pieces for the crossing, sir."

The shinobi's hand emerged from within his cloak — pale, steady, the fingers wrapped in dark cloth. He pressed a single oval coin into the captain's palm. Gold, stamped with unfamiliar characters.

The captain squinted at it, turning it over in his weathered fingers. "Um... sorry, sir. I don't think I can take this." He held it up, letting the sunlight catch its surface. "I've never seen coin like this before. Where exactly are you from?"

The shinobi said nothing. He simply reached forward and touched the coin with the tip of his index finger — a single, deliberate tap.

The captain felt the metal shift against his skin. He looked down and his eyes went wide. The oval gold piece had elongated, smoothed, reshaped itself into a perfect silver sycee — a boat-shaped ingot stamped with the Imperial seal. Worth easily a hundred times the fare he'd asked for.

"How did you..."

But the cloaked figure was already walking past him, boots silent on the dock, swallowed by the crowds of the riverside market.

The captain stared at the sycee in his hand, then looked up at the departing stranger. He opened his mouth to call out, but something stopped him. A sense, deep in his gut, that some questions were better left unasked. He pocketed …