CHAPTER 23: Scrap Pickers

At a remote slag heap, Bero and Mudt supervise Uwiwan scrap pickers searching rubble for hidden jade, marking potential stones for later cutting and payment. They guard against worker theft and dream of more jade and status, even as the cold and danger mount. When Bero senses incoming Green Bone auras, panic erupts; flares go up and the pickers scramble for three waiting trucks.

As the convoy flees, three Mountain warriors block the road and combine a devastating Deflection, flipping the lead truck into a gully. Green Bones drag drivers, pickers, and the teen supervisors from the vehicles. In a swift crackdown, they execute the foreign pickers—thirteen on the spot, with more likely slain on the heap—and secure the scavenge.

Nau Suen, Horn of the Mountain, confronts Bero and Mudt, noting their suspiciously rich jade. When Bero brags he took it from Kaul Lan’s body, the Fists scoff, and Nau coolly reframes the teens as tools once hooked on shine and jade by Gont Asch’s faction and now exploited by Zapunyo. Instead of killing them, he decides to use them.

Nau orders the trucks righted and the haul taken, then spares Bero and Mudt as messengers. His ultimatum: tell Soradiyo that continued scavenging will fail under Mountain pressure, and that Nau offers him “better career options.” Before departing, Nau warns Bero that believing he wears Kaul Lan’s jade will one day make him wish for death. Mountain departs with the loot, leaving the shaken teens to find their way down the mountain at dawn.