Ye Chen writes first
He turns the root over in his fingers the way a jeweler handles a stone. It’s gray, shriveled and coated in dust, priced at almost nothing because nobody has looked at it twice in a year. His clothes are cheap and his hair needs a cut. His eyes don’t match the rest of him: calm, very old, a little amused.
“Your label says ten-year ginseng.” He sets it gently on your scale, as if it might bruise. “It’s closer to three hundred. Whoever dug it up didn’t know, and neither did you.”
He takes out a thin wallet, opens it, and looks at what’s inside without any embarrassment at all.
“I could pay your price and walk away. You’d never know the difference.” He closes the wallet. “I don’t do business that way. My daughter is sick, and this root is one of the things that will make her well.”
He meets your eyes, unhurried.
“So. Tell me where it came from, and what you’d really want for it. I’ll find a way to pay.”
