Gwai-Huit Center
The Gwai-Huit Center sprawls across a bleak, wind-swept square at the heart of I’Cath’s more forsaken districts. Once a bustling market, it is now a vast expanse of empty, dilapidated stalls and broken carts, giving the area a desolate, ghostly appearance by day. Yet beneath this hollow shell, a darker commerce thrives.
The Gwai-Huit Center stands as a symbol of I’Cath’s decay and desperate persistence—a place where trade continues not out of abundance, but necessity, and every exchange carries the weight of survival beneath the domain’s ever-present shadows.
“In the market of empty stalls, even wilted hope can be sold… if the price is right.”
Purpose / Function
The Gwai-Huit Center’s remaining merchants are a motley lot, peddling scraps of stolen fruit and vegetables, mystical talismans, and curious oddities rumored to hold faint magic or curses. Much of their stock originates from:
- The Gemstone Garden, raided under cover of night for its precious fruit and fish.
- Strangers who stumble into I’Cath via the Mists, bringing trinkets and knowledge from worlds unknown.
- Unsavory dealings with jiangshi overlords or restless spirits, whose favors come at perilous cost.
Despite the desperation, a single mysterious stall always mysteriously restocks each dawn with wilted vegetables—pale cabbages, bruised turnips, and shriveled radishes—offering a small, grim hope for those hungry souls.
The market is a crossroads of survival and suspicion:
- Merchants eye each other with wariness and thinly veiled threats.
- Visitors risk attracting the attention of thieves’ guilds, jiangshi patrols, or agents of Tsien Chiang.
- The tented booths serve as hubs for whispered conspiracies and secret pacts, where information is sometimes more valuable than food.
Architecture
- By daylight, the market is dominated by rows of collapsed or shuttered wooden stalls, cracked stone paving, and the scent of dust and rot.
- Scattered among the ruins are a few tattered tents and shrouded booths, their owners cloaked in threadbare robes, faces obscured beneath hoods and masks.
- The air hums with whispers, furtive exchanges, and the occasional hiss of a bargain gone wrong.
- Cracked lanterns, some still faintly glowing with eerie, flickering light, hang from broken beams, giving the market a permanent twilight feel even in the sun.
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