“…it can’t be forgery!” he was yelling. “I bring it from China! Look, I here from China! And what you say?!”

  “It’s a fake, plain and simple!” Simeon interrupted. “Let me pack up what you’ve bought instead. That’ll be ninety thousand rubles.”

  “You pack up!” the customer agreed. “But I not pay ninety thousand, only sixty!”

  “No, no,” the old man replied, shaking his head. “For sixty thousand, I’ll just take it and put it back on the shelf.”

  Yawning, I walked over to them.

  “What kind of fight is this, if there’s no blood or cops around?” I asked.

  Upon seeing me, the Chinese gentleman turned to face me.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “I own this store. What’s going on here?”

  The customer immediately began complaining.

  “Someone tell me that expert work here!” he explained, pointing at Simeon. “Great expert! So I bring my thing! Dragon with frog on! Twenty expert take a look at it! Half say it original! Half say it fake! And what?! And this…” he gestured scornfully with his hand in the direction of Simeon. “He say it fake! He lie!”

  “This is my colleague Simeon. I’m the expert.”

  “You the expert?!” The customer burst out laughing. “No way! Great expert can’t be twenty year old! This a scam! I almost one hundred percent sure that my statue of dragon with frog toad in mouth is genuine!”

  I yawned again, took the statuette from him, and examined it carefully.

  “This is a fake,” I informed him. “An interesting one, of course. It was made using some unusual magical techniques. But it’s a fake nonetheless. If you want, I can write you an official certificate.”

  The Chinese customer evidently appreciated the gravity of the situation and hesitated.

  “Okay,” he muttered. “If you so sure…”

  “It’s not so much a matter of ‘so sure,’ as ‘I have the credentials.’ Granted, they’re online, but I’ve had plenty of powerful customers who vouch for my professionalism.”

  “But…” The customer still had his reservations.

  “You know, certificates of authenticity don’t get given out that often. And you know why? Because experts really value their reputations. If it emerges that they were mistaken, it could destroy their whole careers. What’s more, the certificates are all entered into a single online database.”

  The Chinese gentleman began nervously shuffling his feet.

  While he was thinking about what to say in response, I took out a blank certificate, quickly filled it in, signed it, and put my stamp on it.

  “Here, take this,” I said, placing the certificate next to the statuette and taking a photo of it with my phone. “Simeon, I’m sending this over to you now. Upload it into the database.” I then turned back to the bemused customer. “For you, this first appraisal is free of charge. In my report, I stated clearly how I know the statue is a forgery and what people should pay attention to. There’s no point in my risking my reputation. However, if you still have your doubts, you are welcome to assemble a committee of specialists. You’d have to pay for them yourself, of course.”

  The Chinese gentleman took the certificate, read it, and grunted mistrustfully.

  “You just twenty year old,” he remarked. “What kind of specialist are you? You are swindler!”

  “Wait here,” I said, before heading down into the basement.

  A few minutes later, I returned carrying a large box.

  “So you consider yourself a real collector…” I said, opening the box. “Well, then, take a look at all this and maybe you can tell me if the stuff inside is fake or not?”

  There were various antiques in the box — weapons, statuettes, jewelry, coins… They were all genuine antiques, collected by my people all over the principality and carefully restored by me.

  The customer couldn’t believe his eyes. He picked up a bronze dagger, squinted at it, and began examining it carefully. He ran his fingers over the surface of the handle, feeling every curve.

  “This weapon… very rare,” he muttered, carefully running his finger down the blade. “It in… perfect condition. Lin How… was great master craftsman.

  The dagger did indeed bear the hallmark of the craftsman who’d made it — two crossed swords that formed a triangle. They had been applied using a special magical stamp that no one could reproduce. According to legend, after his original stamp got destroyed, Lin How made a new one. And this dagger was apparently one of the first pieces he’d made using the new stamp.

  “Forgive me,” the Chinese gentleman said, glancing at me deferentially. “I was… mistaken… This dagger genuine.”

  “No problem. You can hold it a bit longer, or I could take a picture of you holding it. But I brought it out here just to show you that we’re serious professionals in here.”

  The customer nodded as he cradled the dagger in his arms like a baby.

  “No, no, thank you. Tell me… is dagger by chance… for sale?”

  “Two million rubles, and it’s yours,” I replied, well aware that the price was fairly high even for such a rare piece.

  No sooner had I begun to yawn once again than the Chinese gentleman was yelling loudly into his phone in Chinese.

  “Bring it in! Now! Bring all the money in right away!”

  I could understand what he was saying perfectly thanks to my knowledge of various foreign languages.

  A minute later, three Chinese men wearing tuxedos rushed into the store, carrying some cases.

  “Here,” said the customer, proudly arranging the cases on the counter. “Two and a half million.”

  “Pfff…” Simeon muttered, shaking his head. “And you were haggling over thirty grand earlier…”

  “Haggling is… sacred,” the gentleman replied, raising his finger into the air in a preachy manner. “But not when it comes to work of Lin How. He was true weapon master!”

  He picked up the dagger, carefully packed it into a velvet case, and then turned back to face me.

  “And now… perhaps you take another look at statue. Maybe you… make mistake?”

  I sighed and headed down into the basement. A few minutes later, I returned carrying the exact same statuette as the customer’s — a dragon with a frog in its jaws.

  “Now you can compare them yourself,” I said, putting my statue down next to the Chinese gentleman’s. “But I’ll warn you right off the bat that it’s not for sale. We have already reserved it for the Flaming Orchid Clan.”

  “That’s why I could immediately tell it was a fake,” Simeon explained. “I’ve held the original in my own hands.”

  The customer examined both statuettes in amazement. He then grabbed his phone again, dialed a number, and shouted loudly down the line in Chinese:

  “The shop where I bought that statuette of a dragon with a frog in its mouth… Burn it down right away!”

  He then turned to me and held out his hand.

  “If you ever find yourself in Hunan province, know that you have friend there,” he said.

  “I take it you’re an aristocrat,” I remarked, shaking his hand.

  “Sort of…” the Chinese gentleman replied. “Triad…”

  “I see,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand as I yawned again.

  The customer, evidently pleased with his purchase and the new connections he’d made, bought another couple of items and then left the store.

  “Well, Simeon, how’s business been going?” I asked my sales assistant once the customer had departed.

  “We’re running out of goods. We’re buying up a lot of raw materials, but we don’t have many finished products. Yesterday, some dealers brought twenty boxes from Switzerland, but…” He gestured dismissively with his hand.

  “There’s effectively a war going on, but the traders keep coming…” I thought to myself as I walked over to the boxes, which were in the far corner of the store.

  I activated my Gift and scanned their contents. There was a ton of all kinds of junk inside — smashed vases, half-broken statuettes, the remains of rusty weapons…

  It seemed that people had begun to figure out that they could sell any old crap in my store and get a good price for it. And that was fine by me. After all, I could just restore it all and sell it for ten times as much.

  “Simeon, I’m taking all this down into my workshop. Let’s make some money.”

  * * *

  An underground sewage reservoir

  Vaduz, the Principality of Liechtenstein

  Droplets of water pattered monotonously against the concrete walls of the sewers. The spec ops squad, under the command of Captain Kruglov, slowly proceeded down the sewage canal, lighting their way with tactical flashlights. The foul-smelling air made them wrinkle their noses in disgust, even with their respirators on.

  “The tracks are fresh, Captain,” whispered the sergeant, pointing at some slimy residue on the wall. “It looks like the monsters passed through here no more than an hour ago.”

  “Hey,” said one of the privates all of a sudden, “is it true what they’ve been saying on the TV, that these monsters are the descendants of ancient civilizations?”

  “Oh, give it a rest,” the sergeant replied good-naturedly, gently rebuking the soldier. “You’re always watching crap on the box.”

  “So? I was just asking,” the private muttered. “I was watching a show on the Conspiracy Channel just last night — Secrets of Ancient Civilizations with Igor Gullybull. They were saying that the monsters are descended from some ancient reptilian creatures that were able to survive underground after the global flood.”

  “The Conspiracy Channel, you say?” the sergeant chuckled. “Isn’t that the channel that said the Ural mountains were actually frozen dragons and that intelligent rats had been found in the sewers under St. Petersburg?”

  “Yeah!” the soldier replied animatedly. “I mean, I don’t believe the mountains are really dragons, of course. But intelligent rats definitely exist…”

  “Uh-huh… If they do, then they’re definitely more intelligent than the people who believe in them,” the sergeant grunted, scanning the tunnel walls with his flashlight. “Maybe you should spend less time listening to hearsay and more time working on your aim. Otherwise, these ancient reptile descendants will eat you whole before you even utter so much as a squeak.”

  “Quiet!” Captain Kruglov interrupted, raising a clenched fist — the signal to stop.

  The squad froze in its tracks. Somewhere up ahead, in the pitch-dark tunnel, they could hear a noise — something between rustling and squelching. The soldiers instinctively directed their guns toward the source of the sound.

  “Flashlights off!” the captain commanded in a whisper. “Switching to night vision.”

  The soldiers immediately obeyed. The beams of their tactical flashlights vanished one after another, leaving the squad in total darkness. The switches on their helmets all clicked at the same time as the squad quickly activated their night vision goggles.

  The tunnel ahead of them emerged onto a maintenance bridge suspended over a vast sewage reservoir. Kruglov cautiously crept up to the edge and looked down. What he saw made his blood run cold.

  “Goddammit…” the sergeant whispered as he, too, gazed downward.

  Below them, no fewer than a hundred and fifty monsters were swarming in the large reservoir. The walls were covered in a disgusting substance resembling slime that the monsters occasionally vomited up.

  “What the hell is going on down there?” the sergeant asked in a barely audible whisper.

  “Seems we’ve found their den,” Kruglov replied. “And it looks like they really settled in down here.”

  “Good god… There’s a whole brood of their offspring…”

  And indeed, there among the adult creatures were some smaller ones — some about the size of a large dog, others barely as big as a cat. They had clearly just been born.

  In the far corner of the vault loomed a truly repulsive mountain of corpses: rats, pigeons, crows, and some larger animals. The bodies of humans dressed in rebel uniforms were visible among the nightmarish heap.

  “They’re stocking up,” Kruglov remarked in a somber tone. “And they’re multiplying like rabbits. I thought maybe only a few dozen were left of them, but this…”

  He carefully examined the entire vault through his weapon sights.

  “No, we’re not prepared for this, dammit. Let’s get out of here. Fast!” he ordered quietly.

  “What are we going to report to HQ, Commander?” his sergeant asked. “Maybe we should request permission to use napalm? We could burn this filth to a crisp…”

  The captain shook his head.

  “No. We’ll report that if something isn’t done very soon, Vaduz will soon become uninhabitable. Completely uninhabitable.”

  * * *

  An abandoned theater

  The outskirts of Vaduz, the principality of Liechtenstein

  Leos lazily eyed the two battered and beaten rebels who, limping and stumbling, entered the theater auditorium.

  “Well? Report,” he ordered quietly without interrupting his own train of thought. “Have you managed to find out anything?”

  One of the rebels stepped forward, gasping for breath. There were dark patches — fresh bloodstains mixed with dirt — on his jacket.

  “The Chimera lab has been destroyed, boss,” he said, swallowing hard. “They blew it up themselves. All the monsters were… released.”

  “Well, well…” Leos drummed his fingers pensively on his oak desk. He remained unperturbed, but a dark twinkle flashed in his colorless eyes. “I believe I sent five of you. Yet only you two have returned. Where are the others?”

  He briefly looked them up and down — their clothes were torn, and there were bite and cut marks on their bodies.

  “We were attacked by the monsters, boss,” muttered the second rebel, rocking from side to side where he stood. “We had to fight them off… The other three didn’t make it.”

  “Didn’t make it?” Leos repeated in an icy tone, raising an eyebrow. The next moment, his face distorted with rage. “What the hell?! What good are you if you just keep dying like flies?”

  He stood up abruptly, knocking his chair over, and grabbed his pistol from his desk.

  “Those who are sick or weak drag everyone else down with them. I have no time for useless fools.”

  Two gunshots rang out almost simultaneously, reverberating around the auditorium. The rebels fell to the ground without even uttering a cry. Leos walked over to their corpses, flipped them over using his foot, and stared indifferently at their lifeless faces.

  “Even better,” he muttered to himself under his breath. “It’s easier just to shoot a worn-out workhorse.”

  Leos ordered his men to clear away the bodies and then began thinking.

  “The Chimera lab…” he pondered bitterly as he recalled his own ambitious plans.

  The scientists who had worked there had been breeding genetic freaks that would have made the perfect hosts for Shadows. Creatures with enhanced strength, speed, and regenerative abilities would have made the ideal bodies for completing difficult missions.

  However, recent events — the coup in the principality and that goddamn Babylonian — had ruined his plans. The situation had gotten out of control, and now that the monsters had been released from the lab, he would have to think on his feet.

  “Well, let those beasts fill the city,” he thought, dismissing a feeling of regret at the fact that his plans would have to go unrealized. “Let them sow chaos and destruction. Very soon, the Babylonian and his guard regiment will run out of steam. The monsters may be weak right now, but once they have fed, things will be different. And then… then they will become fodder for my Shadows. I now have enough energy, and I am far more powerful than I was before. I shall devour their very essence and become even mightier.”

  He walked over to the map of the city that was laid out on his desk.

  “Increase security along all the passageways that lead to our territory,” Leos ordered. “Have the Shadows drive out the monsters. And don’t forget about the sewers. Those are our communications channels. We need to maintain full control over them.”

  At that moment, Klaus, Leos’s faithful assistant, emerged from backstage.

  “Leos,” he said quietly, “someone has arrived from the Empire. It’s the man you’ve been expecting.”

  “Good,” Leos nodded. “Have him wait for me. How are we doing in terms of meat?”

  “Everything is ready.”

  “Excellent,” Leos replied with a satisfied smile. “Take me there.”

  They went backstage and proceeded along a narrow, dimly lit corridor, eventually stopping at a door that led into the makeup room. Klaus pushed the door, and it opened with a creak. At one time, this room would have been filled with the sound of actors’ voices and the aroma of powder and makeup. Now, however, the makeup room had transformed into a gloomy, almost sinister place. The walls were lined with cells in which prisoners, who had all been captured by the rebels during raids, were being held.

  Leos walked slowly over to one of the cells. Sitting inside, trembling, was a young man. He was huddled in the corner, and his eyes were darting this way and that like a cornered beast.

  “Let me go, mister…” he whispered in a shaky voice.

  Leos smiled crookedly and poked his finger in between the bars of the cell, playing with the prisoner as if he were an animal.

  “Please, I beg you…” The young man sobbed, gripping the cold metal even more tightly. “I have a wife… and a one-year-old child…”

  Leos leaned down closer to the prisoner, his eyes burning with a cold fire that lacked any trace of human warmth.

  “A wife and child…” he repeated, savoring the words as if seeing how they tasted. “How amusing. So I guess that means you want me to let you go? And then what? You’re just going to leave and forget about me?”

  The young man groaned and choked up, but Leos had already turned away from him. He surveyed the other cells.

  “Remember this moment,” he said loudly, addressing the other prisoners. “Today, your worthless lives take on new meaning.”