Tsuchi no Ichi — "the earth market" — is Akanegumo's largest settlement, the grey market city below the southwestern highlands where the province's timber, silver, and stone have always come down to be weighed, taxed, and carted away. To Yanagihama it is "the city": the place the lumber went, the place the lumber lords answered to, the place you go when you need a lawyer, a loan, or to disappear. It is several days' hard travel to the southwest, and most townsfolk have never seen it.

The Severing should have broken Tsuchi no Ichi, and somehow didn't — its merchant houses kept trading through the chaos, and its lanterns never went out. Stranger news has come up the roads since: that the city's elderly ruler, Wan Shu-Qing, died in the troubles of 3,014... and kept ruling. Travelers swear to it; merchants from the city change the subject; plenty of sensible people call it a ghost story. In Akanegumo, that's not the comfort it would be elsewhere.