chapter 196

POV: Remi

Finally, that madhouse was over. The legal system of this station was a strange one. It was pretty corrupt, yet there were hard lines no one would cross, making it so that if you were right and didn’t fold, you would generally win. But holy damn did you need a clean sheet for that.

When I made it outside, there were eyes on me. Now, when I looked at one of the ones watching, they turned their head away, and with that, almost every eye on me disappeared. The other three Dukes agreed to give me immunity for a week if I didn’t fold, and the deal with the green Duke meant that his men would be giving me a wide berth.

Taking a deep breath in and letting it out, I relaxed just a bit. This should give me a lot more freedom to move about, but one of the security officers who showed up on the scene gave me a warning that the four Dukes weren’t the only ones who could cause trouble here.

So, while I could be a bit more relaxed, this was still a dangerous place. When I made it back to the ship, I found the cargo hold not empty as it should have been, but instead geared up for war.

“Captain, you're finally back. What took you so long?” FH immediately sent out as she felt me enter. All of the docks, and I’m guessing the entire station, seemed to be under isolation. Even my bond communication struggled after you were separated by a wall.

“Had an incident. Sending you the report now. Also sending you verification codes so you can access the web of this station.” Her processing shot up immediately. I expected more questions, but she went quiet.

Next, I let everyone know I was fine and told the story of what had happened. Meanwhile, everyone stood down, with our forces being put back into storage.

“The first mission was successful. I got you all multiple versions of Mana Sense, literally for every affinity you have, so you can pick what you want. Also got everyone Minds Clarity. Absorb them, and after FH has done some research, I’m heading out again to find y’all more skills.”

All of them caught the skill stones I tossed to them.

“What did you get from the Duke? Tell me we’re rich?” Bob asked, barely containing his excitement, the skill stones in his hand forgotten.

“Fine. First of all, they will leave us alone for a while.”

“Yeah, yeah, we got that part,” he interrupted. “Second?”

“The second is this.” I pulled out a metallic card. It was incredibly ornate and radiating magic. All of their eyes were glued to it. I let the moment stretch, watching them struggle to hold themselves back from demanding the answer.

“This can be used in the upcoming auction to pay fully for one item.”

“That’s all,” Sam said, disappointment radiating from him. He immediately got slapped on the back of his head by Dean.

“So, if you got something that ended up selling for 8 credit coins, you would get it for free. But on the other hand, if it went for 5000 credit coins, you would also get it for free?” Lola asked to clarify. I simply nodded.

“Damn it, why couldn’t the next auction be one of the big ones? Then we really could have made that ticket work for us,” Bob said, being both happy and a bit disappointed.

“That’s why we need to keep this a secret, because if the other Dukes find out and start artificially raising the price, we might get into trouble. This should be an excellent opportunity. We need to hope that whatever shows up at that auction near the end will be worth a lot.”

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All of us separated after that, as everyone went to absorb their skills. I was feeling tired after all that, so I took a short nap, feeling refreshed afterwards. It was time to head back out, but before, “FH, have you found anything?”

“Plenty, sending you the report now and my recommendations as to where to go. This place’s web is wonderfully secure and indexed.”

“Anything specific you would want me to pay attention to or know?”

“Yes, you need to go and buy me some more storage. There is so much history and knowledge available here that I’m already struggling to choose what to bring with us. The forums here are a literal goldmine. Some even have full blueprints of devices I know you would be excited to learn about.”

“I will put it on the list with the heat exchanger. I will be heading out now. Did you make a way for us to communicate?”

“Yes, I set up a small web page. Know that it’s not secure, so no sensitive information, but we can keep in touch.”

“Understood.”

And just like that, I was back in the main station. The recommendation list FH compiled was extensive, but now I had directions.

There was a sophisticated delivery and order system where you could basically get supplies from any shop and have them delivered to you. But you never knew for certain if a skill stone would work for you or not, and I certainly wanted to inspect everything that we would be installing onto the ship.

While there were also recommendations on where I might find skills for my own use, this wasn’t our current goal. The other skills were, and the upgrades to the ship.

The shops that catered to ships were quite close to the docks. There were even places where you could buy new ships, but they didn’t actually have any on display. They were stored in specially built docks for the express purpose of selling ships.

With all the shops and all the high-end technology that didn’t just end with regular tech but went all the way up to magic tech, I knew that if I didn’t focus, I was going to spend weeks here, something that we couldn’t afford.

It was so hard to focus, as everything seemed so interesting, and I wanted to know how they were built and what materials were used. Surprised by my own mental fortitude, I managed to get to one of the shops that sold data storage solutions for ships.

Walking into the shop felt like walking into an old-school office supply shop. Everything felt quiet. That was quite surprising, as I had expected cooling fan noise to be quite loud here.

“How can I help you today, Captain Remi?” For a moment, I was confused as to how they knew my name, but then I remembered the identification system. Of course, they would know my name; I literally displayed it.

Before I answered, I looked at some of the numbers displayed. Trying to calculate what and how much data we might need to store in the future. There were extensive technological blueprints, the data I could gather from my innate skill, and all the biological data we would also need.

“I’m looking to get around one zettabyte.” Which is a million petabytes or a billion terabytes. The salesman looked at me, stunned by my statement. That was a lot of data storage and probably wouldn’t be enough, but for the time being, it would be plenty and allow FH to gather data quickly without having to worry about compressing it immediately.

“Also, do you have some solutions for extremely fast data transfer. I’m talking about a few dozen petabytes in 1/10 of a second.”

“Why would you ever need something so fast?” he said under his breath, but then composed himself. “What would be the distance you require for that transfer speed?”

I took a moment to think about that. If I held the storage device in my hand, it would need to travel from my brain quite a long way, but with Lola’s help, we should be able to build a module that connects straight to the brain, shrinking the distance the data would need to travel to only a few centimetres.

With my fingers, I showed the approximate distance. He seemed to relax after that.

“While we don’t carry something like that here, I do have a recommendation of where you could find someone who might be able to help you. Fair warning, something like that wouldn’t be cheap.”

“I would expect not, but now back to the data storage. Do you have anything?”

“Oh, we most certainly do. The real question is, is it for a ship or a research station? We could easily do that amount of storage, even a lot bigger, but everything would depend on where this storage is going. If you need it for a station and have room to spare, we have some solutions that are quite reasonably priced.”

I shook my head and knew what would follow would hurt my soul.

“Then let’s head to the higher-end section.” The further we walked, the higher the prices climbed. Ahead, I saw some that would cost not tens or hundreds more credit coins, but thousands. I had to stop him.

“I don’t have an endless budget. Let’s see if we can find something in the 20 to 50 credit coin range.”

What followed was a lot of discussion and haggling. I ended up taking a storage solution that was only half a zettabyte. That only made me mentally scoff. That was a stupid amount of storage. It was going to be a tight fit, and we would need to move our current storage into my workshop or someplace else, but we would have plenty of storage for a while, at least.

Next, I went to one of the shops that sold magic-tech heat exchangers. The cheapest I could find was a used one for 1200 coin credit. That was way more than I expected. I should have expected that this was out of my price range as soon as I walked in and saw the looks they gave me, like they knew that I had no business being here.

No matter how they looked at me, I stayed to observe and understand why all of these were so expensive. It came down to two things: material cost and the expertise required to build these things.

It wasn’t simply one device you could hook up to your ship and be done. Each one would need to be fitted to your ship. There would be kilometres of high-end heat transfer materials that would need to be fitted throughout your ship to make any of this work.

Perhaps it would be better to try to achieve this right now with skills. After that, I acted like a horse with its eyes covered, only looking forward as I made my way out of this shopping district, knowing that I was coming back and spending every free moment I had here after getting everyone their skills.

My first stop was at the best shop in the station that sold healing skills. It was one of the few places that had revival skills in stock.