Chapter 95: Still Can’t Eat It 1

Kent did not know whether to laugh or cry at the gnome merchant.

The fellow was obviously recommending eggs purely according to size.

He really had taken Kent’s earlier remark seriously and assumed that Kent intended to buy a magical beast egg for dinner.

Kent waved him away impatiently.

“All right, all right. Go on.”

“Boss, why don’t you leave me alone and let me choose for myself?”

The gnome merchant had no choice but to turn away and attend to his other customers.

Kent resumed his search.

One by one, he placed his hands on the magical beast eggs, carefully sensing the faint traces of life within them.

Unfortunately, by the time he had examined every egg in the stall, he still had not found anything worthwhile.

Most of them belonged to common elemental types—

fire,

earth,

darkness,

and water.

Low-rank magical beasts of these elements were generally of little value to Kent.

At first, he felt somewhat disappointed.

But after thinking about it, he quickly understood why.

Back in Alliance City, the magical beast egg shops he had visited were among the largest on the entire continent.

Those stores held thousands upon thousands of low-rank magical beast eggs.

With such an enormous inventory, finding a few unusual or rare ones was hardly surprising.

And the eggs Kent had picked out back then had clearly been stock that no one wanted.

Otherwise, the merchants would never have sold them at a simple fixed price per egg.

They had probably been sitting around for years.

This stall, on the other hand, contained only a few hundred eggs in total.

There was simply no comparison.

Kent looked toward the gnome merchant again.

Then a sudden thought flashed through his mind.

“Boss.”

“How about we discuss a little business?”

The gnome immediately looked at him warily.

Kent could not blame him.

Merchants survived by being cautious.

Still, the gnome was not particularly afraid.

His entire merchant caravan was currently in Muan City.

There were several hundred merchants alone, not to mention nearly a thousand guards.

So after a moment, the gnome asked suspiciously,

“What kind of business?”

Kent reached into his robe.

“This.”

He pulled out a Breadfruit Tree fruit and held it up.

“I can find a way to obtain some of these.”

He smiled.

“I’m curious how much you’d be willing to pay for them.”

Kent had very few ordinary coins on hand.

What he possessed in quantity were mithril coins and adamantine coins.

But those were things he absolutely did not want to spend casually.

Take a single mithril coin, for example.

If the mithril contained within it were used to inscribe a magical formation onto a weapon, the finished magical weapon could easily bring back a profit equivalent to twenty mithril coins.

That did not mean magical weapons were absurdly profitable.

The real problem was that the success rate for crafting them was simply far too low.

According to ordinary theory, a mere second-rank mage like Kent should not even have been capable of studying alchemy properly.

Creating magical weapons should have been even further beyond his reach.

Strictly speaking, the theoretical success rate of a second-rank mage crafting a magical weapon was—

zero.

Kent, however, was hardly ordinary.

That was precisely why wasting mithril or adamantine as everyday currency felt almost painful to him.

The Breadfruit Tree fruit was another matter.

The Elder Council had forbidden Kent from selling the thirty-percent share of fruit that had originally belonged to him.

Even so, after considerable arguing and bargaining, Kent had managed to secure two fruits for himself each day.

That was the result of a great deal of effort on his part.

Under the dark elves’ meticulous care, the Breadfruit Tree was now producing several thousand fruits every single day.

The primary reason was the enormous amount of Water of Life being poured into its cultivation.

By now, the Breadfruit Tree and the land surrounding it occupied nearly one-sixth of Muan City.

The entire area had been designated a restricted zone by the dark elves.

All six elders personally took turns guarding it.

Several ninth-rank experts had also been stationed nearby.

Thousands of elite warriors had been transferred in from the dark elves’ main city.

Even most of the Ancient War Trees had been relocated to the surrounding area.

The level of security was almost absurd.

Kent himself had even been forced to move out of his former residence because of it.

As an Honorary Elder of the dark elves, he had no choice but to obey the decisions of the Elder Council.

The more Kent thought about the entire arrangement, the more he felt that he had suffered a tremendous loss.

Still, there was one benefit.

His contribution points among the dark elves had risen to an astonishing level.

According to what he had heard, his current contribution alone was enough to allow him to enter the dark elves’ treasury and select a high-rank magical weapon.

Those weapons were not ordinary items.

Many had been passed down through generations.

Kent, however, had little interest in them.

A magical weapon?

Why would he need one?

Once his own rank became high enough...

he would simply make one himself.

The gnome stared suspiciously at the strange green fruit in front of him.

He picked it up with obvious uncertainty, turning it over carefully in his hands. He felt its surface, brought it close to his nose, and gave it a cautious sniff.

A moment later, his eyes widened.

Without warning, he grabbed Kent by the arm and hurriedly pulled him aside. After glancing around to make sure no one nearby was paying attention, he lowered his voice and asked, his words trembling with excitement,

“Is this breadfruit? Where did you get it? How many do you have? Sell them all to me! I can offer you a very good price!”

“Breadfruit? Yes, that’s right. It’s breadfruit.” Kent was nearly rendered speechless by the barrage of questions, but his mind worked quickly enough. “I don’t have much of it. I can sell what I have to you, but as for the price...”

The gnome merchant hesitated for a moment before gritting his teeth.

“Fifty diamond coins each. What do you say?”

Kent was stunned.

That was a price he had never even dared to imagine.

A hundred diamond coins could be exchanged for one mithril coin. If he sold two breadfruits every day, that meant he could earn the equivalent of one mithril coin a day.

That kind of income would be considered a considerable fortune anywhere.

“Deal. I can give you two every day,” Kent agreed immediately. “But we’ll have to wait until I return from the Trial before we start trading. And I want to be paid in silver coins.”

He accepted without the slightest hesitation.

Then he happened to glance toward Darkya in the distance and noticed that she looked as though she were grinding her teeth.

Most of the breadfruit allocated to Kent had ended up being eaten by Darkya.

The moment Kent realized that everything she had been casually munching on was practically mithril in another form, his heart ached so badly that he almost wanted to clutch his chest.

The gnome merchant, on the other hand, visibly relaxed.

Two a day was just about perfect.

If Kent had been able to supply too many, the merchant might actually have had trouble selling them. Rare goods commanded high prices precisely because they were rare.

The bread tree might produce a large amount of fruit, but the Underdark was home to tens of millions of people.

Even if only one person in a thousand was wealthy enough to afford such a luxury, that still meant tens of thousands of potential customers.

More importantly, the dark elves did not sell breadfruit at all.

At fifty diamond coins apiece, the merchant was confident that he could still turn a profit. Even if the wealthy bought them merely for the novelty of tasting something rare, the market would still be enormous.

Yet another question soon entered the gnome merchant’s mind.

Everyone in the Underdark had heard about the dark elves’ bread tree.

Several well-known thieves had even tried to sneak in and investigate it for themselves.

Not one of them had ever returned.

The gnome looked at Kent again, and suddenly thought of someone.

Over the past few days, the name of a certain human had spread throughout the underground world.

The merchant hesitated before asking cautiously,

“Sir... are you Master Kent?”

“Master?” Kent blinked in confusion. “No, no. I’m only a friend of Steward Kent.”

Kent could not understand when he had somehow become a “master,” but he pushed the matter aside for the moment and answered the merchant’s question first.

“You know how we humans are. We’re not particularly fond of eating nothing but vegetables, so the steward... well...”

Kent deliberately left the rest unfinished.

“Heh, of course. We gnomes prefer meat as well,” the merchant replied with a chuckle.

But the moment he heard Kent’s supposed identity, his manner became noticeably more distant.

That was only natural.

If Kent was merely a friend of Steward Kent, then the connection to the famous man himself was rather remote.

Still, merchants were merchants. Even the slightest possibility of future profit was not something they would willingly abandon.

“I’ll take this breadfruit, then. Once the Trial is over, I’ll wait for your message. I’ll remain here until then.” The gnome merchant reached into his purse. “And here are the forty diamond coins I owe you in change.”

“Thank you.”

Kent deliberately put on a pleased expression, though inwardly he had already decided that he wanted nothing more to do with such status-conscious fellows.

“Ha! Hahaha! Hahahaha!”

Darkya’s laughter rang out as they walked away.

“I’m dying! That egg is enormous! I bet you don’t even own a pot big enough to cook it in!”

Kent walked beside her with the huge egg clutched tightly in his arms, enduring her mockery with a dark expression.

What made matters worse was that every time Darkya ran into someone she knew, she would enthusiastically stop them and explain the whole story.

By the time she had done this several times, Kent was thoroughly miserable.

Finally, unable to endure any more of her teasing, Kent clenched his teeth and turned onto another road.

That road led toward the dwarven smithing workshops outside the city.

Darkya did not follow him.

Instead, she stayed behind and shouted after him,

“Are you planning to throw it away? That thing cost ten diamond coins!”