Chapter 355

“Anything wrong?” Jacob asks Anna.

She smiles and shakes her head. “I never trusted the kingdom much anyway. If they let the city guards abuse their power, who knows what lies they can tell us.”

Taya didn’t seem happy about the fact that the kingdom’s leadership was being called a fat bunch of liars. But given everything that had happened to her, she wasn’t in a position to raise any objection.

So Jacob changes the topic.

“Um, where are we going first? We have, uh, Mithril tokens, and we need to make a lot of money. We’re good at spotting deals, let’s say.”

“If you’re looking to gamble, the Gem Hall is not a bad place to start. But if you guys have a Mithril token, then you might want to go for something else. I know that there are appraisal contests among nobility, and they, uh, require a Mithril token. There should be one today, I believe. I heard somebody talk about it when I first entered the Merchants’ Guild.”

“What’s an appraisal contest?” Jacob asks.

“Some rich people get together and try to appraise the value of items retrieved in Rafnov’s Bounty. A patron will pay for appraisers to find out as many qualities of a given artifact as they can, and the more they find out about the artifact, the more the patron will pay. They also sell artifacts at a much lower price if you’re willing to gamble on their real value. So sometimes, if an artifact is on sale rather than just up for appraisal, people will buy said artifact and just sell it. I heard that a lot of people went bankrupt in the last year because of how much unknown equipment was found in Rafnov’s Bounty. A lot of people tried to get rich quick and bankrupted themselves.”

Anna gave a long glance to both Jacob and Taya, since their plan was to get rich quick.

And so Anna brought the two to the Mithril Appraisal Hall. Jacob and Taya flashed their badges to the guards and told them that Anna was their guide.

Jacob saw that there were many, many marble tables with guards stationed all over. On top of each table, there were usually one or two artifacts at best. And small crowds would form routinely among these tables.

“So the plan is,” Jacob says, “to make sure we can spot a good artifact or two. I wouldn’t do too much appraisal work. If we guess too much, we might get in trouble. We don’t wanna draw any unneeded attention to ourselves.”

“I agree,” Taya replies.

Anna walks, stunned, among the kind of artifacts that are being held at this Mithril Appraisal Hall. She’s never seen such a display of riches before in her entire life.

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But the more Jacob and Taya walk around the place, the clearer it is to them that there are no great deals. All that they are looking at is mostly Adamantite equipment. But to power the Primordial Spell that Jacob needs in order to contact Liuthkrav, they would need to amass a great amount of Mithril Rank riches.

Jacob pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “This is not going to work. How are we gonna get away from King Blade and Kamenev if we can’t make any money? I asked around. Even appraisals are barely a few dozen Adamantite coins per item.”

“I know,” Taya replies in a low voice. “This is going to be a problem. The longer we stay here, the higher the chances that somebody’s gonna put all the pieces together.”

“Even that clerk girl at the Merchants’ Guild. She has seen us ask for tokens and say that we come from the countryside. But how long till she pieces together that we are extremely suspicious, and that we could be wanted by the crown?”

Taya nods back. “What do we do?”

Yet, as the two are starting to get worried that they will never make enough money in time to contact Liuthkrav before they get caught, Jacob hears a guy say, “I can’t believe nobody’s taking up my offer. This is ridiculous. It’s a great offer.”

“It’s a death sentence,” a man says back. “Your elite Dungeon is too dangerous, and if only two people can enter it, then what do you expect?”

“Yeah, but it could be full of treasures, and I’m not asking anybody to pay me for it. I’m willing to give it away if they just tell me what this damn sword does.”

Jacob and Taya both turn to see that a merchant is looking quite distraught at the fact that nobody can tell him what his sword does. And so, he looks ready to leave the Mithril Appraisal Hall just when Jacob goes up to him and says, “Excuse me, I’ve heard that you’re putting up entrance to a Dungeon in exchange for an appraisal?”

“Yeah,” the merchant sighs. But the man looks at the crowd around him. “Yes, but I have to tell you, for disclosure — the Dungeon is a bit cursed.”

“Cursed?” Jacob asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah. The Dungeon is not that powerful in terms of monsters. The strongest monster is just an Imperium Rank monster. But it was infected by Apocalypse, and so it mutated. Now there are traps at Adamantite, and some perhaps at Mithril Rank. And nobody above Imperium Rank can enter the place. There’s a few people that I paid to try and clear it.” The man sighed. “They were at Intermediate Imperium Rank, and they died horrible deaths. My guess is that the traps took them out. It’s almost impossible to deal with something like that unless you’re Mithril Rank. But if you think about it, the materials themselves are probably worth a fortune, right? You could just take the trap arrays, dismantle them, and you’d be rich. I’d be doing that myself, but I don’t think there’s a single person in the whole of Zamorye who’d be able to pull off something like it.”

At which point Jacob smiles.

“All right, how about this? I’ll appraise your sword, and I’ll take the Dungeon.”

The man laughs. “Yeah, but you know that a Mithril Rank appraiser just passed through, and he couldn’t tell me what this sword was. Apparently the Primordial Magic around it is too powerful or something.”

“Well, I am an expert of Primordial Magic,” Jacob says, “and I have seen such an artifact before.”

The second part is a lie, but Jacob has already turned on the Grimoire, and so he knows exactly what he’s looking at.

The merchant shrugs. He was about to leave, but he tells himself that there’s nothing he’s going to lose if he lets this young man try.

“Go ahead.”

Jacob briefly touches the sword and then makes a face. He looks at the merchant and then back at the sword.

Taya gets close and snorts out a laugh.

“That’s a kid’s toy.”