Novel Full Chapter 445: Market
Chapter 445: Market
They found the market without looking for it.
The road from the Guild’s side yard led them back through the main street, and the main street, heading away from the gate district, opened into a wide square that Bruce had not seen on the way in. The square was full of stalls and shops, the kind of organized chaos that every working city produced around the place where hunters came back with money and immediately needed to spend it.
Souls moved through the stalls in every direction. The noise was good noise, the noise of commerce, of people arguing prices and finding things they wanted and calling out to passing customers. Lanterns hung between the stalls on lines of pale soul-light, warming everything below them in soft gold. The smells were layered, cooked meat from the food stalls, something sharp and mineral from what looked like a tools section, the faint green freshness of cut soul-herbs somewhere to the left.
Bruce, Kael, and Theron stopped at the edge of the square and took it in.
"Right," Kael said. "We need things."
"We need specific things," Bruce corrected. "We’re not browsing."
"We can do both."
"We have eighty-seven points each and no room to be impulsive."
"Speaking of impulsive," Theron said, and pointed.
The stall Theron was pointing at sat near the square’s center, slightly larger than the stalls around it, with a sign above it that Bruce could read without effort, the same strange languageless reading that had worked on the soul-point window and the Guild’s contract board. The sign read: Spatial Storage - Rings, Bags, Boxes.
The stall’s display was impressive even from a distance. Small items laid out on a velvet-dark cloth, each one radiating a faint compressed-looking glow, the glow of objects that held more inside them than their outside size should allow. Rings with tiny inlaid stones. Small pouches barely the size of a fist. Flat boxes no bigger than a book.
Bruce knew what they were the moment he saw them.
Every cultivator from his physical-realm life would have known. The ability to fold a large empty space into a small container had been worked out in various ways across multiple realms and multiple magic systems. Bruce had his own, a ring on his finger in the physical realm, now sitting on the motionless hand of his body in the labyrinth, with a frankly unreasonable amount of space inside it holding frankly unreasonable amounts of equipment and materials. He had used it so constantly, for so many years, that it had become invisible to him the way a well-fitted tool becomes invisible.
His hand, here in the Soul Realm, was bare.
He had known that. He had known from the moment he looked at his soul-body in the mist that everything from the physical realm had been left behind. His clothes here were the clothes of his memory and habit, not actual fabric. His knife was here because he thought of it as part of himself. His ring was not here because the ring was an object, and objects from another realm could not cross.
He had known, and he had not let himself think about it, because thinking about it was not useful in a mist full of hollows.
But standing in front of a spatial storage stall, seeing the rings laid out on the dark cloth, he felt the absence of his own ring with sudden and inconvenient clarity. It was like reaching for something that had always been in your pocket and finding the pocket gone.
He sighed.
"Go look," Kael said, already moving toward the stall.
Bruce followed.
The stall keeper was a tall soul with a long elegant face and the quiet manner of someone who sold expensive things and had long since stopped being impatient about it. She watched the three hunters approach without moving, her hands folded on the counter, the faint glow of a well-established soul around her. Not a new arrival. Not someone who had been F-rank recently.
"Hunters," she said. It was not a question.
"Looking," Kael said.
"Looking is free."
She let them look.
The rings were laid out in a precise row, each on a small raised mount that kept it separate from the others. Bruce picked up the nearest one, she did not object, which told him this was expected, and turned it in his fingers. It was lighter than a physical-realm spatial ring, the material somewhere between glass and bone, smooth, with a very faint interior depth that the eye could almost see into if it tried.
"How much storage?" he asked.
"That one is a single-space ring," the stall keeper said. "One cubic meter of compressed space. Smallest we carry. Good for a day’s light hunting, three or four beasts if you’re careful about how you pack."
"And the price?"
"Eight hundred F-rank soul points, that’s its f-rank soul points you’ve got on you"
Bruce set the ring down.
Eight hundred. He had eighty-seven. The ring he wanted, the size he was used to, something that would genuinely transform their hunting efficiency, would be the larger ones at the end of the row, which he did not even ask the price of. The number would just annoy him.
Kael had drifted to the bags. The spatial bags were slightly cheaper than the rings, same compression principle, but in a soft pouch form that could be clipped to a belt. The smallest was four hundred points. Still more than four times what any of them currently had.
"The boxes?" Theron asked, nodding at the flat book-sized containers.
"Cooling boxes," the stall keeper said. "Not spatial storage. They slow the dispersal of fresh soul-flesh, keep your cuts from losing their energy before you can sell them. Useful for hunters who go deep and take a long time getting back. Those are one hundred and twenty points each."
Still too much.
Bruce, Kael, and Theron stood in front of the stall and did the same quiet math at the same time. The silence among the three of them had the particular quality of three people who all want something and all know they cannot have it.
Bruce thought about his ring in the labyrinth. He thought about the first day he had acquired it, the ridiculous feeling of luxury, of putting things in and having them simply be there, waiting, when he reached back. How quickly it had become indispensable. How much more efficient today’s hunting would have been with it. They had spent time on improvised carrying-slings made from coats. They had left meat behind because they could not carry it. They had made two trips where a single trip with good storage would have done.
He wanted a spatial ring the way a surgeon wanted his hands, not for vanity but because the tool was the difference between doing the job well and doing it badly.
He could not have it. Not today.
"We’ll come back," he said.
"When?" Theron asked.
"When we have eight hundred points." He looked at the ring on its little mount. "At today’s rate, that’s ten days of hunting. Maybe seven if we go deeper and find better beasts."
"Seven days," Kael said. He nodded. "I can wait seven days."
The stall keeper, who had watched this entire exchange with the patience of her profession, said nothing. She did not try to sell them a smaller option or offer a payment plan or make them feel the embarrassment of leaving empty-handed. She simply waited. If they came back, good. If they did not, other hunters would.
Bruce gave the ring one last look and turned away from the stall.
"Let’s find what we can afford," he said.
What they could afford turned out to be quite a lot, in the smaller categories.
The market had a whole section dedicated to hunters’ practical supplies, and it was clear from the way it was laid out that the Guild had designed the stall layout with new F-rank hunters in mind. The items here were cheap, simple, and obviously useful, the kind of gear you bought before you could afford the good gear.
Bruce moved through the section methodically, with Kael at his shoulder and Theron ranging ahead and coming back to report on interesting things.
The first purchase was carrying frames.
Not crates, not bags, lightweight frames made of pale soul-wood, roughly the size and shape of a backpack frame, with crossbars that could be expanded or contracted to hold different sizes and shapes of load. They had simple binding-straps, strips of treated bark, flexible but strong, that could wrap around cuts of meat, whole carcasses, bundled hides, and hold them securely against the frame while a hunter walked. The frames did not create more space, and they did not compress anything, but they distributed weight evenly and left the arms free and the hands ready.
Twenty-two points each.
Bruce bought three without deliberating.
Kael bought carrying hooks next, small, sharp, simple clips of soul-metal that attached to the frame’s crossbars and let you hang things beneath the frame rather than only strapping them on top. The hooks doubled the effective cargo of each frame. Eight points for a set of eight.