Novel Full Chapter 446: The Cost Of Progress
Chapter 446: The Cost Of Progress
"This is what you were describing," Theron said, holding a set up and examining them. "The way porters carry things in the city."
"Yes," Bruce said. "We are, for now, glorified porters who happen to also do the killing."
"I was once a tax clerk and died when apocalypse descended to my world. This is already a better job."
Bruce couldn’t help but frown a little upon hearing that from Theron
Kael bought a skinning kit next, a folded set of small blades in a soul-wood case, each blade a different shape for different cuts. The set replaced his single knife with a proper butcher’s spread. It came with a small instruction slip that Theron read aloud while Kael examined each blade.
"The mid-curve blade for bark-plate removal," Theron read. "The straight blade for prime cuts. The hook-tip for core extraction. The narrow blade for..."
"I know what the narrow one’s for," Kael said.
"The slip says..."
"I know, Theron."
"You don’t want me to read it?"
"I have been alive longer than you and I know what a narrow blade is for. Please."
Bruce, examining a set of carry-sacks made from cured beast-hide, did not look up, but the corner of his mouth moved.
The carry-sacks were his next purchase. Not spatial, not compressed, just large, well-made bags of cured F-rank beast-hide, stiff enough to hold their shape and keep contents separated, with a flat bottom that let them stand upright. They could clip to the carrying frame with the hooks Kael had bought, and they held a surprising volume for a flat bag, the hide was cured under compression, the stall keeper there explained, which made it denser and stronger than its weight implied. Two bags each. Eighteen points each bag.
"Will these hold fresh cores without the energy leaking?" Bruce asked.
"For a few hours," the stall keeper said. She was a young soul, enthusiastic about her product, which Bruce appreciated. "After about four hours the cores start to bleed energy. If you’re hunting close and coming back same-day, no problem. If you’re going deep and staying overnight..."
"We won’t be doing that yet," Bruce said.
"Then you’re fine. Most first-season hunters use these. They do the job."
He bought two each.
Theron, meanwhile, had found something else.
He was standing two stalls down at a small table run by an old soul with a deeply lined face, looking at what appeared to be a set of jars. The jars were squat, clear-bodied, each one filled with a pale luminous substance, not liquid, not solid, something in between, the consistency of cold honey.
"What is this?" Theron called back.
Bruce and Kael came over.
The old soul’s voice was slow but precise. "Soul-seal paste," he said. "You apply it to a fresh cut after butchering. It slows the dispersal of soul-energy from the cut surface, holds the glow in for up to twice as long as untreated meat. Makes a cut worth more at the exchange because it’s still fresh when you arrive."
Bruce picked up a jar and turned it. The paste inside moved slowly, catching the light.
"How much?"
"Fifteen points per jar. A jar treats about ten large cuts."
Bruce did the math. For the volume of meat they were bringing in, one jar per hunt was roughly the cost, and if it raised the sale value even ten percent it would pay for itself within a day.
He bought two jars. Then, after a moment’s thought, a third.
The old soul wrapped them in thin bark-cloth and tucked them into a small carrying case. He also, without being asked, included a short strip of soul-wood spreaders for applying the paste. "New hunters don’t know to ask," he said simply.
Theron was delighted by this. He thanked the old soul at length. The old soul seemed unaccustomed to being thanked and looked slightly uncertain about it.
They moved on.
The middle section of the market was less practical and more interesting.
Bruce’s intention had been to pass through it quickly on the way to the food stalls. He managed perhaps forty paces into it before stopping.
The stall in front of him sold weapons. Not ordinary weapons, soul-weapons, which he understood immediately were different from the conjured-talent weapons he and Kael and Theron had been using. These were manufactured objects, built by craftsmen from soul-materials, stable and persistent without requiring the user’s own energy to maintain them. A soul-weapon held its own energy. You did not drain yourself by using it. You only drained yourself if you tried to enhance it with your talent.
Bruce picked up a short blade from the display. Soul-metal, a pale grey alloy, balanced well. It had the weight of a tool made by someone who understood what tools were for. He turned it. He set it down.
He could not afford the good ones. The one he had picked up was sixty points. The better ones in the back of the display were many hundreds.
But he had his talent. He did not need a weapon. He noted the stall, noted the prices, noted which items were in his range if ever he needed a backup, and moved on.
Kael had stopped at a stall selling glass vials of something labeled, in the market’s strange readable script, Pure Soul Essence, F Grade, Bottled.
He was reading the product description with narrowed eyes.
"It’s pre-bottled essence from dungeon beasts," he said when Bruce came up beside him. "Someone went and killed things, extracted the essence, and put it in a bottle. You can drink it instead of eating the beast or absorbing from the kill."
"Why would you do that instead of hunting?" Theron asked.
"If you can’t hunt," Kael said. "Or if you want to rank up faster than hunting alone allows. It’s like... buying the advancement rather than earning it." He set the vial down. "Expensive, though. And I suspect the bottling process loses some of the quality."
"Much more expensive than hunting?" Bruce asked.
Kael pointed at the price card. Bruce looked.
"Yes," Bruce said. "Much more expensive."
They moved on.
Theron stopped them one more time, at a stall selling maps.
They were soul-maps, not paper, but thin sheets of a translucent pale material that showed the Soul Realm’s geography in soft glowing lines. Bruce did not know enough of the realm’s layout yet to evaluate the accuracy, but the general shapes were clear: Xiltra at the center of a large island, surrounded by the Bone Tidewater, with dungeon-portal locations marked in small green triangles and the Mistlands at the outer edges in a wash of grey.
He bought the simplest, cheapest map, a single-sheet overview of the Xiltra island, with the dungeon portals marked. Twenty points. He folded it carefully and slid it into one of the new hide sacks.
Kael bought nothing from the map stall but spent a full two minutes memorizing the display map with the focused stare of someone who retained things by looking at them hard enough. Bruce noted this was apparently how Kael dealt with information he wanted but could not purchase.
They came out the far side of the market into the food district, where the smell improved dramatically.
The stalls here ran long, many types of food, all of it soul-beast-based in some form, cooked in different methods by souls who had clearly been doing this for years. Bruce stopped at a stall run by a heavyset woman with burn-scars along her forearms from a life spent over fire. The menu was simple: large bowls of slow-cooked beast-stew with soul-herbs, thick cuts of roasted flank with bark-crust, small pressed cakes of something dense and sweet that had no obvious physical-realm equivalent.
He bought three stews and three of the sweet cakes.
The stew was cheaper than almost anything else they had bought today, eight points a bowl. The sweet cakes were three points each. They stood at the edge of the stall and ate it there, because the woman had a small ledge-counter with soul-stone stools, and Bruce’s legs wanted to stop.
The stew was good. Not as good as the fresh kill in the forest had been, there was something about eating what you yourself had just hunted that the stew could not replicate, but it was good, properly seasoned, thick, warming all the way down.
"Seven days," Kael said again, over his stew, returning to the spatial ring. He had apparently not stopped thinking about it.
"Seven days," Bruce agreed.
"I am going to get the one with two cubic meters," Kael said. "Not the smallest one. Two cubic meters. We can fit half a dungeon level in that."
"At our rate, two cubic meters won’t be enough within a month," Theron said. He said it with the unconscious confidence of someone who had already decided he was going to be good at this. Bruce noticed it and approved.
"Then we buy bigger in a month," Kael said simply.
The sweet cake was, Bruce could not name what it was. Dense, barely sweet, with a faintly mineral note underneath that made it taste like it had been grown somewhere very old. He ate it in four bites. He bought a second one. He ate that too. He was not even hungry anymore; it was purely the pleasure of a good thing.