23 Chapter 23

It took ten minutes of walking to reach the party's storefront. The building was located near one of the player vendor districts, an area of the city where players with the merchant tradeskill could buy and develop properties.

Most of them hadn't yet developed their stalls into permanent buildings yet. It created the effect of having a flea market winding through a wooded park. Some of the stalls were only an arrangement of items laid out on rugs while others offered items over an actual booth counter. The more wealthy merchants sold out of fanciful cottages wrapped in themed skins and colorful wagons that actually traveled between cities.

I felt like I was in hell after twenty seconds. There was so much noise. Players haggled and talked, players performed in empty plots for tips, and NPC followers emoted to attract attention to specific stalls. The sounds of crafting clashed with the sound of someone's Guild recruiting speech, and I could hear the distant clanging of a sword duel.

"I should have crafted earplugs," I said as I followed Trace through the mayhem. Trace shot me a confused look and I explained, "It's a lot quieter in the ocean. This can be kind of overwhelming."

His expression cleared and filled with sympathy. "After we add you to our virtual store, you can remotely add stuff in the future. But you can find some good stuff browsing the market. We usually do that during the weekend since it becomes dangerous outside of NPC towns."

The party's shop turned out to be a two-story cottage. It wasn't fancier than some of the other cottage-type shops I'd seen. It still had a thatched roof and the default skin, but the sidewalk display was impressive. There was a set of carnival-type costumes on mannequins, a peacock in a pen, and a rack of gleaming weaponry. The freestanding wardrobe on the end was somewhat out of place until I realized the game probably had a housing system.

The inside of the building was full of hardwood floors, plaster walls, and painted display shelves. The store's hired NPC was a tall, bookish man tinkering with a terrarium behind the counter. At least, I thought he was an NPC until Trace introduced him to me.

"Casper, meet Jay. He just joined our party. Jay, meet Shey's Uncle Casper. He takes care of our store for us."

Casper barely glanced over his shoulder before returning to his terrarium-building project. I didn't notice him make any initiating movements, but a screen suddenly appeared in front of me.

[You have been granted level two management authority for a player store: Casper's Curios.]

[Remote consignment is now unlocked in your Merchant Tradeskill menu.]

It took less than five minutes for Trace to give a tutorial on using the system once I had permission. And five minutes after that, when he saw all the goods I consigned, Casper gave up working on his terrarium. He moved around the store in a frenzy to clear out a section of the wall and began shifting furniture to create a dedicated display.

I found it was rather satisfying to see my stuff appear. The racks at eye level held aquariums full of living fish, crustaceans, and starfish. Fishbowls appeared to hold all the varieties of pearls and coral I'd collected. Larger bins of ice appeared to hold the edible fish, eels, and clams.

Casper set up a jewelry box to display wearable trinkets I'd made from Sage Karson's Journal, then he arranged a mannequin wearing a full set of kelp gear. As for all the other crafting materials I consigned, he set up a table full of wood bins and filled them with everything from spools of kelp twine to bricks of Atlantean bronze.

I winced when he started adding price tags to everything. I didn't really understand the value of gold compared to ancient coins, but a thousand pieces for a single summoning pearl seemed ridiculous. How was a useless payara tooth worth two hundred gold? Even worse, it was five thousand for a chunk of Cerulean crystal and ten thousand for a small skein of sea silk. That was just insane.

Did they not know how easy it was to get this stuff? I'd collected everything off starter maps.

"Gold-farmers chase the rare quality goods because they offer the biggest payday," Casper commented as if he'd read my mind. "They aren't interested in collecting this stuff at all unless they can grab it along the way to their destination. As for Guilds, they aren't interested in wasting manpower to farm a large number of common goods. Their rush to the top sometimes leaves them blind to the smaller opportunities. Decorative items like pearls don't come onto their radar at all until they're needed for a bigger project. Even then, they'll just buy what they need."

Before I could reply, Trace cut in. "Do you have something eye-catching we can add to the sidewalk display?"

I glanced through my remaining inventory. Other than the stuff I wanted to keep for myself, I didn't have a lot left in my spatial ring. "You can have my old training spear to put in the weapon rack, but it's not very impressive. I do have a bunch of bottles of low-grade fish-oil, if you think you can do something with them. They can be pretty when they catch the light."

Casper dropped what he was doing and asked, "Low-grade fish oil?"

I pull out a small glass bottle to show him. "It has a rare chance to drop when you process certain fish. I don't have any recipes that use it yet, so I've been holding onto them until I figure it out."

"It's used in medicine crafting," Casper murmured in consideration. "These are three-ounce bottles. It takes less than half an ounce to raise someone's intelligence by ten points, so this bottle is the equivalent of sixty intelligence points. Low-grade oil can only add fifty points before it becomes ineffective, but that can still be worth a lot to some people. How many of these bottles do you have?"

"Only twenty," I replied. I actually had nearly forty of them, but I wanted to keep half my stock.

Casper nodded like it made perfect sense. "Considering the rest of your item ratios, I suppose I can swallow that."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know the drop rate for a pearl from a domesticated oyster?"

I shook my head.

"It's low. Even if you have ten aquariums set to breed oysters at maximum capacity, you'd get maybe one or two pearls a day. Of course, ten aquariums would be a massive investment and it's doubtful anyone other than gambling dens would do such a thing, but it should be enough for you to see my point."

"Gambling dens?" I asked.

"Some shops in other parts of the capital treating oysters like lottery tickets. If you pull a pearl, you're a winner and the shop will buy it off you. If there's no pearl, at least you get the meat as a consolation prize. Yet here you have hundreds of pearls in a dozen varieties. Most people would look at all the pearls we have and think we're rich fools who went crazy gambling."

Casper's gaze seemed like it wanted to penetrate straight through me. "Fish oil is even rarer than pearls. Domesticated fish don't seem to drop it all, no matter how processors handle it. Only wild fish caught by fishermen will have a chance for it to appear during processing."

"My fish-oil dropped while I was processing eels to make Cerulean skewers."

"Do yourself a favor and be more discreet about what you possess from now on," Casper advised. "I can already tell you're a treasure trove for ocean goods. Half of what you've consigned will have to stay hidden in the warehouse, otherwise, its value will bottom out. If a player discovered you were the type to walk around with twenty bottles of fish-oil in your pocket, I don't know what would happen. Nothing good, that's for sure."