31

"You're over half an hour late, half sets," my father says casually when I rush down to the dining room from my bedroom for dinner only to see the kitchen was clean with only him sitting there watching his phone. After my not immediately dropping to the floor to do push-ups, he says, "I'm serious. You won't learn discipline without punishment whenever you do something wrong. you're late by half an hour, now you're giving me half sets. While you're at it, tell me about your day."

Dropping to the floor like a grunt recruit in basic, I start doing push-ups to his counts while telling him about my gaming sessions. When I had done fifty push-ups, he let me rest while asking me questions about the imp night hunting with Skooma and his team. After telling him my thoughts on the main characters and how we can use their friends for labor, I started doing sit-ups.

While doing sit-ups I simplified the explanation of how my tutorial escort quest became a big series. After sit-ups, I was heavily questioned for five minutes about the people involved while he made speculations about political and other types of drama I could find myself in. Then I started my one-legged squats.

Because this was halfway a cardio exercise from alternating legs, I was not allowed to stop between legs but instead muscle through as I told him about our recent survival event with just the previous main characters and then my morning sunrise of affinity with the retired leader of the region's knight order.

"This is a pretty big deal," my father finally admits. "I know these games are a big deal, loads of people who come into the gym take the quick courses for video games nowadays. If you can make it as big as you say you can… you'll have come a long way from that kid who got expelled for fighting."

When I was finally allowed to eat a heavy dinner of rice and stir fry, I spent half an hour doing some basic research while spending time with the family before finally heading back up to my room. I had already read over and memorized most of the things I studied up on but it was always useful to review everything one more time before using it. After another few minutes getting a few things in order and sending out some messages, I went back into the game.

-

It was not even noon yet when I logged back in and appeared outside of the large Golden Ferry building, walking inside alone after having dropped my animals off at the inn who could not refuse my paying for another night after dropping Lady Mara's name. Apparently, her name still carried enough weight for a small matter like this in Sierra. That was a good sign.

Inside I soon found a familiar clerk behind the main front counter of the lobby but this time she was seated at the far side closer to the doorway in the partition. When she noticed me walking up she immediately smiled and stood up while saying, "Ah, Mr. Life, it's good to see you again! Right this way."

"Please, just call me Hack," I say quickly as she opens the doorway for me to try leading me deeper into the building. "I'm just here to see about those materials I traded for. I can't imagine you've held an auction yet."

"This might come as a pleasant surprise to you, Mr, Hack, but we did hold an auction already," he informs me while waving me forward into the back of the lobby. "Besides, even if we only had some of your materials it would be iron and iron is heavy and cheap. Somewhat. Getting it to you would take time."

"Thank you for being so thoughtful," I say pleasantly, enjoying this slight VIP treatment.

"It's simply how we do business," she assures me quickly.

Once we were finally back in a private room I was surprised to find that there were biscuit cookie snacks on the table as well as a glass carafe of water and cups. This place was much nicer than the snack-free room last time. I gladly sat down and tried one of the biscuits, finding it only vaguely sweet kind of like an animal cracker.

However, it was my first ACTUAL sweet in the game and it was not bad, I was impressed with how well it reminded me of Earth but still had its own distinctive grain flavor. Not long later, an attendant joined the clerk lady and I in the room, carrying a large metal tray laden with paper rolls of coins. After she left, the pretty clerk lady stopped eating biscuits with me and picked up a roll of coins.

"This is fifty gold coins, you have almost a hundred of these because you single sold your materials and pissed off everybody in the city-wide auction we held," she explains before putting the roll back on the tray and picking up a piece of paper. "This is a receipt signed by the people who bought the clubs and myself who oversaw their handling and sale to show that these are the original prices and we took only our ten percent from your earnings. You made more than we anticipated, it was a rushed auction and only advertised in the city but we advertised a sword that Ferithar made similar to yours but gilded in green-gold electrum. It sold for more than two thousand by itself."

Impressive, I say while accepting the receipt she holds out to me before simply tossing it backward over my shoulder into the air. "I'm glad you bring Ferithar up, and swords he made. I made a smaller sword out of Hardened Hickory for my new pet dusk imp priestess with her claws for a second edge and, wouldn't you know it, it does as much damage as the swords he gave me!"

"He gave you the same basic form of transmutation and enchanting that he intends to teach you," she explains softly, maybe a little awkwardly. "Because you paid for his teachings and because of how much you paid, you're really only a student of his in name. His personal techniques and recipes will likely remain his own."

Shrugging as if that did not matter, I eat a biscuit whole and pour myself some water before saying, "It's one thing to teach me the basics, I only wanted him to do it because he was available and had a good title. It's another thing to sell me a poor quality item. I feel cheated, but he DID expand my mana pool basically for free so I can't complain TO him about it."

Bursting out laughing suddenly, the clerk tries to stop herself with a look of surprise but ends of snorting which changes her expression to one of horror. After collecting herself a moment later, she says, "I'm sorry you had to see- or hear- that."

"Don't be, it was adorable, thanks for the show," I say while raising my glass with a smug smile that makes her narrow her eyes at me. Coughing awkwardly as I remember that this was an NPC, I quickly apologize and then quietly nibble on biscuits until my metals arrived.

When they finally showed up it was in the form of a large man pushing an equally large cart containing several large crates under a few smaller ones. Thanking the man for his help, the clerk professionally presents the boxes of iron, arcanite, ridium, and cobalt that I had ordered. She even offered to have the materials weighed in front of me.

I quickly rejected her offer before putting my gold and metals in my inventory. Then I took out the short tree-like mana crystal we had dug up from the imp nest. The clerk freaked out because she recognized it in an instant and asked me 'how in hell' I managed to acquire something like this legally.

The entire thing was about six feet tall with several branching portions of glowing crystal but was honestly not that big of a deal. Supposedly, things like them START becoming rewards from dungeons later on in the game. However, the game was still new so things like this on the market were probably rare.

Because of the value of something like this she could not give me an appraisal for the giant magic crystal because it would involve more departments than just Ferithar, I just left it with them. Of course I had the clerk write up and sign up some documents stating I was the owner. She was also only too glad to do so because of the questionable legality.

After leaving the chamber of commerce I started sending out messages for everybody to meet up at the city. The missing members of our team in the region were only a few hours away if they did not run into any serious complications so we could expect to see them by at least tonight. Now that it was noon, though, I did not bother with the actual smithy.

When everybody was finally together half an hour later, everybody had a few new skills or items gifted to them from their class quests and general game advancement. I did not have any direction besides my new quest series and currently no priorities or ways to get them besides the things I simply want to do. After a day or two, though, I would probably end up restricted when I returned to my quest series.

From the smithy we went around looking for an armorer than Skooma claimed to have some affinity with after doing a quest for them through the guild that was part of his class assignment. Apparently, the game really will just hand you business relations. Luckily for us, the place we went to was a large business with an equally large workshop in the back that even had a small forge area outside for making or repairing armor pieces.

It was even on the way to the south gate where I could detour to the coach inn to collect, feed, and lightly groom Duck before their final hour ran out.

Even though there were already players at work here like in the smithy, we were charged ten percent less per person than usual and quickly set to work. The others all worked on cutting out more armor pieces for the soft leather suits we would sell while I worked on making the cut-outs for brand new suits of mixed goblin and dusk imp hides.

Luckily, after all of the hunting everyone had been through on their own or together, we had plenty of dusk imp hides to make my main team a suit as well as fill Skooma's original order. His own armor would come afterward made from the materials he previously gave me and then his friends would receive a simplified leather-only version of our armor. Their value to me was only as high as Skooma and Agnes so they had yet to prove the deserved more effort than that. For now.

The biggest issue I had was that I was revising the existing goblin armor recipes to include a second layer of imp leather. Not only did I have no idea how to use a goblin core I also had no idea if it would even work the way it was supposed to with this armor. For all I knew there was too much imp to succeed or I needed a core of either for every piece.

When I revealed this issue to the group while making small talk in our somewhat private corner of the workshop, Skooma surprisingly stepped in to solve it. He simply called over the master craftsman who ran the place so that I could ask. Of course, to 'better understand' my question he needed to see my recipe.

Only seconds after reading the recipe, the armorer handed the parchment paper back and said, "It's a good recipe, and following that design will naturally enhance the affects of using a core. I have several like it and even designed a few of my own. However, you don't need a recipe to use cores. If you have an appropriate skill to increase the effect of using a core, one would use that, but otherwise you just place the core in the armament like a person and you should be asked whether to use it or not."

Satisfied that our armor would receive enhancements regardless of whether my design functioned as good as the recipe, I still could not help but ask, "What if we used two cores? Such as placing a dusk imp and goblin core inside the armor piece or two of either?"

Frowning and scratching his stubbly chin, the long haired and middle-aged elven armorer says, "It's not impossible, I use it myself whenever I make new pieces and want to experiment. However, the species of the core determines the affects and some species will grant a strong affect as well as a negative affect belonging to the race. If both races share a negative or their positives do not match, the enhancements will be weak and will have a high probability of negative affects. Luckily for you, yours truly has experimented with much more than just goblin and imp cores."

"They work well together and a creature core that works well with any metal armor is the armored tree lizard, a variation of the common tree lizards in our forests," he adds with a knowing smile and wink before turning and heading off somewhere else in the building.

*