NOVEL NEXT Ch. 5
“I’ll pay you four hundred and twenty Kohns for this.”
The shopkeeper’s tone had the weary finality of a man who’d spent too long inhaling torch smoke and adventurer sweat. His voice rasped like sandpaper on oak, and I felt as though he had polished every syllable by years of disappointment. He prodded the Slime-Eye Amulet with a brass-tipped rod to very intentionally show me he’d thoroughly appraised the items.
420. There was something funny about that number, and not in a good way. My last haul, almost identical, had fetched me 510 Kohns and a slice of rye bread.
I knew the angle already. I could’ve opened my mouth, folded my arms, tilted my head just so, maybe even squinted like a man burdened by honest desperation. I’d done it a hundred times: mention the purity of the aether residue, imply competing offers, remind him of guild shortage rates. I could have wrung another sixty Kohns out of him easily, maybe seventy-five, if I invoked Saint Merin’s pancreas for luck.
The words lined up neatly in my head like soldiers ready for battle.
And then I remembered the guard. The silence, the stares, the sound of that melon bursting on cobblestone. The villager.
My mouth clamped shut.
No unnecessary words, I told myself. The local population had been sufficiently terrorized for one week.
The shopkeeper squinted at me, possibly mistaking my silence for doubt. “It’s a fair price,” he said, with the tired patience of a man explaining gravity to a bird. “Been in the trade thirty-two years. I’ve appraised relics worth a hundred times this, and I know the going rate. You won’t get better in this district.”
I knew just from the items behind him that this shopkeeper was no roadside peddler. He was the real deal. Possibly too real; the kind of man who knew exactly what aether was worth and exactly how much he could underpay you for it.
His shelves, a small museum of bankruptcies, were proof enough.
I recognized half the gear on display. not because I could afford any of it, but because I’d seen the likes hanging from the belts of magi-knights and guild champions. Swords with pale veins of aetherstone running through the steel, shields etched with the same marks I’d noticed again and again in the field: crosshatched sigils at the corners, a spiral inlay near the boss. Defensive runes, probably. I’d never studied them properly, but every shield that carried those patterns seemed to leave its wielder standing a little longer than they should’ve.
That was what separated magi-warriors and me. In my hands, those costly weapons would be nothing but iron.
I nodded and accepted the coins.
The pouch felt too light for the effort it had taken. I left the shop with the faint jingle of underpayment trailing me and saw that the sky had turned that grey-violet shade it wore before an evening rain. As much as I wanted to explore what this Ceralis thing could do for me, my stomach had other plans. Logic warred with curiosity, and logic won, as usual.
My pannier, once stuffed to the brim with the day’s haul, now sagged uncomfortably light. The Ceralis quartz nestled inside, safe for the moment, but the bag was far too big for the delicate heft of these treasures. One misjudged curb and the rock could slip free. I’d need a better solution soon—
My eye caught a small, inconspicuous rock at the edge of the cobblestones. Slightly different from the usual gray-brown of the street, it glinted in the dying light. My luck with stones today had been . . . notable, to say the least. Maybe this would offer me another surprise.
I bent down and picked it up.
[Task Received: The Taskgiving Tutorial]
Objective: Pick up another taskgiving object
(Note: Keep this taskgiving object with you until task completion. The boon will not be redeemable otherwise)
Boon: +25 EXP
A Taskgiving object? Whatever could that be?
Hint: Taskgiving objects usually contain resonant aether, visible as a faint glow or unusual shimmer.
“Wait here, girl,” I patted Silvermane, who was peacefully eating someone else’s hay by the shop. “Stop eating. That’s not ours.”
The mare’s ears swiveled in my direction, then very deliberately kept chewing. She was obviously listening; she just didn’t give a rat’s arse about what I had to say.
“I mean it,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “That’s theft.”
Silvermane chewed harder.
“Right,” I grumbled. “I shall deal with you later, you insolent thing.”
I stuffed the slightly glowing rock into my pannier and trudged onward, resigned. Whatever this task or EXP thing was supposed to do for me, I wasn’t in the mood to analyze it right now. Logic dictated: pick up the object, get the reward, move on. Simple. Done.
And then I realized: finding random shiny things on the ground was not that simple. I spent a solid five minutes scanning the square, bending over, crouching, squinting, and lifting every pebble that twinkled in the fading light. Most were nothing: ordinary rocks, shards of glass, and a rusty button. The so-called ‘resonant aether’ was either hiding very well or entirely imaginary.
But then, the next object I spotted glinting from the cobblestones caught my eye. The metallic shimmer from it definitely fit the description from the hint. Could it be? I crouched and picked it up.
Ten Kohns. Not aether-resonant, just useless money. Free money, yes, but irrelevant to the task.
I kept walking, scanning for anything else that glimmered. Another corner, another pebble catching the dying light. I bent down, fingers brushing it, but it was once again just an ordinary pebble that had decided to be shiny for no particular reason.
“By Merin’s overgrown toenail, I am officially turning into a scrap digger,” I muttered, tugging the pannier strap higher on my shoulder.
Then I felt eyes looking at me, and I looked up. Villagers’ eyes followed me, some mildly disgusted, most absolutely terrified. A mother pulled her child back the moment I looked at her, hurriedly tramping away. I’d realized I must’ve looked like a proper idiot, scavenging pebbles under the evening light. My priorities were clearly broken when ten free Kohns ranked below imaginary quest objectives.
That was the last straw.
I hurried off, muttering to myself, “Alright. Fine. This quest isn’t finishing anytime soon. Not today.”