Jay touched the wall-mounted trade crystal with a large grin, excited to see what he could find on the market.
Perhaps he could find the most powerful monster wand for only a few gold? Maybe they would be seen as trash that weren’t even worth picking up? Who knows.
[Trade Platform Accessed]
[29 Minutes remaining]
Jay sat down on a nearby bench before he began to search through the items. There were a few other adventurers around now that they could start selling their loot and buying things, though many of them did not look as cheery as Jay did; they didn’t have a monster class, so at this point, they were stressing over every single gold coin.
One even had to get up from the bench and touch the trade crystal again.
Jay shook his head, pitying them before he opened the trade window.
“Hmm… I’ll start with searching ‘wand’… but how will I know it’s a monster wand?”
“What if I buy some expensive crap I can’t even use?”
Jay found his first problem, but hoped that the monster wands would have obvious names, such as the goblin wand.
A long list of wands came up, and soon he found the one he used in Viladores’ class.
[Vibrance Wand]
[Spell Channel Tier 1]
[110 gold]
“Wow, that was an expensive wand. I had no clue spell channels were so expensive?”
Jay searched for his green crystals that he previously harvested from the carters demise dungeon, only to find that the price was still around 0.7 gold.
“What? Why? But it’s a spell channel too??” he was confused, he felt like he got ripped off - but this was the price available to everyone, so how could he complain? What he now wanted to know was why was a tier 1 spell channel item priced differently?
He decided to not let this one go, immediately he wanted an answer.
Jay got up from his seat and knocked on the window-door to Lillian’s office.
He heard a sigh come from behind the door as she sluggishly got up before walking across and opening the window in the door.
“Hello again, how can I help you today?” she said with a sarcastic tone.
“I was wondering why a tier 1 spell channel is priced differently from another? Shouldn’t they be the same?”
“A tier 1 spell channel? Can you give me more information?”
“A virbance wand is 110 gold, while a minor green crystal is 0.7 gold. They’re both tier 1 spell channels so I was won-”
“Ohh,” Lillian cut Jay off with a smile, “minor crystals shatter after some use. Their shape also results in only slightly stronger spells. Most only use them for alchemy ingredients.”
“Oh.. I see. Thanks.”
“Is there anything else?” Lillian smiled as she shut the window, not even listening to Jays answer.
“N-...” he turned around as the window shut and walked back to the bench “No thanks”.
He went back into the trade platform, doing a ‘wand’ search again, he found the goblin wand.
[Goblin Wand]
[Trophy]
[46 gold]
“Oh, this is actually… pretty expensive.” Jay thought, “Viladore’s pretty generous I guess.” he was starting to appreciate Viladore now, despite his frustrated attitude from his class.
“Huh, it’s in a trophy category, so I guess most monster drops like this would be there?”
Jay browsed the other wands for a moment that came up in the search, but he really was out of his depth, and none of them really peaked his interest.
There were hundreds of wands, most of them expensive and with strange names that he had never heard of.
[Glomscach Wand] [Heinous Screamer Wand] [Abathess Wand] [Charmer’s Wand] [Hatecraft Wand]
Jay did scroll past a few that had [trophy] and sounded like they belonged to monsters, but they were either cheaper than Jays or incredibly expensive.
This was when Jay realised a second problem.
Checking the prices, he realised that these would have their value determined by how good they were to look at. The price had no bearing on if they worked well or not; no human could test them.
“Perhaps a rare but beautiful wand may belong to an illusive low level creature, making the wand a collectors item and raising its value. Practically though, the wand could be useless… it seems like trophies are something only the nobles would buy too.”
“Dammit… this just gets more complicated.” he frowned slightly, his grin long gone.
Jay then decided to search by category and brought up the trophy listings.
Similar to the wands, there were hundreds, maybe thousands. The list seemed to go on and on.
Jay had to scroll through for 5 minutes before finding a wand, [Water Hoplite Wand], though it was incredibly expensive.
This is when he realised another problem too: a spell channel doesn’t necessarily have to be a wand. The crystal he had was a spell channel, and it wasn’t a wand.
Surely there were other monster drops that no one knew were spell channels.
Frustrated, Jay let out a long sigh.
“Seems like I have wasted this trip.” he thought as he closed the trade window, a defeated frown on his face. There were simply too many unknowns.
Besides, Jay doesn’t want to risk his hard-earned money on something that will make spell-casting deadlier, especially since he doesn’t have any spells in the first place.
Not to mention he already had the expensive goblin wand.
With a defeated frown he shut the trade window, glad that he had at least one monster wand.
“It will be enough for now” he pursed his lips as he got up and left the trade area.
“Bye Margaret” Jay smiled as he left the association, and a warm smile returned back to him as he passed by.
Jay paused for a moment as he watched a few adventurers run in and out of the association. Most of them had sold the overpriced weapons they bought from Bertram by now, as they discovered the trade room in the guild.
Of course, some were bitter since no one told them about the trade area. They brought their sour attitudes to the trade area too now, which had made Lillian fairly bothered, but it was not her job to babysit them. It was quite a harsh lesson to learn at such a low level, but it would help in the long term after all. It was almost like a rite of passage now; a tradition.
Jay watched some train in the courtyard, testing their new purchases. Some wielded spears with scales and jagged edges, others carried bows with feathers and spikes. Slowly but surely the adventurers of Losla were getting stronger.
While the average adventurer level was still 6, many were now hitting level 7, and some of the hardest working adventurers were even level 8.
Compared to most of the other villages in the region, Losla was an anomaly - other villages were still averaging around level four.
It didn’t stand out too much now, but if this continued, it would attract attention, and not necessarily the good kind.
Unbeknownst to Jay, this was because of him.
His incessant rushing around, leaving dungeons early in the mornings, being high level, combined with going into dungeons solo had an impact on the local adventurer community which made them push themselves harder.
Anya was one of the few who touched on level 8 now, and she only worked harder seeing that she was one level behind Jay, who was level 9 - as the guild master's daughter, she was not isolated from the gossip going around.
Anya was even copying Jay and going into dungeons solo, though sometimes she would form a duo team with various tank-class adventurers; a few people she trusted - they could block the damage while she would deal it.
Of course, Jay is level 10; his disguise stone doing the perfect job of hiding this fact.
“Now… that ability point I was saving from level 9… Do I want another level 3 skeleton, or all of them to be level 4?” he thought as he watched the training dummies and wooden target birds being decimated by their new weapons.
