The storehouse was opposite the Colosseum on the mountain, located in a valley that marked the bottom of vastly wide set of stairs up into the mountain. At first glance it was a peak, a light brown sharp line dwindling as it moved upwards into the fog. Only when he was closer and could see trees hanging over it did Corvayne realize what he was looking at. As they made their way up the gentle slope into the foothills they reached the storehouse. Some of the dune-like mounds on closer inspection looked like crushed bulwarks. He weaved on his hoverbike through the talus to the storehouse. His compass was sure Kirae was there. It made sense given she had some sort of merchant class.
Whereas many of the buildings he had seen showed a sort of tasteful refinement of the 'Daoboy' aesthetic, the storehouse was made to look much like a desert fortress, like one might see in a historical painting featuring cowboys fending off goblin cattle rustlers with six shooters. Adobe walls had wood logs jutting out from the six tiered fortress. There was an orange wooden arch into the fortress with heavy oaken doors, iron rings and rivets and all, as well as what looked like a later addition of a clay tile roof above... but the rest of it was pure cowboy with cannons, gun slits, and desert pigments used to draw arrays on it.
Corvayne was worried he was going to be blocked from entering. Instead, he found the doors opened for him automatically, creaking and leaving the scent of wood chips baking in the sun. Perhaps Rio was finally holding up her end of the bargain(s) they had made and actually helping him. The interior looked less dusty and dry. Greens with stone paths and koi ponds contrasted with the tan walls, where they hadn't be replaced with moss colored stones. There was a more traditional stables with actual regular horses in them as well as a stack of cannonballs but those were the only signs the interior may have been a functional fort. It made sense to Corvayne: he strongly suspected they had built the fortress when the Sect was new, and expanded to include the more impressive monstrously over sized buildings.
The interior of the fortress was wood, with woven straw floors. There were hanging scrolls with calligraphy horseshoes drawn in explosive singular brush strokes. Not his thing, but he could see why they were there. The first floor just contained rows of what looked like Confucian scholars hunched over laptops, sometimes with piles of objects they weighed before throwing it into one of three to five bins near each desk.
Because he had been ruthlessly teased by his party in the dungeon for not knowing the basics of the sect, he had Spears drive for part of the trip while he re-read the summary of the building the Three-Kings syndicate had put together. At one time the main stampede bulwark, the building had been reworked into Dusky X Creekwood's home, then the main trading and vault for everything the sect leader had decided was 'tradeworthy'... but nothing so precious the sect would be willing to part with. So, he wasn't going to find some goofy 50,000 year old flower that would magically lift his curse.
The first floor was all business, sorting and assembling payments and salaries for the folks that couldn't be paid in contribution chits or were cashing out. In addition there were currency rooms in the first basement to store all that money. He had no interest in those as he would never need to collect another crystal as long as he drew breath. Also he would instantly alert half the sect if he stepped into the basement with the vault. The building also held things the sect had deemed worth selling outside their normal exports. These were housed on the second floor and included anything besides guns and the ammo (Ie: their unique built ones that turned you into swiss cheese), domesticated beasts for riding or farming, and flying swords that ran off mana but could also use petrol.
He didn't stop on floor two or the third, climbing wooden steps and only glancing at a hallway with armed guards beside every door. Aside from more powerful and unique items in the second basement, this was where magic items were stockpiled for trade. Again, heavily guarded and his notes said the selection was usually very eclectic: The sect preferred to give anything useful to people who could use it, aside from a few greedy elders who had extensive collections. Rumors of deeper floors were mentioned, but Corvayne suspected he'd have better gains going and climbing the tower to find chests rather than gambling on something even the report said was doubtful. The writer had speculated that all the really good stuff would be in the heart of the mountain where the sect leader had carved an imposing fortress deep into the stone.
What he was here for, as well as to see Kirae, was the fourth floor, which was oddities. Things like art they were considering selling (Overpriced per the report), stacks of enchanted chairs (for an auction hall that had been replaced by leather seating when it moved to Neo Nashville), cages with living tumbleweeds in them (Per the report: once a pillar of their monster sales but outclassed by the named monster duckweed from Greencarpet), a room full of cursed gear (he did a furtive check with compass for living clothes passing the room and sadly found none), and finally the place Kirae was: the “We Have No Fucking Idea Storehouse”.
The rooms on this floor were not true vaults. The 'WHNFI' Storehouse actually had windows out to the inner courtyard to let fresh air in. Someone had swept dust out of the isles between containers, but Corvayne got a sense from cobwebs higher up that the stacks of fifteen foot tall bundles, piles of chests, and rolls of odd fabrics had been sitting there hundreds of years. It was labeled, some by marking on the floor, others by wood signs tied into the rope keeping containers together, and some just with slips of lined paper in pen. He recognized Kirae's handwriting, frequently followed by question marks.
The report he had read included some of the contents of the room. Three Kings didn't know any more than the sect did what much of it could be used for. Examples included: Ghostfire Cloth. Sounds really powerful, the dungeon drops high level gear made of it. The raw material was totally useless. You cannot handle it once you unroll a roll, the material becoming etheral except when you roll it back up. The only use is to collect enough of it, buy out someone you know has been infested by a rival merchant's spies, then sell your stock through a different dummy front after said rival assumes the guy buying has a way to process it. Corvayne passed three log-cabin sized stacked pallets of the material, it's dull teal glow mingling with the light from the windows. It looked like it was finely woven from essence.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
There was a very, very, very rare drop from monsters on this floor that were 'Impervium' chips. The material was too strong, to the point it couldn't be smithed. Aside from being used to make a really bad macuahuitl it was worthless, but again it could be priceless. The Sect had been operating for thousands of years and decided they would keep those rocks in case that changed. They were bundled into chickenwire bales and stacked two tall. They radiated gravity to Corvayne.
There was also moneystone. The report states it's well known that the little green metallic rocks trigger every sort of merchant sense as being priceless, but have no functional use besides trying to scam people. The practice fell out of favor as merchants who had value-smelling skills wised up. It was sometimes used as a decoy for thieves with sense value. Someone had made a giant clear piggybank for them, and it was half full.
Paper that ate everything written on it with no apparent function, Stacks of metal that made enchanted items no-one could figure out the benefit of, eggs that nobody knew how to break open or hatch... useless things that might be precious. Corvayne followed his compass and found Kirae sunbathing face down in a clear square where the sun shone down.
She looked up at him, then reached over and pulled her discarded initiate robe over her ass.
He coughed and looked away. "Bad timing?"
"I spend a lot of time here either sunning or having trysts with two different accountants and a few other staff."
Corvayne saw someone scramble into a darker part of the room while putting their own robe on. Ah. "Sorry, I can go catch that guy..."
"Guy or girl." She corrected, then got on her hands and knees and pulled her robe around her, standing while using her foot to collect undergarments she tucked into a pocket. "Are we leaving?"
"Not yet. I have some goals I've picked up since getting picked up. Is it safe to talk here?"
She ran fingers through her hair, straightening it. "Yes. This isn't the real vault for anything but currency they are desprately trying to convert. Everything below is a massive collection of scamstone. It's a deterrent for scrying and searching skills for treasure."
"So there's another place they stock crystals?"
"I've been to site B. C is spirit stonybrooks, which are functionally useless to us because we don't cowtivate. D is spirit stones, also functionally useless to us because we don't cultivate."
"There's a difference?" Corvayne couldn't keep the shock out of his voice.
Kirae shruged. "They tell me there is, I don't have talent in regular or cowboy cultivating. Which means I'm the only person with a mercantile class they let anywhere near them now. Makes for a very boring Monday."
"Are you happy here?"
She made a so-so gesture. "I've gotten extremely good level ups and there are skills I'm developing very quickly, but the other merchants hog the expensive and wide trades since they think they can't get good essence gains doing other things. So I'm going to get a weird quartermaster class if I don't rip someone off soon. Also... I miss Shaelle, I like living in a city, and I kinda miss you idiots."
Easy levels... "Are you selling anything in this room?"
"There's nobody to buy it-"
"I can afford it." Corvayne said. "And I'm willing to bet solid money we have a sort-of theif class who can then steal everything the sect was paid on my behalf from you when you got to site B with a boatload of black crystals."
Corvayne walked over to laundry bins full of metal hexagons, and picked one up. "Nobody knows what these plates are used for?"
"The Eagle-Eye'd Trader they have thinks a lot of things here are tower currencies for rooms that don't exist yet or no longer exist." Kirae went over to a clay jar labeled 'Dragon Stones' and held up a gem. When she pressed it, it changed form, Corvayne recognizing a web, a hammer, a rock, and eventually back to a blue stone. “Worth 6,000 yellow crystals as what my skill calls the 'mean', but you might pay at most 1,000 blue from curio vendors at the marketplaces. You often can just buy them for a 10 gold from initiates who find them. Less than a billionth of the price it should be.”
He held a hand out, and she dropped it into his. Corvanye used compass, asking it for someone who could use it. It pointed at him and Kirae. Oh right, he could squeeze it and change shape. He tried again, for someone who could show him it's real value. It gave him a direction. That was enough.
Now, he could probably just pop things into his storage ring and walk out, but Kirae had been lamenting not gaining levels acting as a merchant. “You here all day?”
“I sleep here sometimes in exchange for the night shift doing me favors. My actual room is tiny and I have a mattress on top of the softstone slabs in the corner.”
Corvayne looked about. “How's currency scale again? Roughly a hundred gold for a green, hundred green crystals for a blue, so on?”
Kirae jerked her head back and forth following where Corvayne was looking. Her voice sounded a little confused by the question. “It drops to ten times for orange and up. But yes, green, then blue, yellow, purple, orange, red, violet, then black, then white to radiant white, which might have grades, supposedly there was a merchant who saw a white that gave them a tan at the marketplace on floor 50.”
Corvayne made eye contact and nodded. “Thanks. Standard size is about a knife blade, right?”
“Most of the shards you bleed are two to three crystals.” She said, frowning. “That's why you want to keep them in a storage ring, it's too easy to hone in on them for thieves. I am wondering why you are not bleeding them... I figured they had been harvesting yours in jail.”
Corvayne shook his head. “I suspected our original plan might go south. I will need to talk to you about information regarding the sect... but to be clear, you are responsible for this room and it's stock? If you had a merchant come here, would you have the authority to deal with it?”
“Yes. They gave me authority to sell from the room, but there's a demand I get at least one hundredth my skill's market price unless the head merchant approves. It's woven into the formations of this building, somehow. Just the other day I had a gentleman who wanted some of the Impervium for the bottom of his fish tank...” Her eyes narrowed as she trailed off, then she got a predatory look. “Corvayne, my good friend, are you perhaps storing a few pounds of black crystal in your body?” Greed and ambition flowed through the [[Unity]] link. “That can't be healthy.”
He summoned one of many, many piles of slightly bloody black crystals from the holdout ring on his clavicle onto the wood floor. Then another pile. He picked up one that after rubbing some of the dried blood off had a hint of white on the tip. “What are you asking for everything in this room?”