Chapter 7
Keith knew nothing about coffee, so he simply went to the nearest franchise and got what was popular before returning to Frisk with a bag. Baffled, Frisk looked inside and pulled out a tall transparent plastic cup. “What the slimeball is this?”
“It’s a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Crème Frappuccino,” Keith answered matter-of-factly.
Frisk took a sip and recoiled in disgust. “This is dessert, not coffee!”
“It has coffee in it,” Keith was helpless. “Anyway, you didn’t say what type to get.”
Frisk placed the Caramel Ribbon Crunch Crème Frappuccino back into the bag and set it aside. Rubbing his brow, Frisk glanced at Keith, feeling disappointed. “Forget it. Seems I can only trust myself.”
Keith shrugged as Frisk pointed at his desk, “I wrote up the contract. Tell me if you disagree with anything.”
Walking over, Keith read through the contract and was surprised by Frisk’s guarantee to provide two two-hour teaching sessions a week. The contract was as fair as possible, so Keith wrote his signature.
When Frisk saw Keith’s visible satisfaction, he scoffed, “Are you happy now?”
“Yes, very,” Keith smiled, his opinion of Frisk improving by a few levels as he quickly stuffed the contract into his inventory before anything could happen.
Frisk’s lips twitched, and shaking his head, he said, “Now that that’s settled, I want you to show me each skill array you possess so I can deduce the meaning of all the runes I’m unfamiliar with.”
Keith paused. “Uh, I have over three hundred skills, you know.”
“All the better,” Frisk sat down and stared intensely at Keith, waiting for him to begin.
Knowing this would take a long time to accomplish, Keith asked, “Can I get a chair?”
“If you can find one,” Frisk thought about it. “If not, you can use a box.”
Keith searched for a good minute before deciding to spend gold to withdraw a chair from his Collection Grimoire. And so, sitting across from Frisk, Keith spent the next twelve hours circulating his mana to form one skill array after another.
It took Keith around five minutes to recreate a single skill array and ten minutes for Frisk to commit it to memory. In total, it took twelve hours to go through forty-eight skills. Keith was utterly exhausted after channeling mana for so long, so they could only continue tomorrow.
To be time efficient, Keith stayed inside the Pocket Dimension. He cleaned up a corner of the dimension, then used the boxes as walls and furniture in his Collection Grimoire to have a private area to sleep in. While Keith rested, Frisk returned to his previous task – upgrading weapons.
Six hours later, Keith woke up, found something to eat, then continued showing Frisk his skill arrays. Like this, a week went by. When Keith revealed the last skill array, he nearly whooped with joy. The whole process had been utterly dull, and he couldn’t wait to do something that involved moving around. Thankfully, Frisk didn’t assign him another task, so Keith left the Pocket Dimension without reservation.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Right when Keith breathed in fresh air from outside, he noticed something off. Looking up, he saw a transparent barrier covering the entire sky.
A name popped into his mind – the Skynet!
Overcome with curiosity, Keith activated Flight and soared into the air. With a better vantage point, Keith saw multiple pillars of mana connecting the sky and earth, a large distance separating each one. Flying even higher, Keith spotted at least a hundred pillars powering the barrier in Serenity Canyon alone. Including the three other zones, there had to be at least four hundred pillars.
“Slimeballs,” Keith muttered, awed by the sheer scope of the array. He couldn’t help but admire the sight. It required hundreds of thousands of people and countless resources to create. How grand of an undertaking was that?
It wasn’t until some time later that Keith recovered his awareness. Stretching mid-air, he wondered about what to do. Staying locked up in the Pocket Dimension for so long had left him brimming with energy and nowhere to vent it. Considering a little, he decided to hunt monsters – alone.
Although he didn’t like to think about it, when he fought against the Elemental Dimension’s adventurers, he found the whole encounter fairly easy. Ever since acquiring a transcendent grade Mana Body, he lacked an understanding of his combat potential. That was a problem. Not knowing your own power was taboo for an adventurer and could easily lead to a fatal mistake during a moment of crisis.
However, there was one thing Keith needed to do before heading out in search of monsters. For the past six months, he hadn’t stopped growing and selling herbs, and with the influx of new items from the Grandsky Realm resulting in a volatile market, Keith saved over 99% of his profits, waiting for it to stabilize. He didn’t want to buy items at a premium price if he could wait a few months to get the most value out of his gold. As such, Keith had in his possession an enormous 40 billion gold to his name.
Nowadays, the economy had mostly stabilized. All the items Keith had an eye on were now several times cheaper than six months ago. On the flip side, thousands of farmers now provided a steady supply of herbs to the market, so the profit Keith acquired from selling herbs was at an all-time low. It was still worthwhile for Keith to grow herbs, though it was nowhere near the crazy money it racked in at the start.
After Operation Skynet, Keith felt the desire for strength now more than ever. He wanted to be strong enough to take control of any situation – no matter how dire it became. Keith didn’t want circumstances to force him to do anything he didn’t want to. Once was enough.
In any case, every day for the past few weeks, Keith had kept tabs on the market, noting what items he wanted to purchase in a personal file should the time come when he decided to splurge.
Now was that time.
Pulling out his magic tablet, Keith went to his contacts and sent Adeiv a message, informing him to begin purchasing things en masse. Keith had long since coordinated with Adeiv to take advantage of the man’s vast network, and lately, Adeiv was just waiting for Keith to give the go-ahead.
Meanwhile, when Adeiv read Keith’s message, the corner of his lips curled. Even as a business owner, he’d never made anywhere near 40 billion gold. Adeiv couldn’t wait to begin, so he promptly cut his training short and rushed to his office. He flipped open a document, ran his finger down the contacts list, and began making calls. For every person he called, he spoke with great confidence and authority.
“Petre? Yeah, it’s me. I want daggers, swords, staves, rods, spears, and wands. 40,000 each, all mythic grade and level 500 or above.”
“Hey, Michael, it’s Adeiv Strinde. I heard you recently acquired a large stock of equipment. Is that right? Good. I’m interested in all of it. No, I’m not joking.”
“Alexandra, it’s been a while. How’s the farm been? Ah, I’ll purchase one million of each fruit and vegetable you have.”
“Wait, Alexandra, don’t hang up again. No, I’m not scamming you. I’m serious. Yes, one million each. My client? Well, they’d prefer to keep their information private.”
Similar conversations happened over and over, and if Adeiv hadn’t built some reputation for himself, they would’ve thought he was a prank caller. By the end, Adeiv made orders with over forty suppliers across seven industries—food, equipment, raw materials, potions, etc.
Forty billion gold, gone in the wind, just like that.