“Uh….”
The guy seemed immediately remorseful once he realized that he was too eager that it must have resulted in a misunderstanding. He brushed his long and oily hair away from his face, licked his finger, and tried to remove the stains from his white lab coat, he tried to fix his posture but failed after a few seconds.
“My apologies. I forgot to introduce myself again.” The man held out his hand for a handshake. “My name is Leonard Ainz.” However, he didn’t seem to realize that Patty was still in his bed and he was still at the door, so there was no way that they could do a handshake.
“Cool bro.” Patty nodded. “I’m Patty.”
“Ah! So you are Patrick Patterson…I must say I am a bit disappointed.” Leonard looked at Patty’s house and saw that it was very disorganized and very unclean. There was plastic litter all over the floor, and unwashed dishes in the sink, and he could tell that the room hadn’t been cleaned, probably since it was built. This wasn’t the home of someone who could give him what he wanted.
He was expecting to meet someone more official, someone who had the aura of dignity and professionalism. Patty was none of those. He didn’t even get up from his bed to greet him.
“Can’t do anything about that,” Patty commented. He didn’t care about what this new guy thought of him.
“I came here because I thought I was meeting with someone from a professional company that was impressive enough to catch the eyes of Miss Alexandria Von Cromich,” Leonard revealed.
Leonard knew that Miss Xandra inherited the eyes of a Chromic, meaning that her words held tremendous weight. Those eyes were what led the Matriarch of the Chromic family to conquer the world using their business acumen. Everything she touched, eventually became a goose that bore thousands of golden eggs at the same time. In her eyes, a simple rock could become a gem that the wealthy would pay millions of Chains to wear on their bodies.
So, when the lady Xandra contacted him for an opportunity to buy high-quality Kores, he thought that he would be meeting with an executive of a mining company that found new Kores in an unexplored mountain.
After all, Kores couldn’t just be found anywhere lying on the streets. They had to be excavated from the depths of mountains and the Earth. Usually, they would be hidden under oceans of lava guarded by Fiends and Monsters who made it their lair. Excavators without the proper equipment and strong guards, you would not even be able to mine low-quality Kores. That’s the reason why only companies with Money and Power were able to mine high-quality Kores, and also why Leonard was suspicious of Patty.
There was no way that a guy who didn’t even have a bed frame owned high-quality Kores. Thousands of people die every year trying to venture into lava pools and to try their luck at the Kore lottery, and most of them were professional Dreamers who were licensed and trained to deal with any problem that came their way. So, how did a lazy youth like this have a high-quality Kore?
“Urgh,” Leonard shook his head in disappointment. “I wonder what happened in the Von Chromic line? It must have been diluted from the original for their eye powers to have weakened to this point.”
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“Huh?”
“Or perhaps Miss Xandra still hasn’t fully grasped her powers to have misjudged the value that a youth could give me. It is my fault. I hadn’t made it clear that I wanted high-quality Kores that were either 30% to 50% purity Kores. I did want normal grade Kores at the beginning, but I have long since finished that project and moved on to more high-quality Kores.”
“Wait, are you here because Xandra said that you can buy high-quality Kores from me?” Patty asked him expectantly.
“I’m sorry. This must have been a misunderstanding between us. What you have in your possession is most likely normal-grade Kores that are between 5% to 25% purity. They are the most common Kores to find and the easiest to gather, so they aren’t that valuable.”
Leonard took out time from his precious laboratory time because he thought he’d be able to buy Kores, but it seemed that he wasted his time for nothing. “I’ll take my leave now,” he said as he turned around. He was about to close the door behind him when Patty spoke up,
“Do you mean high-quality Kores like this one?”
More often than not, people tended to misjudge their Kores because it was hard to see the purity of the Kores using the naked eye. There were special microscopes armed with prisms that could accurately judge a Kore’s purity, but only certain agencies had this equipment.
So, most Kores circulating in the market were marked by banks and official certification agencies that engraved a small rating of purity on the Kore itself. So, you couldn’t know for certain about the purity of a crude Kore that wasn’t certified yet. That was the reason why high-quality Kores needed to be processed by banks and made sure that it was high quality.
You could buy crude Kores in the black market that hadn’t yet been marked, but a lot of people were scammed because they thought they were buying high-quality Kores, but the truth was much lower than they expected.
Leonard turned around and faced Patty. As a professional researcher, he knew more about Kore purity than most people. He could accurately guess a Kore’s purity by at least 5% of its true value. He felt sorry for Patty, so he decided to tell him the truth about the Kore he had. He was probably one of those people who were scammed by the black market who were telling him that it was 30% pure Kore, but in truth, it was probably only 23% pure.
“I’ll be nice to you and be frank with you,” Leonard moved closer to Patty’s bed to take a closer look at the Kores in his hand. Because of the dim lighting, he couldn’t accurately guess it if he wasn’t looking at it with his hands.
The Kores in Patty’s hands were Kores for sure, judged Leonard. They were thin, black crystals that were as thick as one and a half fingers and as long as a middle finger. They were the real deal. Now, he checked the opacity of the crystals, how they absorbed all the light and reflected as little as possible.
He expected to see Kores that were a little bit clear, enough to read through the text behind the crystal. But surprisingly, they were blacker and more opaque than he expected. They might even be high-purity Kores that he wanted! But that’s impossible. His eyes must have been deceiving him because of the poor lighting.
“Can I open the lights?” Leonard asked.
Patty nodded and used his lips to point to the light switch on the wall. Leonard walked towards the wall, his head going through all possibilities. He still didn’t know what to expect when he looked at the Kores in a bright light.
He walked back over to Patty and his heart dropped. Even from far away, he could see how dark those crystals were. It was like there were a bunch of crystal-sized holes in his hands that led to the deepest and darkest voids of space. It immediately caught his eye; there was no mistaking it. These were high-quality Kores!
“Oh, Supremes…” Leonard's knees weakened as he sat on the bed, staring at the crystals just in front of him. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He didn’t expect such high-quality Kores to appear in such a messy and unclean place like Patty’s house. And he certainly wasn’t expecting a youth like Patty to bring out these Kores like it was nothing. He didn’t even have any cases to store these! Was he insane?
“Can I?” Leonard asked to touch the Kores and Patty agreed. Even if Patty didn’t want him to touch it, Leonard’s professional curiosity would have made him snatch the Kores away from his hands, not to steal it, but to observe it with his own eyes.
Looking at it now, he was certain of their purities.
He started to evaluate the Kores in his hands, and with each Kore, his breathing got heavier. 30%, 40%, 45%, 53%, 59%, and Leonard’s hands started to tremble as he looked at the last piece of Kore. It was 70% purity Kore! Most people would consider this a family heirloom, but somehow, Patty just had it in his house without any sort of security at all. The insanity!
“Th…this….I…I can’t believe…..70% PURE KORE!”
He contacted every company he could contact to see if they were selling any 60% and above pure Kore, but they all declined to sell him one, either because they didn’t have one, or they didn’t want to sell their stock. It was his dream to study Kores of this quality!