Chapter 139: Weekly Haul

A cool, air-conditioned breeze left Zach feeling refreshed as he and Jimmy took their first few hesitant steps into this unexpected, NPC-run, and incredibly cozy item shop. Part of him felt like he should be a bit more taken aback, but at this point, he was accustomed to unexpected turn of events like these in the adventuring world; therefore, the fact that a place like this existed did not entirely shock him. What did shock him was the desperation, longing, and glee in the tear-filled eyes of the quirky-looking shopkeeper. Zach wasn’t sure what to make of this man, with his white puffs of hair, his vividly colored attire, and the rainbow-colored umbrella that he swayed back and forth almost as though it were an automatic reflex.

“Customers,” he said, his tone making it obvious that he was choking back even heavier tears. “I can’t believe it.”

For the second time, Zach and Jimmy exchanged a glance as though searching for answers in the eyes of the other, finding none. Zach took another step forward along the soft, clean, and navy-blue carpet. From the entrance to the counter, there was a fairly wide-open space, offering nothing in the way of furniture aside from a round stand that contained various packaged snacks along with unrefrigerated, bottled beverages. Interestingly, it seemed to consist entirely of common rarity items like Frog Snax and Skelly Chips. Off to his left was where the various aisles of other miscellaneous products awaited, and Zach was willing to bet that they, too, contained exclusively “adventuring world” items. Overall, the shop looked incredibly well maintained, fresh, and had a perfect level of cleanliness. Not a speck of dust or dirt could be seen anywhere.

“Hi there,” Zach said, unsure of how to proceed.

“Hi,” Jimmy added.

The shopkeeper, who went around the back of the counter and then reappeared out front, still holding his umbrella, wiped tears from his eyes with his opposite hand. There was a natural quiet in here, making each of his footsteps more pronounced, as well as those taken by Zach and Jimmy. Zach, filled with uncertainty, held his position and observed as this extraordinarily high-level NPC leaned slightly forward and squinted his eyes as though attempting to discern something, saying nothing for the time being.

What’s he staring at? Zach wondered.

It only then occurred to Zach that he and Jimmy still had their weapons drawn, and so, apologetically, he quickly sheathed his sword, and Jimmy, as if catching on, sheathed his staff as well. Even still, this did not bring any change in the NPC man’s demeanor; he continued to squint and stare at them as though perturbed. Finally, after several awkward seconds of this, he opened his mouth, gasped, and said, “L-let me get the fire extinguisher!”

“The what?” Zach asked him as he dropped his umbrella, ran behind the counter, and disappeared a moment before reappearing with a red mini-extinguisher.

Does he want to use that on me?

“Whoah, hold up!” Zach called out to him, backing away. “Don’t spray me with that!”

“Ehrm, why not?” the man asked, another gasp trailing his words. “Aren’t you on fire?”

“On fire? Huh? Why would you think I’m—”

“Zach, your ability,” Jimmy interrupted, nudging him.

“Oh. Ohh! Okay, no, it’s cool.” He held out both of his arms and extended his hands in the man’s direction, showing him that the smoke was coming from the center of each hand. “It’s just an ability I have. I’m not on fire. So please don’t hose me with that, okay?”

Once more, the strange shopkeeper squinted at him for several, prolonged seconds, and then he released a chirp of a laugh, returned the fire extinguisher back to wherever he’d taken it, and hurriedly came back out front, picked up his umbrella, and then gawked at the two of them. Zach, a bit offput, did his best not to offend or upset the NPC, as he was roughly three times higher level than even Angelica and the last thing Zach wanted to do was get on his bad side.

He doesn’t seem unfriendly, at least, Zach thought. Just really strange.

Clearing his throat and coughing into his fist, Zach took yet another step into the shop, and once there, he said, “So, uh, my name is—”

“I’m Mushkie!” the NPC shouted out, his volume a bit too loud for such a quiet, homely environment. Even still, Zach smiled politely at him, not bothering to mention that his name was evident as it was literally floating about six-or-so inches above his head in bold white lettering. “It’s my honor to meet the both of you: Zachys Calador and James Green.”

“You know who we are?” Jimmy asked, sounding surprised.

“Just your names. I can see that. And your levels and a few other basic details.” He began to sniffle. “I’m sorry. I apologize.” He wiped more tears that came to his eyes. “You don’t understand how lonely I’ve been. I haven’t had the chance to speak to anyone in over five centuries.”

This was something he’d mentioned earlier, but it only really sank in now. Zach found it unsettling, and it brought about an immediate compassion within him. Thanks to his connection with Eilea, he didn’t have to “imagine” what someone would feel like being alone in isolation for such a long time, because he had felt it—or at least a small portion of it—during his interactions with Eilea Vayra. For this reason, Zach found it easy to forgive him for his off-putting, somewhat manic behavior.

“I’m guessing you did something to piss Adamus off, huh?” Zach asked him.

The NPC—Mushkie—reacted with a sort of stunned bafflement to Zach’s question. His mouth dropped open, his back stiffened, and he began fervently shaking his head. “Who, me? No, no, of course not, dear customers! I’ve never been anything but good!”

“Really? Then why’d Adamus lock you up here?”

“Lock me…? No, this has always been where Mushkie belongs!” he insisted. “I’ve been here for thousands of years. I was created to be here.”

“But…if you didn’t do anything wrong, why’re you stuck here?”

“Because I was created to be here,” he repeated, speaking as though his words were more than sufficient to alleviate any confusion on the matter. They weren’t. Zach wasn’t sure if he should even bother to pry given that he was speaking with an unknown NPC with a clearly erratic temperament. Nevertheless, he decided to gently probe, as the existence of this place did much to arouse his curiosity. Yet, just before he could ask the next question on his mind, Jimmy beat him to it.

“Why don’t you just up and leave if you’re so lonely?” he asked, extending his arm towards the exit door.

“Leave?” Mushkie whispered. The way he spoke the word gave Zach the impression that it was strange on his lips: like a foreign thought. “Mushkie can’t leave. I’m not allowed!”

“But Angelica leaves her inn and tavern all the time,” Zach said. “So why can’t you leave your item shop? You should go visit Angelica.”

“I don’t even know her,” Mushkie replied curtly and a bit dismissively. This, Zach found more stunning than anything else he’d said so far.

“You…you don’t know Angelica? She’s an NPC like you.”

Mushkie tapped his umbrella against his noggin. “I know who she is. Never met her, though. She’s got nothing to do with me.”

Jimmy seemed to find all this just as strange as Zach did. He made a reflective-sounding hum then vocalized his confusion. “Do you really just stay in here all day by yourself?”

“That’s right! I’m not allowed to leave.”

Zach rubbed his chin as he thought over everything he’d just heard. After a moment, he asked, “So, you’re not allowed to leave this place, and uh, you’ve been all alone here for over five centuries. And you’re saying this is not some kind of, like, punishment or something?”

Mushkie’s response was as quirky and unusual as the NPC himself. Slowly, he closed his umbrella, and then he tapped his palm against his chest several times. “That’s right,” he whispered. Then another short period of silence transpired between the three of them, with Zach standing beside Jimmy on the carpet, and Mushkie gazing off solemnly at nothing in particular. Eventually, however, he met Zach and Jimmy’s eyes, looking at each of them for several seconds before addressing them both.

“But it wasn’t always like this!” he continued. “My shop used to be so popular. Once upon a time, Mushkie had thousands of customers a day. It was always busy in here. So lively! But something changed around a…hmm…I’d say around a thousand years ago; fewer adventurers started showing up, dropping to a few hundred a day, and then even less started coming over the following centuries. My last customer visited me five-hundred years ago. I don’t know why it happened. Trials of Nolak used to be a very busy dungeon. Why did all the adventurers stop coming?”

Zach found his words so remarkable that it took him a bit to reply as he processed what he’d heard; in particular, what stuck out to him was that Mushkie had specifically mentioned Trials of Nolak, the exact dungeon that he and Jimmy were currently running through. He’d mentioned it and it alone. Did this mean…?

“Uh, hey, Mushkie,” Zach said. “Are you telling me that the one secret passageway we used to get here is the only way to get to your item shop? That there are no other ways for someone to get here?”

Mushkie scratched the bald spot in the center of his head, which was sandwiched between two giant, cotton-ball-like puffs of pure white hair. “Well, of course,” he replied, speaking as though it were obvious.

“But Angelica’s has thousands of ways to get there. Maybe even millions. They say no one knows even a fraction of them.”

Mushkie shrugged. “Mushkie is not Angelica. My shop runs through Trials of Nolak only. But it’s hardly a secret. Everyone knows I’m here. Why don’t they come anymore?”

Zach looked at Jimmy, and then Jimmy looked at Zach, and in that moment, Zach was positive that the same chill he felt running down his spine was one that Jimmy could feel as well. “You…you don’t know what goes on outside of this place?” Zach asked him.

“Nope,” he replied immediately. “Should I?”

“Well, Angelica seems to have ways of knowing everything that’s happening around the world.”

“Mushkie is not Angelica!” he shouted as though offended. An instant later, his tone became far softer, and he asked, “Why? What doesn’t Mushkie know?”

Zach drew a deep breath and then released it slowly. “Whew, okay. This is going to be a lot for you to take in.”

“Tell me.”

Zach took a second breath, and like the previous one, he held it a moment before releasing it. “All right. So, just to come straight out with it: Galterra today is not the same as it was a long time ago. I don’t know how you don’t know this, but there are barely a thousand adventurers left in the world, and from what I’ve been told, almost no one knows anything about Trials of Nolak. Me and Jimmy are only even here because we’re using the dungeon as a way of getting to Slopes of Dal’Zarrah.”

“Slopes of Dal’Zarrah?” Mushkie asked, clearly amused. From his reaction, he seemed to ignore everything Zach had just told him except for the last few words. “You boys off to fight the minotaur?”

“The minotaur?”

His response to Zach’s question was to clasp his hand over his mouth as though he’d spilled some important secret. “Oh no! Did I just reveal a quest spawn to someone who hadn’t discovered it yet? That’s a no-no!”

“Quest…spawn?” Zach whispered. Then it truly dawned on him just how clueless Mushkie actually was. “Wait, do you think…?” Zach paused, unsure of how to word what he knew he needed to say next. But at the very least, all the pieces were finally falling into place, and he was beginning to understand Mushkie’s confusion.

“Mushkie,” Zach began, addressing him by name. “Galterra doesn’t have any ‘quest spawns’ or mobs or things like that anymore. Everyone in the world except for a few people is level 1. The average person has never seen a mob with their own naked eyes, and even fewer people are aware that the dungeons still exist at all, let alone would they ever imagine visiting one. In fact, not only don’t people level up or visit dungeons anymore, but most people couldn’t do so even if they wanted to. There’s nothing for them to kill that gives experience, and they can’t access the dungeons without a special buff. That is probably why people aren’t coming here.”

Mushkie’s eyes widened, and Zach could spot disbelief in them. “That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s the truth,” Jimmy said, chiming in. “I been out there. It’s just people living regular lives. There’s no mobs or anything in the open.”

Mushkie once more went behind his counter, and he returned a moment later with a small wooden stool, which he then sat down on. “Are you boys lying?”

“No,” both Zach and Jimmy said at the same time. Then Zach took a few minutes to calmly explain his upbringing, his life prior to becoming an adventurer, and what his view of the world was like before he’d become involved in this new one.

Stolen novel; please report.

“So…so what do Galterrans do all day?” Mushkie asked, clearly flabbergasted.

“Just, you know…normal stuff,” Zach replied.

“Like what?”

“Uh, you know, work, go to school, sell insurance, watch movies—just normal things.”

Mushkie’s expression shifted back and forth between wonder, doubt, and then finally, after a period of apparent reflection, Zach thought he spotted something akin to acceptance. “So that’s why,” he whispered, staring at the floor a moment. “Galterrans…they actually…” He snapped his face up and once more took in him and Jimmy. “So, are you saying that Mushkie didn’t do anything wrong?”

“Of course not,” Zach said. “Did…did you think it was your own fault that people stopped coming?”

“Yes! I thought maybe I was bad.” He again shed a few tears. “So that’s why everyone went away…”

Astounded, Zach asked, “And you’ve been here all alone ever since?”

“Yes!”

“And nobody ever came by to tell you anything? You were just left here for hundreds of years to wonder what happened?”

“That’s right!”

Zach couldn’t help but feel a storm of rage growing inside of himself at how cavalier Adamus was when it came to abusing non-biological, sentient beings. Despite only having spoken to him once, and despite knowing almost nothing about him personally, Zach had now seen more than enough evidence to conclude definitively that Adamus held absolutely no regard for NPCs, and he almost certainly did not view them as being “real” or “genuine” forms of life.

For whatever reason, the so-called “Great One” placed absolutely no value whatsoever in the concept of “consciousness.” Clearly, he didn’t mind bringing thinking, feeling beings into existence only to allow—or directly cause—them to then experience great suffering. Not even those who appeared to be loyal and serve him well were granted any kind of consideration for their pain. It was sickening and irresponsible.

He brings them into the world and then doesn’t care for them, Zach thought. Worse, he doesn’t even view them as people.

No matter how different he might have been from the average person, Zach could never view someone like Grundor or even Ruby as just an inanimate object meant to serve a master. Thankfully, Olivir and Kalana couldn’t either, and both Grundor and Ruby were loved. But what if that hadn’t been the case? What if Olivir treated Grundor more like a pet—or worse? Like a meat shield to be used and then discarded? It was unthinkable. If anything, both Kalana and Olivir were more likely to throw themselves in front of their NPCs than they were to allow them to die on their behalf.

What Adamus did isn’t right, Zach thought, a belief he held down to his very core.

For a short while, Zach said nothing as Mushkie seemed to take a moment to let everything sink in. Finally, however, after almost two straight minutes of what looked like silent contemplation, Mushkie’s expression brightened; he smiled, got up from his stool, set his umbrella down, and then spread his arms widely to both sides of him. “So, do you boys want to know about my store?”

“Hell yeah,” Jimmy said. Zach wasn’t sure if he was genuinely interested or just looking to change the subject; it was probably a mixture of both.

Mushkie took several quick steps forward and then pointed. “Believe it or not, my store is one of the most important places for adventurers, and I’m not exaggerating. It really is! You’ll come back here again and again.” He wiggled his finger, his smile broadening. “You see, boys, there’s a reason Mushkie used to be so popular that adventurers would have to line up outside in the passageway because there was no room left to get in.”

Zach glanced around at the spacious interior of the NPC’s shop, finding this to be an astonishing claim. “Really?”

“Oh, yes-yes-yes! On some days, it was so crowded that adventurers would fight each other to get inside.”

Zach laughed. “Well, consider me hooked. I’m interested in hearing more.”

“Yeah, tell us what the deal is,” Jimmy said. “What’s so special about it?”

This seemed to be the question Mushkie was waiting for, because he really came alive, and now that he was stripped of his sad and defeated expression, his colorful attire and whimsical appearance began to make a bit more sense as he playfully twirled around and began discussing his item shop.

“So, as both of ya can already tell, I have a general section where you can find mundane, every-day common items that can help you in your grand adventures. As I’m sure you boys know, you can’t store regular objects in Bank and Storage: only named items from the adventuring world can go in your storage box. Luckily for you, everything in my store can accompany you on your travels. Emergency food, water, whatever you need: all of it can be placed in your storage and go with you wherever you end up. But! But! But! But! That is not why Mushkie used to have so much traffic that more than a dozen adventurers perished in brawls trying to cut the line to get in!”

Mushkie scurried back behind his counter, slapped his palms down on the countertop, and then a screen of information popped into existence out of midair, occupying what Zach now realized was a frame of sorts above and in front of the counter. “The reason Mushkie’s shop has always and will always be the number-one stop for adventurers is because of the Weekly Haul! Each and every week, my selection of special items refreshes. You can buy anything you see here, but in limited quantity, for the entire week!”

Zach glanced upwards at the screen of information—and then he felt his heart begin to kick in his chest as he came close to choking out a cough in sheer amazement at what he saw for just the first three items on this informational display; before him, amid a blue backdrop, there was a simple list of items along with a “quantity” that could be purchased per customer. And it was the first three of these that made him lean in closer while shuddering with excitement.

Item

Quantity (Per Customer)

Price

Red Rejuvenation Stone

2

20,000G

Yellow Rejuvenation Stone

2

25,000G

Purple Rejuvenation Stone

1

30,000G

There were other items, but those three struck Zach so powerfully that it was as though the words themselves had leapt off the floating display and poked him in the eyes. “J-Jimmy!” he yelped. “They’re selling rejuvenation stones for…for…”

Of all things, Mushkie sighed. “I’m sorry, boys. Usually, they’re a bit cheaper. Mushkie has no control over what appears on the list each week and how much it will cost. They’re a bit pricey this week.”

“Pricey?” Zach exclaimed, unable to control his shouting. “Those stones are worth millions of gold each!”

“Millions?” Mushkie shouted right back at him. “For mere rejuvenation stones? My, what has happened to sweet Galterra if the stones have inflated that much in cost!”

Zach couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Like a rising tide, he risked being swept away with a greed so powerful it made his hand shake as he reached across to touch the screen. “How do I buy them?” he asked urgently.

“If your money’s in Bank and Storage, you just have to tap what you want and then tap buy. I accept raw gold coins as well. Also! I forgot to mention: each and every month, I have a rare, very exclusive item for sale. I actually get to pick who I offer it to, which has always been so much fun for me. Now, the way I used to decide who gets the offer would be by holding special contests and events. But…since you’re the first face I’ve seen in centuries, and since you mentioned you visit Angelica’s a lot, I think maybe you’ll be interested in this.”

The display briefly changed, and now there was just one item shown for sale. Zach saw it, he blinked exactly three times in succession, and then there was an explosion within him: a monumental nuclear-force blast of greed that shook him so terribly he momentarily lost the ability to breathe. As the name of the item appeared before him, he did not simply reach forward to purchase it: he dove at it. He actually dove forward at the screen and slammed his palm against it with enough force that it caused his hand to ache. And then he continued to tap at it, slapping the buy button over and over and over, spending 40,000 of his 72,000 gold without even a moment’s consideration.

“Did I get it?” he shouted. “Did I get it?”

“You did, you did! Stop slapping my display!”

Zach made such a sharp inhale that it reminded him of how he sounded a bit earlier when him and Jimmy had surfaced in the pond with their lungs burning for oxygen.

This can’t be real.

Appearing before him was a certificate. And on this certificate, it said: Angelica’s Inn: 1 year paid in advance, room 8.

“You greedy motherfucker!” Jimmy hissed, clearly upset, though Zach was too elated to care. “We could’a rolled for that shit or something. Damn, man.”

Zach trembled as he looked upon the certificate. He couldn’t believe this was real. Room fucking eight! This was worth fifty, maybe sixty million gold, easy. Hell, any inn room within a twenty-minute walk was worth in the millions. Most people would fight—literally, actually fight—over getting a room in the top two thousand. And here was an item of “uncommon” rarity that might as well have been artifact quality.

The eighth inn room! Nobody’s going to believe me when I tell them I have it! This is worth more than life itself!

Despite having impulsively rushed forward, Zach audaciously turned to Jimmy and asked, “Can I borrow some money?”

“You serious?” Jimmy asked, a slight scowl on his face.

“Jimmy, I know you’re mad, but we obviously need to buy every single thing on this list. I don’t know what most of this shit is, like that ‘dungeon escape rope,’ but we have to buy everything. Especially that ‘teleport stone,’ which sounds cool as hell. Oh, Gods, Jimmy! We’re about to be the richest people in Galterran history!”

Jimmy curled his lips. The prospect of fortune and riches didn’t seem to matter much to him, and rather than reply to what Zach had just said, he seemed to be stuck on the matter of the inn room.

“I’m just gonna be real for a second,” he began, coming across as aggravated. “Zach, I don’t mind you taking the inn room if it’s because you want to use it and start building a world in there. But you’re gonna sell it. That’s why I’m kinda pissed off. I mean, don’t get me wrong: like I said, if it’s because you wanna build a pocket world of your own, I wouldn’t be saying shit to you right now. I just wanna make that clear. Thing is, Zach, that unlike you, I don’t want to live on Galterra. I wanna live inside the dungeon ecosystem, not out of it—especially if this is gonna be my life going forward. I would make so much better use of that than anyone else. Right now, I’m stuck in room thirty-eight-fucking-thousand, two-hundred-seven. It takes my ass over an hour to walk home.”

“Yeah, that sucks,” Zach said, barely paying attention to what Jimmy had said.

Hungrily, he eyed the certificate. Morally, he knew the right thing to do would be to let Jimmy have it. It was also something Jascaila would say he should do if she were here right now. But you know what? She wasn’t here right now, and progress took time, so fuck it: there was no way Jimmy was getting it; no, Zach was going to sell it and then buy ten mansions or something. Or…maybe not. That might be excessive, actually. But the point was that he could buy ten mansions if he wanted to. After all, he was holding onto the most prime real-estate in the entire adventuring world.

Inn room 8. I just can’t believe it.

The original screen having returned, Zach eyed the rejuvenation stones as well as the various other items being sold beneath them. “Damn, I need more gold,” he muttered.

Mushkie beamed, pointing somewhere at the screen. “You can also sell your unwanted items here, too.”

“I can?”

“Sure can! Just press that button there, and you’ll see an itemized list of everything in your storage box.”

Zach did as he was told, and just as Mushkie had said, he could now see his own storage box, which was mostly filled with ether low-level junk from the Moldark boss in Yorna that he’d farmed, along with the common, unneeded items he’d gotten from Gacha Get'cha. Interestingly—and disappointingly—their value here was greatly disproportionate to their real-world value. But this, of course, meant little, since selling adventuring-world items to normal level-one citizens was considered such a huge taboo and also a crime. Even still, the mace from Moldark, which was worth a mere 5,000g, was something he could probably sell for a million if not way, way more if only he was allowed to do so.

I never thought I’d see the day where 5,000 gold feels like a small amount of coin, he thought to himself. Gods, things have really changed for me.

Not wanting to waste any time making decisions, Zach lifted his hand and absentmindedly pressed sell, sell, sell, sell, sell…

It’s just junk, he told himself. Better off getting rid of it.

When all was said and done, Zach ended up with 51,229g in his Bank and Storage, and now, navigating back to the main Weekly Haul display page, he purchased a red and a purple stone for a total of 45,000g, leaving him without enough gold to buy anything else. Each time he thumbed the buy button, he heard a cash-register-like cha-ching sound, and then the amount available to purchase for each was reduced by one.

“Where are the items?” he asked.

“Unlike the special monthly item, these go straight to your box.”

“Ahh, okay.” Pleadingly, even knowing it was crass of him, he again turned to Jimmy and asked, “Is there any way I can borrow a few gold?”

“Seriously?” Jimmy replied grumpily. “Ya’ll got some nerve.” Zach opened his mouth and began to release a sigh, but before he’d fully exhaled, to his surprise, Jimmy released a sigh of his own and relented. “How much you need?”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “I mean, obviously, we probably won’t be able to buy everything that’s for sale, but I think we can—”

“Actually, yeah we can,” Jimmy said, interrupting him. “I have 2.5 in my bank.”

“2.5…what?”

“Million.”

Zach squawked. “How the fuck? You’re a millionaire, Jimmy?”

“Soloing bosses is lucrative,” Jimmy said, cracking a smirk. Then his lips became flat and his expression serious. “You’re lucky I’m such a nice guy.”

More than just a little guilt erupted inside of Zach. In a way, he almost wished Jimmy would have refused him, because he was being so disgustingly greedy—he couldn’t even deny it—and Jimmy was being generous and unselfish. But the temptation to keep the inn room…it was just too high. And so, his joy was tainted as Jimmy gave him enough coin to cover a blanket purchase of everything for sale, and then Jimmy stepped up to the screen and did the same. Once both were finished shopping, the screen vanished, and Mushkie clapped his hands together.

“I’m just so happy to see people again,” he said. “Thank you for your business.”

At this, Jimmy snickered. “Oh, you’ll be seeing tons of people from now on.”

“I will?” Mushkie shouted out in surprise and hope.

Jimmy nodded. “Trust me. As soon as the adventurers know about your shop, they’re gonna be busting down the door. You’ll never have a quiet moment again. You can expect twenty-four-seven customers. There may not be as many of them as there used to be, but they really get around.”

Mushkie again clapped, this time continuously as though giving Jimmy a round of applause. “Oh, thank you! That’s all I want! To have this place come alive again!”

Zach cleared his throat. “Well, we don’t know for sure if that’s going to happen.”

“Huh? Why not?” both Mushkie and Jimmy asked him.

“Well, we can come by a lot and pay Mushkie visits regularly so that he’s not lonely anymore, but do we really want to tell everyone about this place? The price of these items will crater. Right now, we have a monopoly on this item shop. We can corner the market. We can become a bigger supplier of rare items than entire adventuring guilds. Think about what our return on investment will be each week.”

Mushkie’s face reddened, and he took on a look of devastation. “Nooo! Please, Zachys Calador. Don’t!”

“Don’t what? Corner the market.”

“No! Don’t keep this place a secret. I can’t fulfill my purpose. Every day is worse than the last. All I do is stand around waiting and waiting for someone to find me useful and visit my store. I was designed to crave social interaction. You don’t understand my pain. Please!”

Hearing the desperation and hurt in his voice, the words cut straight through Zach’s greed, which had momentarily blinded him, making him forget about how Mushkie felt about all this. But before he could reassure the quirky NPC, Jimmy decided to do so for him.

“Relax,” he said, holding up his hand to Mushkie. “We’re not keeping it a secret. I won’t let him.” To Zach, he said, “Do you really wanna make this poor dude sit here and cry every day? So what if the prices go down a little bit?”

“No, you’re right. It was a dumb idea. I wasn’t thinking.” Lifting his index finger, he added, “But just so you know, it won’t be a little drop.”

“Oh yeah?”

Zach nodded. “Mushkie implied that the stones are regularly featured on the Weekly Haul, sometimes even for cheaper. Let’s just say they pop up every two weeks—hell, let’s say three weeks—and let’s say each and every adventurer can buy two-to-five stones for between ten-to-twenty-thousand gold. You can bet that the price of a stone is going to plummet from over a million—the going rate for a red since the dragon raid—all the way down to, I don’t know, 100k at the most.”

“So?”

Zach threw his hands up. “I want to be rich.”

Jimmy made a confident, self-assured grin. “Duo some bosses with me. You’ll get all the gold you want.”

Zach pointed at him. “I’m taking you up on that.”

“Good. And you don’t know it yet, but you’re giving me that fucking inn room.”

“No way.”

“Yeah you are.”

“Never.”

“We’ll see about that. I already know how I’m getting it, too.”

Zach laughed. “Oh yeah, how?”

Now, Jimmy laughed. “I’m gonna tell Kalana.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Might as well hand it over now.”

Zach laughed yet again, but this time nervously. Jimmy had better not get Kalana involved. He clutched the inn certificate against his chest. Nobody was getting it: not without a ten-million-gold down payment.