56. Anecdotes from the countryside (2)

By this time, people were already coming out of the caravan's camp one by one, looking like they were also rushing to the inside of the town. I could spot the group of noble dudes from the Prosperity Adventure Group in those crowds from afar, walking towards the town in company with a group of gaily dressed dance troupe dancers, which made me feel that, all told, sometimes this caravan was quite small. No matter what you do, it's inevitable that you'll meet up.

As we stopped to talk at the well, the group of noble dudes passed us, snickering softly at the odd foursome like us, and a few young nobles even came over curiously to ogle Katrina and me exaggeratedly and made slit-throat gestures at me with a distinctly provocative flavour. Ming Qian, with a grim look on his face, deliberately raised his head high as he passed us, while Daj stopped in front of Kiger with a beautiful short-haired dancer in a fine short leather dress, who looked a little surprised to see Kiger and smiled with an expression that looked a little unnatural, her big eyes looking at Kiger as if she could speak, as if to say: Hey, what a coincidence, you're here too!

She had a lightness of touch between her bright eyes and white eyebrows. Kiger was also a little surprised, but didn't say anything, just nodded indifferently to the short-haired beautiful dancer, the moment of brushing shoulders was, after all, brief, and in the blink of an eye the two had misplaced their eyes and went their separate ways. Daj walked past as if she hadn't seen Katrina, her face expressionless.

I couldn't help but be curious about the identity of this dancer and turned my head to ask Kiger who she was.

Kiger looked at me and said, with a slightly deeper meaning, "She? The fifth lady of the troupe."

I can't believe this one is in the mood to hang out and be so close to these noble dudes from Daj. It's not something I can just mess around with, so I'll just stay away when I meet them in the future, as children like me are easily forgotten anyway.

We then left the well and walked into the rundown town of green and white and earthy yellow, the buildings on both sides of the street were painted with green and white lime and the streets were generally clean and full of orcs with huge parcels on their backs, most of them carrying long bows and spears with hunting knives on their belts. They kept moving in and out of the shops along the street, some coming out with happy faces and empty hands, others with helpless faces, carrying large parcels and moving on to open the curtains of the next shop, or simply setting up small stalls along the street with goods waiting to be bought.

When I saw the town from a distance, I didn't think it was so busy, but when I was there, I realised that it was really busy. There were bundles of leather and antelope horns, wheat flour and salt were the most popular items, and many of the merchants were very willing to buy these in demand, even as some orcs kept pushing their way through the crowd to ask us if we had any wheat flour or salt to sell.

Most of the orcs who had stalls in the streets were selling strange animal bones, home-made dried meat, tendons to make bowstrings, some even horns of wild animals, a hodgepodge of herbs and some coarse grains of various colours. The goods on the stalls on both sides of the street were a mishmash of goods, most of them were laid out on the ground with a ragged cowhide and placed in front of the stalls in different categories.

We stopped in front of a grocery stall with some ragged herbs and a pile of rotten rocks, mainly because Kiger was crouched down in front of it and refused to go any further, poking at the rocky debris in the pile with a small stick. Perhaps it was because the pharmacist refused to take them that the stall owner put them on the ground. Instead, there was a pile of sharp-edged rocks next to it, looking like pieces of stone knocked out of some large stone wall, the big ones almost as big as a plate, and the smaller ones as big as my fist. The young human child and the half-grown beast child were standing together, followed by two young human girls, who looked like they were wandering around the market.

The stall owner seemed to have not been accosted for a long time, however, and his eyes lit up when he saw someone stop by his stall. I definitely didn't mean to say hello to him though, seeing as his short coat of hard cowhide was worn and leaking, he really didn't look ordinary poor, and the things on his stall were some rags, would anyone really buy goods like this?

The stall owner was a middle-aged beast-headed man dressed as a medicine picker. Just by looking at the rusty nose ring on top of his big nose, it was easy to guess how miserable he was, with a big basket behind him and a broken medicine hoe inside. His copper-bell eyes looked over at us and, noticing that we hadn't even glanced at the herbs and that only the two girls were crouched in front of the pile of stones, he asked in a jarring voice, "You want to buy a sharpening stone?"

"How do you sell this stuff?" Kiger asked carelessly as she tossed the fist-sized grey stone around in her hand.

The stall owner scratched his head with a large, thick hand and four words spilled from his fat lips, "Twenty each." And wouldn't say more.

"Hey, do you have the money?"

I was a bit confused when Kiger actually pulled me in behind him, and I said to myself, "What's the point of going to the market without money? So I nodded and said, "I've got some, I'm going to buy a bow for Kurtz and I don't know if I'll have enough."

"How much did you bring?" Kiger asked me curiously.

I clutched the cloth bag tied around my waist and shook it in my hand, saying, "Thirteen silver coins, didn't you two help us collect the loot from the dwarves we killed last time, Sister Gogo?"

Only then did Kiger say, "Er, I didn't collect the money bag, so how would I know how much you guys collected. But it's only this much! I've been looking for this for a long time and I've forgotten to bring money with me today.

"Sure."

"No."

Cuz and I said at the same time, naturally I didn't agree, Cuz had been planning to buy a bow for a long time and we had both been working towards it, today we came to this free market just to buy a better bow for the next hunt in the wilderness. Where was the other spare money to lend to Kiger to buy a stone.

But I didn't expect Kurtz to be generous and gave him a strange look, signalling with my eyes that this was all we had and what would we do with it? But Kurtz stood in front of me sincerely, patted me on the shoulder and took the money bag from my hand, then said to me, "Your friends, we haven't had time to show our gratitude for taking such good care of you these days, and now that they need help, isn't that when we, as friends, are at the forefront?"

"But we still have to buy the bow." I said with some reluctance, thinking to myself how could the titular dance troupe, the Seven Maidens, not have any money, maybe they had forgotten to bring their money bags this time out, when could they not buy those broken stones?

Instead, Kurtz patted the open axe he was carrying behind him and reassured me, "What does it matter, we'll trade this axe for a bow back."

I then nodded in agreement and said to Kiger, somewhat apologetically, "It's all we have, that's all we have, and it's probably not enough."

"It's a bit short, geez! I'm not going to take advantage of you, so I'll give you four shares of the thirteen silver dimes, and Lina, you too, so we can all contribute to the purchase." Kiger turned to Katrina and lobbied her again.

I was too short to see how much money was in the pouch, but I saw that Kiger had picked out seven silver dimes from it and threw it to Katarina, saying. "You can have two shares, and the remaining four are mine. We'll have ten shares, and when I've made some money from the stones, I'll share them with you."

I asked, somewhat curiously, "Do these whetstones sell for a lot of money over in the Imperial capital?"

Kiger gave me a contemptuous look, a look that said nakedly. The look on her face was a naked statement of how terrible it was to be uneducated.

I said to myself, "I'm just a little kid who hasn't even seen the capital, what do you expect me to do? With my money bag gone, there was no way to pick out a Naiti bow, so I had to find a weapon shop and sell the axe, so I could maybe get a bow in exchange. So I said indifferently, "Whatever."

Most of the orcs were still bartering, and it was only when human traders opened up the trade routes to the Pai plateau that the orcs learned to use money, but the more remote frontier towns still had the habit of bartering.

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