57. Anecdotes from the countryside (3)

Not far ahead there was a very grand weapons shop with a very grand facade, and not even a merchant with a stall in the street in front of it. I had no idea that bartering was actually popular here. I was a bit vain about whether I would have enough dimes in my belt pouch to buy a Natty bow, but now I didn't have to worry.

So Kiger squatted at the stall and picked up some oddly shaped sharpening stones, placing them in front of her every time she thought they looked good. I thought to myself, "Twenty dimes for a sharpening stone, the four of us can only buy one, so you're squatting here picking and choosing, but in the end, you can only buy one? I know very little about ores, I can only barely recognize magic crystals, I call everything else stone. But Kiger seemed much more professional and patient, staying in front of the grocery stall for a long time.

Naturally I wasn't in the mood to watch them pick out stones, something we didn't know much about, so I said hello to Kiger and told her we'd wait for them at the weapons shop up ahead. A few steps ahead there was a shop selling weapons, a double-storeyed building, and as we got closer we realised that the stone house was much more elaborate than any of its neighbours, made of strips of stone with evenly spaced seams of white lime and a leather front with black crossed swords printed on the door.

If I hadn't seen the swords and knives hanging on the signboard, I would have thought I had entered a restaurant. The entire hall was decorated with about ten wooden tables, each with four elaborate chairs, all made of precious ironwood, which is a very good material for making A longbow made of ironwood costs about fifteen silver dimes in the market, and a wooden table like this is the material for at least twenty ironwood longbows, which means that one table alone is worth three gold coins. What does three gold coins mean? It means the equivalent of one adult's income for a year.

He stopped in his tracks and touched the axe on his back, and tried to tug at me again, but I had already stepped forward when a young orc waiter came up to me and said, "How can I help you? Guest."

Seeing that the waiter didn't belittle me because of my young age, I was a little less upset so I said, "I have an axe I want to sell, I wonder if you buy it here?"

"Not only do we sell all kinds of weapons, we do buy some fine weapons, but we will do some relative discounting, but of course we will ask a professional weapon appraiser to do an initial valuation of the weapon you are selling and then do the discounting based on the current market selling price." The waiter took us to the square table, invited us both to sit down and served us two cups of tea made from some unknown leaf, which I didn't dare to drink as I saw that Kurtz didn't.

The waiter sat down in the chair opposite us and it was only then that I realised that this was how this weapons shop sold its goods. It was a bit like the ones selling buildings and cars in my previous world, I never thought that this knife seller could make such an atmospheric shop too. I couldn't help but be a little impressed and was looking around when I heard the waiter across the street ask us, "I wonder what kind of axes the two customers are selling?"

Kurtz hurriedly stood up and unhooked the axe from his back, which made a dull sound when it was placed on the ironwood table.

I pointed my finger at the inlaid bronze carved axe and asked the waiter in a grand manner, "This is the one, when will your weapons appraiser arrive?"

"Well, if this is the only one, I will be able to appraise the price of the weapon on the spot." After a brief glance at the axe on the wooden table, the attendant said confidently, "This is a long-handled, carved and forged bronze axe from the Dwarves, with the entire handle and body forged as a single unit, made from the iron from the iron veins in the northern foothills of the Pai Plateau. The axe is finely polished, but it looks like it has been polished many times and half of the tungsten has already been used up."

I could only see a slight difference in eye colour on the side of the axe blade, but I didn't expect the waiter to be able to see it so thoroughly with just a quick glance. Then I heard him say, "The workmanship of this axe is very fine, and the long, carved bronze handle is polished so well that the owner likes to use it a lot. But looking at the wear and tear on the blade, this could only be considered a six-ply new mountain-opening axe."

I got straight to the point and asked, "So how much is this axe worth in your opinion?"

"Most of what we sell in the shop for a brand new copper-grained long-handled opener like this is thirty silver, and this six-fold new one of yours can only be sold for about eighteen silver." The waiter mused for a moment and then said straight away.

I asked him again, "And how much would you charge for it?"

"It's a fine weapon most commonly produced by the Dwarven workshop, generally those Dwarven bandits in the northern foothills prefer to use them, our orcish werewolf warriors prefer to have fist swords with bladed claws and would find the long-handled kaiju too heavy to carry. The Minotaur warrior prefers the ebony club or the fighting staff, and the axe, though heavy enough, is a little too short for the Minotaur's physique. Only the one-horned rhinoceros people in the south-west of the plateau prefer such long-handled axes, and we sell most of them to them. After deducting shipping depreciation and our profit, the most we can actually give you is ten silver coins."

The waiter finished looking at me and Kurtz with his eyes, waiting for our reply.

I didn't expect to be squeezed so hard, but it didn't look like the axe was in high demand, so Kurtz and I looked at each other and thought, "Well, it's useless to us, it's bulky and heavy to carry around, so we might as well sell it. The waiter, without any expression on his face, counted ten dimes for me, asked for the axe on the wooden table to be taken away, and then asked me, "Is there anything else I can do for you, sir?"

I then asked, "Do you sell bows here?"

The waiter froze, then seemed to finally think of my age before replying, "We don't deal in bows and crossbows, but if you want to buy fine iron arrows, we do sell them here."

After asking around, I realised that there were separate shops for melee and long-range weapons, and that there was one of the largest bow shops in the town on the south side of the town centre square, and the waiter recommended that we take a look there. As we walked out of the shop, Kurtz said to me with some frustration, "Ja, why don't we just buy some steel arrows, I'll keep using the hunter's bow, if I find the right spot I can kill a demon antelope."

I frowned and said, "We must get a new bow, my role is already limited, we both rely heavily on you, Aziz, and we must buy you a better bow. Let's look for a shop that sells magic books and see how much I can get for that one!"

"How much can that damn book of yours be worth when there are no more than a few pages left, or let's sell that bottle of wound medicine!" Kurtz subconsciously touched his hand to his belt pouch and said with some reluctance.

It was then that I really realised that even in this magical world, you can't do without money, and I had to come up with some ideas to make money soon, or I wouldn't be able to afford to wear my trousers any time soon. I didn't really want to sell the wound medicine, in a time of crisis that would be the equivalent of an extra life, and for now I had to say, "Let's go to the bow shop first."

"Nah!" Kurtz was quick to do so.

As we walked out of the weapons shop, we saw Katrina going into the shop to look for us both and when she saw us coming out she asked, "Did you get the bows?"

I had to tell her a little about our situation and then asked her, "Where's Miss Kee?"

"Chiniang she's waiting for you to help carry the stones!" Katrina smiled a little oddly.

I said curiously, "Isn't that just a sharpening stone you bought, that thing doesn't look heavy!"

The three of us pushed our way back through the crowd, and only then did we see Kiger still crouched in front of the grocery stall, and the minotaur stall owner was saying to Kiger in a jarring voice, "You've bought all 98 stones, and ... you're still short of two whetstones. I'll give you two more, and you can add forty for me to make twenty silver."

When I saw the mountain of stones in front of Kiger, I finally knew why Katrina had asked Kurtz and me to help her move the stones. Looking at the large and small stones, I thought to myself, "Do we really have to carry a bag of these stones around the market?

"Cut it out, I don't want any more of these rotten stones from you, I want these ninety-eight, I'll buy this many, count them as nineteen silver dimes." Kiger said nothing and threw the nineteen silver coins in his hand over. The minotaur stall owner caught it foolishly and was so choked up by Kiger that he didn't even care about paying sixty less coins. Instead, he grinned widely as he grasped the shiny silver coins in his big hands.

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