It took me almost a minute to calm down when I realised that. Jeric sat patiently watching me the whole time, probably reading what I was thinking by my expression.
I huffed out a breath. “Are you going to tell other nobles about it?”
Jeric shook his head, folded his hands on the table in front of him, and then looked me in the eye. “Arnold, I want to make this clear. I do not consider myself to be the owner of this exploit, even though as the first noble to learn about this method I will receive the experience bonus associated with it. This is your discovery. When you are ready to sell it and make your fortune, I will be there to help facilitate those sales. We can do so now or after you have tested your other exploit. The decision is entirely yours.”
I stared at him, lost for words.
I liked Jeric.
He was a good guy.
I hadn’t realised that he was that good a good guy. He was the kind of guy who would hide a dead body for you or tell you your girlfriend had tried to sleep with him after he had turned her down.
“Thank you.”
“No, thank you. This is going to generate quite a lot of experience for me.”
“Do you know how much this exploit is worth?”
Jeric shrugged. “That depends on how you choose to sell the method. If you are looking for gold, then I’d be surprised if you could sell this information for more than a few hundred crowns, as those that can benefit are not wealthy. However, the true value in noble exploits lies in the favours you can trade for them.”
“Favours, what do you mean?”
“Unlike most classes, nobles can’t sell their experience. It’s one of the quirks of our class, like the fact that we can’t choose whether or not to conceive, risking pregnancy. If we have to trade experience, we do so for favours. Telling another noble about this exploit could be considered a favour that could entitle me to half their experience.”
“So the true value in this exploit is that it allows you to exploit other nobles with it.”
“Essentially. However, if you need gold, as I said, this could earn you several hundred crowns.”
“It’s not enough,” I said, being practical. “I’ve heard I’ll need at least 5,000 crowns if I want to reach level 100. And that doesn’t include the cost of getting through my thresholds. If my other method works, it will be significantly more profitable.”
“Then you would like me to remain silent for now?”
I nodded. “If you wouldn’t mind.”
“I told you. This is your method. I am happy to do as you want. Now on an unrelated note, my captain informs me you are building a sex dungeon. I’m not exactly sure what that has to do with finding an exploit, but I must say I am honestly both intrigued and excited. I can’t wait to hear those old fusspots at the Academy of Law debating sex dungeons and their function within the law.”
“It’s not a sex dungeon!” The words just came out. I’d been holding them back too long.
Jeric smiled and then chuckled softly. “Sorry, Arnold, I’m having fun at your expense. I know you well enough to be sure that whatever it is, it isn’t that. But it is a good misdirection. Our dear captain was quite adamant that it was exactly what he had been looking at. But enough about that; let’s play cards. I want to see if you are really as good as you think you are.”
I scowled, fighting the urge to smile at Jeric’s joke. “We’ll start with a 100 silver buy-in and play for an hour or until one of us is out of money. Small blind is a silver and the big blind is two. Deal when you’re ready.”
Jeric’s smile faltered. “Why so little? At that rate, we will be playing for weeks. You did hear the part about increasing the base price of the fields, didn’t you?”
“I did. However, I’m not deluded enough to believe I’ll win every game and I don’t want to have two bad games and be out of money. Trust me. We will start slow and then raise the bet when I’m ahead.”
“This is still going to take weeks at that rate.”
I grinned. “Well it would be faster but someone now wants me to pay the max price. And you’re overestimating your chances of winning.”
Max price was a bit of a haggling oddity as you technically didn’t just have to haggle with your own individual skill level, but you could technically do so with both parties' combined level. With ordinary people that would be anywhere between nothing and 400% above base, but Salem had taught me that the crown and its representatives could haggle up to ten times the base value. We were going to be here for a while now that Jeric wanted us to do that.
Jeric’s smile returned. “I suppose time is a small price considering the reward.”
“That’s my justification.”
Jeric shuffled the deck, handed it over and let me cut it, then he dealt two cards to each of us.
I’d been a little surprised to learn they had Texas Hold’em, but then I was surprised by many things, like the fact that incarnation was common. A few times a year, someone from a different universe similar to my own would find their way here, which is why they had chess and checkers. They even had a casino in the capital with a blackjack table that only used one deck—which I was going to clean out the next time I was there.
I paid the blind and checked my cards. They were trash. I waited a few seconds and then folded. “Is that your family?” I asked, nodding to the portrait on the wall. We’d never played in his home, only at the inn.
The portrait showed a younger Jeric standing behind a gorgeous woman with straight brunette hair spilling over her shoulders. She sat on a chair, wearing a maroon dress stitched with arcane runes. The artist had managed to capture intelligence behind her green eyes. She had refined cheekbones and a small, cute nose. Electricity jumped between the fingers of her right hand, in thin sharp lines, while her left rested on the shoulder of a small girl that looked just like her, except she had Jeric’s nose and chin.
Jeric scooped up the cards and handed me the deck. “Yes. That is my wife Isabelle and our daughter Emily.”
I frowned as I began to shuffle. “This is going to sound weird, but this is not the first time I’ve heard names from my world. Originally, I thought the name Gretel was simply a coincidence, but I’ve heard enough now that it’s too common for this to be coincidence.”
Jeric chuckled as he took the shuffled deck from me and split it before handing it back. “Several centuries ago, it became a trend among the nobility to give their children names from incarnate worlds, since anything related to an incarnate becomes more interesting. The effect is significantly less than the one created by your title, but many see it as a good investment.”
Salem never told me that. It made a weird sort of sense, though. Who wouldn’t want to make their child more interesting to others if it only required a name? “Why don’t you ever talk about your family?”
Jeric’s face went still and he stared down at his cards before silently pushing them towards the middle, folding. “Because it is painful being apart from them.”
Boy, was it ever. Dwelling on it didn’t help either. It only made it hurt more. In my case, I found it easier to not think about it. “Ah, sorry, I brought it up. I know how hard it is to be reminded of such things.”
Jeric shook his head and then looked up at the portrait while gathering the cards. “Don’t be. We will be spending a lot of time together, so the topic would have inevitably come up. I’m not sure how much you know about the noble class, but it is a challenging class to level and the only class you can lose.”
“That’s because of the noble privilege thing, right? If you don’t reach level ten by your eighteenth birthday then you lose your class and become an adventurer.”
“Yes, and it is not an easy thing to achieve. Only one in ten retain the class.”
“Only one in ten of you reach level ten by the time you are eighteen…that’s nuts,” I said as he dealt out the next hand.
“Yes. If you don’t have an estate then experience is hard to come by. You only need a
single noble to enhance a village or town and such places are a limited commodity. Sure, there are border wars, for those who have the stomach for it, but they are dangerous, and you have to invest in yourself if you want to survive. Do you call?”
“Sure.”
“Then I raise four nobles.”
I threw in another four silvers. “Call.”
“Since everything is either dangerous or limited, the safe way to gain experience is through social growth. You go to parties, make yourself known by impressing other nobles. Girls like my daughter must look elegant and pretty, showing poise and charm. Boys have to impress others with their swordsmanship or daring. It’s ridiculously expensive and produces very little experience unless you are utterly exceptional, but it is the only readily available, safe way to gain experience.”
“Sounds fun.”
“It does unless your future depends upon it. You have to understand; you have no freedom to be an individual. You have to fit the model of a noble to gain experience and any deviation can cost you. Isabelle and Emily left for the capital nearly nine years ago and they have only gathered enough experience for her first five levels. The next five will be much harder. The horrible part is their gains are considered quite decent. I’ve been saving up every shred of experience to give to her, but that won’t even get her to level eight which is why I asked you to increase the price. Your exploit may just earn me enough experience to give Emily the future she desires.”
I blinked. “It’s worth that much?”
“Alone, no. But if I can use it for all the abandoned farms and land the village owns then it might just get us there. I raise you five.”
“Fold.” I collected the cards and passed over the coins before beginning to shuffle.
Jeric stared at his winnings for several seconds. “I am a man of my word and will not divulge your secret until I have your permission. But knowing what is on the line for my family and I, how long do you think your experiment will take?”
I handed the newly shuffled deck over for Jeric to cut. “Well, Brek said it’s going to take two weeks to move the house to the new site and another two weeks to make the alterations I requested. It will take me another two weeks to alter it further,” constructing and installing the traps I’d designed was not going to be quick, “and a week to cut the first field and prepare it the way I need it. If I’m not a raging success in the following twelve months then I’ll know I’ve failed.”
“So fourteen months,” Jeric said, deflated.
I dealt each of us two cards. “How long do you have?”
“Emily turns eighteen in a little over a year and a half…I fold.”
The deck changed hands again.
“I’ll have a much better idea of how things are going in six months,” I said. “And who knows, perhaps I’ll die early.”
Jeric shook his head. “Arnold, I consider you a friend, so please don’t make me wish for your death.” His tone was so dry I almost didn’t catch that he was joking.
“I’m sorry,” I said, trying not to laugh. “I’m betting everything on this, but if it really doesn’t look like it will work then I’ll end it early.”
Jeric took a deep breath and looked me in the eye. “Don’t,” he said softly. “I would not have this opportunity without you. If it passes me by then I will accept it and never hold it against you. Now enough of these negative thoughts. What are you planning to do if your exploit works?”
I smiled. “I’m going to exploit it.”
“And what does that look like?”
“I’ll need land.”
Jeric nodded while looking at his card. “How much?”
“All of it.” I lowered my cards. “And I’m all in. Now, are you going to call?”
Well done, you have beaten Nobleman Jeric in a game of Texas Hold’em. You have acquired a new skill: Gambler.
Skill: Gambler
Level: 1
Effect:
+2% to your gambling ability
+1 luck
Well done, you have beaten Nobleman Jeric in a high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em and gained a level in your Gambler skill.
Skill: Gambler
Level: 10
Effect:
+20% to your gambling ability
+10 luck
Well done, you have beaten Nobleman Jeric in a game of Texas Hold’em and made a profit. You have acquired a new skill: Merchant.
Skill: Merchant
Level: 1
Effect:
+2% to merchant ability
+2% when haggling above base price.
Well done, you have beaten Nobleman Jeric in a high-stakes game of Texas Hold’em and made a profit gaining you a level in your Merchant skill.
Skill: Merchant
Level: 15
Effect:
+30% to merchant ability
+30% when haggling above base price.
Chapter Six
NIGHTTIME THOUGHTS
It was past midnight and I was pacing around the tavern. A single lantern provided light in the corner of the room. I had been using it to work by and was taking a break. My notebook, where I wrote down my ideas for traps, lay on the table, waiting for my return.
The speed at which Brek and his people could move and reconstruct a house by hand didn’t make sense to me. It was far too fast for their technology and tools. Their classes and levels played a much bigger role than I could have imagined, before seeing it, but they were still a week away from finishing, and I’d run out of things to occupy my mind with. The excitement was starting to get the better of me.
If this plan worked, it wouldn’t only change my life, but perhaps hundreds of others’. The maps on Gretel’s wall showed hundreds of villages like Blackwood, hundreds of places where you could potentially lure and kill monsters.
The plans and traps I was designing for the farm were rudimentary at best. And the danger might end up being more than I could handle, but I lacked the funds to make anything bigger and better. And to be honest, I didn’t want to commit any more money than I already had. Maybe it wouldn’t work…but if it did, I knew I had to be ready to take the next step.
I’d need bigger traps.
Better traps.
In my mind, I could see barns filled with trapdoors and pressure plates. Life-sized roach motels where monsters walked in but they didn’t walk out. Places where farmers wouldn’t have to risk their lives or toil away for years just to gain experience.
Maybe it was just a fantasy.
Maybe this wouldn’t work at all because I was missing some key understanding of the rules. The system, after all, was stacked to work against farmers. Stacked to work against me.
But then again, maybe this would work.
Maybe this was the beginning of a new era.
It was what it felt like. It was the same anticipation as I’d had the night before our team had our first and only win at a major Warlords tournament. Back when I’d found a glitch in the mechanics that let Don and Charley combo their attacks and increase their range by 50% more than the game’s designers intended. The two of them tore through the competition, carrying the rest of us until we were accused of hacking and cheating.
The judges had gone so far as to change out our rigs, but our trick still worked and they’d been forced to give us our trophy and prize money. It took the game developers the whole week after the competition to work out what had gone wrong. They’d patched it out, of course, but they didn’t take our win from us.
They didn’t take our win from me.
Because let’s face it, I was the only reason we won. We were never really that good. Not at a professional level anyway. We could wipe the floor with casual players, but actual pros were another story.
Over the years, I’d got offers to captain professional teams, not as a player but as a strategist. I’d been stupid enough to turn them down, thinking I could use my brain to help our team make up for our lack of reflexes and talent. It had worked
to a degree, but by the time I realised that we had reached our limits and that those limits didn’t put us at pro level, the offers were no longer coming.
I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
I found myself in front of the map of the village. There was barely enough light to make anything out, but I’d stared at it enough times over the past seven months that I didn’t really need light to visualize the utter mess it was.
Salem had explained more or less what the hexagon surrounding the village meant and how it worked. It was pretty simple. It was the range at which the village's magic could extend, and by extension, the limits of where farming magic worked.
That wasn’t why it was a mess, but it was part of it. No, the reason that the farms inside had once been all over the place without a system of organization was because the village was only level three. The land around the village could handle up to 50,000 fields when the village leveled to ten, but the villagers had only ever planted out 6,000. People had just picked spots they liked and built. They wanted to get away from a life of teamwork, a life where they had to rely on others. So they’d created a mess.
No farm exemplified their mentality as much as the Darkwood farm, the farm I had bought, whose first owner had thought it was a great idea to build it in the south-easternmost corner, the spot closest to the forest.
Gretel had shared its sad history. But Salem was the one who explained it. He taught me most monsters viewed buildings like a herd, clustered together they were intimidating, but alone and separated they were no different to an animal cut off from its herd, easy prey in their eyes. The lack of neighbouring farms encouraged monsters to attack the Darkwood farm. The previous owners were killed by goblins, giant rats, a troll, a pack of wolves, some sort of insect creatures…and those were the deaths where people knew the cause. There were three other instances where the families had just been killed off in the middle of the night. The only evidence left behind were tracks that no one recognised.
Oh Great! I was Reincarnated as a Farmer Page 8