“Yes,” Louie agreed and let out a bark that echoed in the small confines of the elevator. “I will be a prophet too, so I can always protect Alex.”
I smiled at his remark, but the sentiment only lasted a second until he asked his next question.
“I can’t see your level and race either,” he continued, unperturbed by social graces, or discretion at all for that matter. “Are you not a human?”
“I’m afraid my line of work forbids me to reveal my level,” the man replied and this time I noticed a smile form on his lips as I hid my face in my palm. “However, I can tell you that I’m not human. I can take the form of a human, but I’m a seraph.”
“What’s a seraph?” Louie asked as I opened my eyes wide at what I had just heard.
“We’re a celestial race, akin to angels,” the prophet replied, just as the elevator doors opened. He waited politely for us to exit.
“That sounds amazing,” Louie said and stood still as I put him on his leash. “Can you fly?”
“That’s a story for another time, young one,” the man said, walking past us to open the large glass doorway leading out into the busy streets of Little Italy.
“No more talking when other people are around, buddy,” I said before stepping out.
Louie only barked in affirmation as we walked outside and I waved back at the old man.
It was weird walking with Louie on the streets—of course, not anywhere near to how weird it was having him talk to me, or talk to a seraph for that matter, but still. When I saw him squat into his usual position atop a small patch of grass, I felt a bit grossed out by the fact I’d still have to clean up after him, even though I automatically reached into my pocket to take out a bag.
“I think we need to talk about this little routine of ours,” I said as I wrapped the plastic bag around my hand.
“Why?” he whispered as I bent down to pick up after him. “I thought this was normal. No need to change things, right?”
“We’ll talk about it another time,” I replied and tied a knot in the small bag before disposing of it in a garbage can next to us.
Despite the change in Louie’s nature, our walk was pretty much the same. He was still the same curious corgi, relieving himself over already pissed-on spots to mark his territory, still using his puppy eyes whenever somebody walked by him with a juicy slice of pizza or a burger in hand, and still acting aggressively to dogs twice and thrice his size, as long as he was on his leash.
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t want any of this to change.
Once we got home, I hastily ordered a couple of full-sized Sicilian square pies from Joe’s Pizza, my favorite place, and showed Louie how he could use YouTube.
“I’ve set the tablet up to activate once you touch it,” I said. “But you have to do it with your paw, not your nails.”
“Yeah, easy,” he said and tapped on the tablet’s screen as soon as I placed it on the couch. “Then what?”
“Then you press on this red icon,” I said, tapping on YouTube, “and select what you want to watch.”
“I don’t want to watch these things,” he said and tilted his head to the side at the home screen. “How do I search for the stuff you watched?”
“You can tell me what you want to watch and I’ll put it on for you.”
“Just tell me where to press,” he said and started tapping randomly on the screen.
“Here,” I said and tapped on the search bar. “But then you need to type what you want to search.”
“Okay, thanks,” he said and his tail started moving excitedly.
“What do you mean ‘okay’? You know how to type?”
“Well, it’s pretty straightforward, no?” he asked, confused. “I just tap on the letters that appear and then press this big button to the right.”
“No, I mean, you can type English?” I said, surprised.
“I guess,” he replied, apparently unsure about why I was asking. “Is it something I should have had to learn?”
“Well, yes. I mean, I don’t know. Speaking a language doesn’t automatically mean you can write and read it too.”
“Well for me it does,” he said and returned his gaze to the screen. “Go on, do your thing now.”
He looked very eager to watch things he had seen me spend hours viewing already, and since I had to do my own research on DEM recipes, I was happy to accommodate him.
A wave of nostalgia hit me when I heard the beginning of “Arrival at Kraghammer”, Critical Role’s first streamed episode, from my laptop as I turned on the DEM tablet.
Louie’s in for a viewing marathon he’ll never forget.
Now that I had Leo’s consent, a new tab opened on the DEM tablet’s starting page. The only available recipes were those labeled as level 1 or 2 and they were further subdivided into weapons, armor, jewelry, materials, and common items. My initial feeling was that the best margins would be in crafting materials or common items in great quantities.
Equipment and jewelry would probably fetch great prices at higher levels, but I doubted they would be a viable option at the moment, considering their life cycle and how long I’d have to wait for them to be moved. Regardless, I took a quick glance at the recipes offered there.
Axe
Battle Axe
Basic Bow
Brandish
Cedar Staff
Composite Bow
The list went on and on—several dozen items. I scrolled back up, not finding anything that stood out to me and clicked on one of the recipes at random.
Recipe Name: Composite Bow Recipe
Level: 1
Type: Weapon
Subtype: Bow
Rarity: E Grade
Success Rate: 100%
MP Cost: 72
Durability : 50/50
Weight: 2st.
Materials: 3x Composite Bow Shafts
400x Iron Ore
80x Hempen String Braid
80x Leather (Suede)
I had no idea of the measurements used in the recipes but figured that I didn’t need to know what constituted one Leather if the same standards were used when I bought the materials, since this was a prerequisite if I wanted to use DEM’s free crafting program. However, each material must come in pretty small quantities, considering that four hundred iron ore pieces were needed for a bow.
With this in mind, I did some research to see the cost of all the materials if bought through the marketplace. Their grand total was just shy of $4,000, an amount I was definitely not comfortable with binding to a single item. Regardless, I clicked on the item’s name and a new pop-up appeared.
Name: Composite Bow
Type: Bow
Rarity: E Grade
Physical Attack: 64
Magic Attack: 21
Special Ability: -
Attack Speed: Slow
Durability : 360/360
Weight: 1880st.
Description : A type of laminated bow. It is made of cedar wood strengthened with iron shards and the grip is wrapped in refined suede. This bow is very flexible, matching different fighting styles and strength levels.
Tapping on the name of the bow brought up a long list of entries from people selling their own. The prices ranged from five hundred dollars for a bow with a durability of very close to zero, all the way up to ten times that for brand-new ones. Five thousand dollars would definitely leave room for large profit margins, but that wasn’t the cheapest choice of the brand-new composite bows.
I adjusted the filters to show only the ones with full or near-full durability as I didn’t think a few points lost there would matter much to prospective buyers. The results were immediately reduced to a couple of dozen, and when I sorted them by price, I saw that the cheapest one was $3,800. This meant that if I crafted a composite bow, taking into account the 15% DEM commission, I would have two choices: either price the item higher and wait in the hopes that it would eventually sell, or sell it at a los
s.
That confirmed that this item was definitely not a good choice and I had the feeling any other equipment would be similar. Regardless, I skimmed quickly through a few more available recipes, noting the amount and types of materials needed. Adding up their costs and comparing them with the prices of the cheapest versions of the product available on the market only served to further prove my point. Going for equipment or jewelry was a dead end. Perhaps the people selling them were getting whole items as loot or repairing their weapons before selling them when the time for upgrading was nigh.
I needed to find something that would leave my hands fast, no matter how small the margins were. From my research, I knew that prices in fast-moving goods were at their lowest on Sundays and picked up again on Mondays, fluctuating throughout the week albeit not by as much. Buying today would allow me to get a good head start with maximized margins while continuing to ramp up production through each day.
I scanned through countless recipes of lower-grade crafting materials—multiple leather types, metal alloys, and items I could only imagine being enchanted materials or resources from other worlds—until my eyes glanced upon the most mundane of fighting resources.
Recipe Name: Wooden Arrow (Birch) x 20
Level: 1
Type: Weapon
Subtype: Arrow
Rarity: E Grade
Success Rate: 100%
MP Cost: 30
Durability : 10/10
Weight: 120st.
Materials: 4x Wooden Stem (Birch)
2x Iron Ore
Everyone needed arrows and—at least from my experience with history and games—once they were fired, more often than not, they were not retrievable. This would mean that the demand would always be there. Running the numbers of the cost versus the price trends over the week, I could already see how this might be a profitable choice, even after accounting for the DEM’s cut.
But I wanted to do this right. I looked at alternatives to birch wood and the price fluctuations were pretty much the same across the board. Wooden arrows also weren’t the only available recipe through the free crafting program.
Recipe Name: Bone Arrow (Birch, 20pcs)
Level: 2
Type: Weapon
Subtype: Arrow
Rarity: D Grade
Success Rate: 100%
MP Cost: 80
Durability : 25/25
Weight: 90st.
Materials: Wooden Stem (Birch)
Bone Grain
It seemed that both arrows were low grade, but these were lighter, meaning archers would be able to carry more without hindering their movement speed. A quick bit of research on arrow grades revealed that even an E-grade bow could use S-grade arrows, but not the other way round. This meant that D-grade bows would only be able to use arrows of D grade and above if one wanted to be sure that their arrows’ shafts wouldn’t break when they were fired. Besides, bone arrows were much more cost-effective to craft since they only needed one wooden stem and whatever Bone Grain was. I clicked on it to see more information about it and how much I could buy it for.
Item: Bone Grain
Type: Crafting Material
Durability : 10/10
Rarity: E Grade
Weight: 4st.
Description : Ground animal bones. The quality of the bone powder is linked to the skeleton from which the bones were harvested.
Forty dollars was the lowest price for a batch of this material that could be found at any time and, considering what I needed them for, the price seemed surprisingly high. Taking into consideration that each wooden stem cost $10 on average, my break-even point would be approximately sixty bucks taking into account the DEM commission. I quickly checked the bone arrows on offer in New York state, sorting them by price, and there were none lower than $65.
But I didn’t just want to get a quick buck. Or I definitely wanted a quick buck, but after a long weekend of sleeping only for a few hours, the trip to that extraplanar forest, and all the fighting, my eyes were becoming increasingly heavy. No, I would have to play the waiting game.
I used the tablet to check the price trends for bone arrows on Mondays and saw that pricing a hundred scores of arrows for $120 each would most probably get them sold in the first rush, start-of-the-week purchases. The cost of having a hundred scores of arrows crafted was four thousand dollars, an amount I wasn’t very comfortable parting with, but the thrill of my discovery would let nothing step in its way.
Assuming everything sold by the time I woke up for work tomorrow, at the 300% mark-up I’d set, I would be off to a terrific start to the week. The Dark Energy Marketplace’s commission would still be $1,800, but there was nothing I could do about that. Perhaps in the future, I could search for ways to bypass their monopoly, but that was a long way ahead for now.
I took a quick shower and brushed my teeth, using the last of my mental reserves to calculate how quickly I would be able to fix my life and call it quits. I was determined I didn’t want to be part of this world in the long run. However, this was such an easy way to solve my real problems. Too easy to ignore.
My hospital expenses were roughly $27,000 and my student loan was holding strong at $80,000. Supposing the bone-arrow flipping strategy worked consistently, I could even reach that amount in a month. Perhaps less. Which made me wonder…
What else can I achieve by doing this?
I had no intention of becoming a philanthropist, of course. I’d heard people talk about how liberating it was to help others, but those were always good people. I was not good people. Not anymore.
I could still remember the prices of listings from my daydreaming days, watching YouTube videos of villas in Spain and Greece. Three million dollars would afford me a villa with everything I needed in Greece, perhaps close to where my parents had moved. But not too close. It would be a place where I could be away from everyone, with a gym of my own so I wouldn’t need to see any more “No Pain, No Gain” and “Princess” tattoos on bros and bimbos.
Perhaps another million on the side to be safe and then living expenses. Sixty thousand a year for both Louie and myself for… twenty years? The thought of his time running out tied a knot in my stomach, but I tried to focus on the math instead. $1.2million for us both, bringing the total to over five million dollars. That was a big number, but not one out of reach. As long as I could keep up with the market.
I lay on the couch, ready to fall asleep in an instant when Louie paused the video he was watching and jumped onto the couch with me. He lay on my side, turning his fluffy butt to my face.
“Excuse me?” I said, looking at him puzzled.
“What?” he asked, slightly turning his head to face me, ears pricked up. “You used to like it when I slept next to you.”
“I…” I stuttered. “I did. I mean, I do. But you always slept by the door.”
His ears fell back before he let his head drop to the side again.
“That’s because I didn’t know,” he said softly. “I can’t make up for all those nights, but you won’t sleep by yourself again.”
My nostrils flared and I pressed my lips together trying to hold back my emotions. Perhaps his newfound intellect was as much a gift as it was a curse.
I laid my hand on him and a few short breaths later, we were both fast asleep.
Incense & Iron
Interlude I
“I had no idea how quickly things would turn south,” Alexander, the scarred behemoth of a man, said as the wind became stronger around the slave encampment, lifting embers high in the night sky.
A loud scream followed by metals clashing was heard from one of the bonfires north of the conspirators. Yalfrigg immediately moved his right hand behind his back, making sure that his gigantic faintly glowing sword was in its place.
“Neleth,” the dominus commanded. “Go check what’s wrong.”
The elf clicked his tongue in disapproval but stood up all the same. The muscul
ar dwarf didn’t seem like someone who would keep grudges related to insubordination, which meant he was sending the elf because he would be able to get there more easily than the others. Or so thought Alexander, who glanced at the elf before he moved away.
Name: Neleth Ienemiah
Race: Light Elf
Class: Shadow Strider
Level: 38
HP : 942/1029
MP: 603/641
XP : 97.54%
STR: 41
DEX: 36
CON: 28
INT: 25
WIS: 12
MEN: 26
A shadow strider. A sneaky fighter indeed. However, no matter how sneaky he was, there was an absolute rule of stats transparency in the ludus and he was no exception. Alexander focused his eyes on the stats window, absorbing more of the available information about the elf.
Battle Stats
Max HP: 1029
Max MP: 641
Physical Attack: 158
Physical Defense: 223
Accuracy: 70
Critical: 139
Attack Speed: 502
Magic Attack: 67
Magic Defense: 259
Evasion: 76
Speed: 148
Casting Speed: 226
HP Regen. : 7.3/minute
MP Regen. : 3.2/minute
His stats were not that impressive, but more often than not it was the skills that mattered. And this rogue had a few aces up his sleeve. The elf’s leather clothes produced only the faintest of sounds with each movement as he walked away until they suddenly ceased altogether, no doubt a skill specific to his class.
Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) Page 11