The shopkeeper was already reaching for the next customer's order.
Kage turned the bottle of Scrivener's Black over once more, then opened his inventory. He navigated to the First Maker's Quill in his tool slot and selected the ink from his bags.
A new interface element materialized. A small sub-slot, rectangular, etched in silver filigree, adjacent to the quill's icon. It pulsed once, invitingly.
He dragged the ink into it.
[First Maker's Quill: Ink Reservoir Loaded]
[Equipped Ink: Scrivener's Black (Common)]
[Automatic Coating enabled. Ink will be consumed per use, reducing reservoir capacity.]
So the quill handles it itself. No dipping.
That answered one question. He'd been half-expecting to have to mime some ridiculous calligraphy routine mid-combat, dabbing a quill tip into an open bottle while a mob chewed on his leg. The system was smarter than that, at least. The quill drew from the reservoir automatically, which meant he could write uninterrupted as long as the ink lasted.
Which meant the quality of what he loaded into that slot mattered. Enormously.
He looked at the shelves again. The green-labeled row. The blue-labeled bottle behind glass.
"Those," he said, pointing. "What are they?"
The shopkeeper glanced up. His expression shifted from polite indifference to something slightly warmer. A customer upgrading mid-transaction was always welcome.
"Calligrapher's Midnight," the man said, reaching for one of the green bottles. "Uncommon formulation. Finer pigment, slower drying time, better adhesion to treated vellum. Fifteen silver."
He set it on the counter.
"And behind the glass?"
The shopkeeper's eyebrows rose a fraction. "Illuminator's Void. Rare. Imported from the Scribe's Enclave south of Korros. Deep black with a natural luminescence under certain light conditions. Forty silver." He paused. "Per bottle."
Kage did the arithmetic. He had roughly one gold and twenty-two silver after the purchase spree. Calling it a gold twenty-two for simplicity.
"Two of the green. One of the blue."
The shopkeeper unlocked the glass case with a small key. "Seventy silver total."
"Fifty."
"Sixty-five."
"Fifty." Kage kept his voice flat. "I'm buying three bottles. Bulk discount."
The shopkeeper studied him. Kage stared back with the dead eyes of a man who had haggled with hospital billing departments.
"Fifty-five."
"Fifty. I'll come back for more."
A pause. "...Fifty."
Kage placed the coins on the counter. The shopkeeper swept them into a drawer and wrapped the three bottles in cloth.
[Currency: 0 Gold, 72 Silver, 24 Copper]
He stored the Uncommon ink in his dimensional pouch and slotted the Rare bottle carefully into the second pouch. The Scrivener's Black stayed loaded in the quill. The good stuff was for when it mattered.
Common gives ten percent. Uncommon probably gives more. Rare, more still. And the tiers above...
The pattern was obvious. The entire Poet class, the Written casting mode, the quill, all of it was designed around a material economy that he'd been completely ignoring. He'd been casting dry. Every Written verse he'd ever composed with the First Maker's Quill had been running at baseline potency because he hadn't thought to pick up a bottle of twelve-copper ink.
Stupid. Sloppy.
Lady Vane's face surfaced in his memory. The woman ran the ink trade in Korros. She'd offered him fifty gold for a poem, and the entire time she'd been sitting on top of the supply chain for the one material his class needed most.
He filed it. Later.
Right now, his gold was below one, and half his inventory was dead weight.
He left the Artisan's Quarter and worked through it fast.
The Shrieker leather went to a tanner on Pigment Row, a squat woman who smelled like the chemical aftermath of whatever she used to treat hides and who paid without haggling because the material quality was several tiers above what she was used to seeing this early in the game's life. Ninety silver.
The miscellaneous drops went to a general goods merchant near the Golden Plaza. An older NPC with a magnificent white mustache and the dead-eyed patience of a man who'd been buying adventurer garbage for two hundred simulated years. He sorted through the pile, named a price, and Kage took it. One gold, twelve silver.
[Currency: 2 Gold, 74 Silver, 24 Copper]
Better. Breathable.
But the real problem sat in his mining pouch like a bag of bricks. Forty-two units of Mnemosyne Ore, each one dense enough to double as a weapon. The dimensional pouch cut the weight by twenty-five percent, but twenty-five percent off of "extremely heavy" was still "very heavy." He could feel the drag in his step, a slight sluggishness in his turns that hadn't been there before.
Can't sell it yet. Not until I understand the market for it. But I can't carry it forever, either.
The mage tower conversation he overheard was an interesting bit; he would have to follow this thread through. He could also simply store it in the bank for a while.
He checked the map. The Vault was on the far side of the Golden Plaza.
Later. One more thing first.
He found a bench near a stained-glass streetlamp. The floating Luma-Orbs drifted overhead, casting pools of violet and amber across the mosaic tiles. Kage sat down, opened his menu, and selected Log Out.
The ceiling of the apartment materialized above him.
Klaid lay there for a moment, blinking, letting the transition settle. His eyes tracked the water stain on the ceiling. Same shape. Same apartment. Same world.
He sat up and padded to the kitchen. Glass of water. Drank it in four swallows. Poured another.
Then he pulled out his phone.
The text from Zherdev was still there, unread, timestamped from earlier in the day. He opened it.
Klaid stared at the screen. Zherdev… every opportunity from this guy was "HUGE." Every item was "INSANE." The man once paid Klaid eight thousand dollars to carry him through a timed jumping puzzle in Astral Vanguard Online because, quote, "the platforms keep MOVING, Kage, they literally MOVE, how is that FAIR."
He tapped the call button.
It rang twice.
"KAGE."
The voice hit him too hard despite being too prepared for it. Zherdev spoke like someone who'd never fully internalized that phone microphones had a sensitivity range.
"Zherdev."
"BRO. Finally! I've been sitting here refreshing my phone like a lunatic. Okay, okay. Sit down. Are you sitting down?"
"I'm standing in my kitchen."
"Sit down."
"No."
"Okay fine, stand, whatever. Listen. I found something. In Crown of Destiny. Something massive. Are you playing Crown?"
"Yes."
"I KNEW IT. I knew you'd be playing. You always play the big launches. Okay. So listen. I've been grinding, right? Leveling. Doing my thing."
Klaid took a sip of water. "Grinding" in Zherdev's vocabulary meant buying the most expensive gear on the auction house for his class and walking into zones ten levels above him until something killed him.
"I found this NPC. Deep in a cave on the outskirts of the city. Like, I fell into the cave, technically, because my horse spooked and I rolled down a hill, but that's not the point. The point is, this NPC, right? She's this old blind lady sitting on a pile of skulls, and she tells me there's a dungeon."
"There's a lot of dungeons."
"Not like this one, bro. She called it a..." there was a sound of paper rustling. Zherdev had written it down. "'The Shifting Galleries.' A raid dungeon. Inside a city. But the entrance moves. It jumps around the city every few hours. Nobody can find it because it's never in the same place twice."
Klaid set the glass down. A shifting raid dungeon, inside a major city. That was unusual mechanics for what was essentially a launch-week environment.
"She said even if you find the entrance, you can't get in without a key. A special item. And guess who has the key?"
"You bought it."
"I bought it."
"How much?"
"Hundred gold."
Klaid closed his eyes. A hundred gold in the first week of a game's economy. That was thousands of real-world dollars at current exchange rates.
"Could've been a scam," Klaid said.
"It's NOT a scam. I have the item. It's real. It glows and everything. It's called a Curator's Invitation. It's in my inventory right now. I can feel it vibrating."
That's either a legitimate dungeon key or the most expensive paperweight in gaming history.
"So what's the commission?"
"I need you to clear it with me. The dungeon. The whole thing. I don't know what's in there. She said 'priceless treasures beyond mortal reckoning' and 'the echoes of forgotten masters.' Which sounds sick, right? I want the loot. I want the title. I want to be the first person to clear it."
"Zherdev."
"What?"
"Are we even in the same city?"
A pause. The longest pause Klaid had ever heard from Zherdev, which was approximately one and a half seconds.
"What do you mean?"
"Crown of Destiny had dozens of starting zones. Different continents. If you started on the other side of the world map, it doesn't matter what you found. I'd have to travel for weeks."
"Oh. Oh, right." More rustling. "Uh. Whispering Woods? I started in Whispering Woods. With the trees and the—"
"Same."
"SAME?! BRO! See? It's fate. It's literally fate. We are DESTINED to clear this dungeon together. The legendary duo rides again!"
Klaid rubbed his temple. The legendary duo. Zherdev had been calling them that since Astral Vanguard. In Astral Vanguard, the "legendary duo" consisted of Klaid soloing a dungeon on one account while Zherdev's character stood in a corner wearing a full set of cosmetic armor he'd spent four thousand dollars on, occasionally pulling extra mobs on accident.
"What level are you?" Klaid asked.
"Uh. Seventeen. Almost eighteen."
Better than expected, actually.
"Class?"
"Berserker. Heh. Get this - I paid someone to give me Uma's number and then paid him to tell him how he got the class." Zherdev's voice dropped to an almost reverent whisper. "Bro, the axe animations are so cool. When I spin, there's fire? And sometimes I spin so hard I get dizzy and fall down, which I think is a bug, but it looks sick."
It's not a bug.
"The dungeon," Klaid said, pulling the conversation back. "Even assuming it's real, a raid dungeon is designed for a full party. Maybe a full raid. I can't solo it."
"Why not? You solo everything."
"Because I'm…" He paused. Both options of telling him he's either a Poet or received a Legendary Class already seemed to hurt his head in advance. "Nevermind. We don't even have a tank, not to mention a healer."
"We have a tank! You're looking at him! I have a rare shield!"
"You have a Berserker class."
"With a rare shield! I bought it! It's very shiny!"
Klaid breathed through his nose. Patience. Patience was a resource, and Zherdev was the most aggressive drain on it in his life. But the man was also the most reliable source of income Klaid had ever had. Every absurd request came with a wire transfer. Every wire transfer bought another month.
And a shifting raid dungeon, in the first week of the game, inside a major city... if the NPC was legitimate, the loot tables could be extraordinary. First-clear bonuses. Unique items. Titles. The kind of content that wouldn't be accessible to the general player base for weeks, if not months.
The money from Zherdev plus whatever the dungeon itself drops. That's a two-stream payout.
"What's the player cap?" he asked.
"The what?"
"The party limit. How many people can enter."
"Oh! Uh, the lady said ten. Yeah. Ten."
Ten. Full raid group.
Klaid leaned against the kitchen counter. Ten slots. Him, Zherdev. That left eight.
His mind moved to Lily's party. Valdrias. A tank with the best instincts he'd seen in a novice player in years. They were underleveled, undergeared, and would be in way over their heads in a raid dungeon.
But they needed the experience. The real kind, the kind that came from being thrown into something dangerous and learning to swim. And he needed a tank. An actual tank, someone who could hold aggro and position correctly while he dealt with mechanics.
He wondered if Valdriad could solo tank a raid dungeon already.
I've seen how fast he learns.
The operator in him flagged the decision as inefficient. The prodigy in him filed a quiet dissent.
"I'll do it," Klaid said. "On one condition."
"Anything, bro. Name it."
"I'm bringing at least five other players with me."
The silence on the other end was... different.
"Five?" Zherdev repeated. "Why? We don't need five randoms. We're the legendary—"
"We need a proper composition for a raid dungeon. Tank, healer, DPS. You want first-clear? You want the loot and the title? Then we do it right."
"But... I'm paying you. I'm not paying five other people."
"You're not paying them. I am."
That was a lie. He would not be paying them. They would be getting the dungeon experience, the loot, and the opportunity for free and they would consider it the deal of a lifetime. But Zherdev didn't need to know the arrangement.
"So I'm paying you, and you're paying them, and I'm basically funding an entire raid team?" Zherdev's voice had the tone of a man watching his wallet open by itself.
"You're paying me. What I do after is my business. Standard terms."
A long, theatrical sigh. Klaid could practically hear the man pacing in whatever penthouse or home office he was calling from.
"Fine. FINE. But I want to be in the front. With the fighters. I didn't buy a rare sword to stand in the back."
"You'll stand wherever keeps you alive."
"Bro."
"Zherdev."
Another sigh. Shorter this time. The capitulation sigh.
"Okay. You run the show. I'll send you the usual rate plus raid bonus. But Kage?"
"What."
"When we clear it, and we get the title, and it goes on the world announcement? I want my name first."
Klaid looked at the ceiling. The water stain stared back, unchanged, unimpressed.
"Deal," he said.
"LEGENDARY DUO, BABY! Plus five! A legendary septet! Wait, is that even a word? Kage? Hello?"
"Send me the details in-game. I'll coordinate."
"You got it. Sending now. Oh, and Kage?"
"What."
"I missed you, bro."
Klaid hung up. He stood in the dark kitchen for a moment, phone still warm in his hand.
A raid dungeon. Inside Korros. Shifting entrances. Ten-man cap.
Seven slots filled.