It was a fruitful day. Monotonous murder of normal bunnies, interspersed with fights with elite rabbit monsters, few moments of terror when they could almost not hold on and escape. Truly, a fruitful day. After nearly half of the team got slayed, others decided to give up the raid. As they walked towards the village, to replenish their stock and wait for the death's aura to be removed from others to dive into dungeon again, Artha was planning many things in his head.
It was strange but no one noticed or mentioned that Artha never had to repair his weapons or other items. They probably assumed he got it done while making rounds to different NPCs. And he had never spent so much time together with a single group of players till date. No wonder, no one noticed it as a peculiarity. Edgeless Sword and his team members were in need of some items. As Artha initiated a trade with him to provide the items and take in all the raw materials they had in excess, he asked Edgeless Sword directly.
"Didn't you all buy those crates? You might have gotten good weapons from them."
"No money."
" But...but these guilds are ready to pay extra if you buy those big bad*ss gift crates, right? Didn't Sun Lord tell you that?"
" We all have been running around as errand boys for different guilds. We know the situation."
"So why?"
"Sun Lord said if major guilds didn't get enough big gift crates, they would pay a bit more for others to purchase and hand it over to them. But we may have to wait till tomorrow."
"Good plan." It indeed was. Instead of hoping that these guilds buy the gift crates they had, better to wait and see which ones they need and buy those. Less chance of burning.
Maybe Sela had thought of that. That's why others in that team had not purchased any gift crates yet. The situation was not at all like that. Basically everyone in that team was dead broke and could not get a loan to buy the gift crates. But would they let Artha know that? Highly doubtful.
There was no regular sales today. All guilds were full with items from the gift crates and they truly didn't have enough credits to purchase anything from Artha. His tier 1 customers - same problem.
Artha had to satisfy himself by making turns to different NPCs. Oh, he needed to rearrange his items too. Better to keep the newest trade bag as empty as possible.
Zumi had new stocks. The tailor, few new designs. Zoya always kept her potions out in the open. Tavish added few more designed weapons. Well, well, look at that. The price of each item had slashes a bit. Not a lot, but a bit. Did they know that these blessed immortals would not spend in their shops much? Atleast the major spending blessed immortals would not.
After running around alone in few maps, he got bored. So he hightailed to kitchen in the inn, to the only apprentice job he had. Did the sun rise in the west? Why else would the cook, the stingiest person in the inn decided to help him?
No, the cook still did not provide any recipe. He gave the skills needed to cook. Not for free, but he atleast had some skills related to cooking, other than using knife.
Artha was not interested in cooking per se. He wanted it to reuse the food he had collected from day 2 of the game. He had collected quite a lot and he could not dump them in the inn room. The food would turn stale or rot and lose its effects completely. He really wanted to repackage those items and sell exorbitantly to guides when they were on verge of breakthrough and just hoping for a tiny impetus.
As the cook was quite free, just watching over as Artha practicing the cooking skill, he decided to bite the bullet and ask directly.
The solution was so simple that Artha felt like hitting himself.
What do you do with leftovers? You use them differently and make a new dish. The real headache was actually to know the second recipe and be good in it. Basically a hit and miss till he gets it right the first time. But atleast he knew what was the direction he had to take.
Cooking is not a easy job. Becoming chef less so. Artha did not mind hard part, if the end result nets him more money. Due to working tirelessly, few of the cooking skills became better.
Unlike normal job skills or regular skills where you had to guess of the profiency of the skill has increased or not or to calculate precisely to know the answer , the lifestyle job players had it easy. It showed profiency directly in the status bar. Oi! Artha! Ever thought it was due to you dumping loads of XP and upgrading it? Which player would be moronic enough to dumpt XP towards status bar instead of leveling up? It's not longer doubling or tripling of XP needed to level up to the next level. Even the experts, and those scions with loads of followers letting him to reap the labour were still in level six and all the players were halfway through in level five. Only you would be moronic enough to not use those XP to level up.
But Artha did have legitimate reasons to do so. It worked well in the end. After all he could save all the XP now seperately to be used later on
This way, his levels would not be running up and down frequently. After all, he had to use his XP to multiply the items.
So, good news. Artha was slowly becoming a cook. He probably will be first one to grow up from his apprentice title. And he still hadn't bought the gift crates yet. If waiting for few hours or a day would bring more chances of earning bit more credits, he would totally wait.
He borrowed another tome from Zoya to read. He won't be disturbed much till all this hoo- haw about gift crates came down. He didn't forget to forage and collect items in few monster maps. The over consumption of basic items would surely lead to scarcity. It was moral of the whole semester worth of lessons. Wonder if it works within a game.
There was still some time to reach the dungeon for the second raid of the day. But, basically it was a meh day in the game.
Unless you liked to be good spectator. The audience loved every minute and wished they had more eyes, more bodies to see many things.
And this happened in one of the cohesive and well mannered village. Wonder how other players gated in other villages.