The Gene of the Ancients (Rogue Merchant Book #2): LitRPG Series by Roman Prokofiev (top books to read TXT) 📕

he seemed like one of the guys, a person you could pour your heart out to, someone who could make a joke when it was appropriate. He knew how to talk to people.

“What about the Pandas? Were you smelling flowers there?”

“You mean that I’m shady? As I said, it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll tell it one day. All right!” he said, abruptly changing the subject. “Someone recommended you to me as an expert on trade. Could you give me some pointers on where I could make a quick buck here? My pockets are as empty as a church service on a football Sunday.”

I studied them, thinking. Valkyrie and Flame had Liberty tags, I was neutral and clanless, and Captain Panther was the clan leader of Gentlemen Bastards, having just arrived from another world. From the outside, nothing connected us. Today, I would take my reward from the Watchers, the tokens and the fortress loot. Hmm, it might work out.

“We could make some money,” I said. “And I’ll need all three of you. Tell me, what do you think about acting?”

“I was the star of school plays!” Valkyrie boasted. “Why are you asking?”

* * *

 

“That’s true, it wasn’t our finest hour,” said Komtur, who seemed as pleased as punch. “But all’s well that ends well, thank God.”

“Actually, we started to nag Jerkhan as soon as we saw his kill,” Olaf added. “By the way, why aren’t you shown in the kill list? Is it a glitch in the statistics, or have you bought a Diamond subscription?”

“So, what about Jerkhan?” I asked, ignoring the persnickety analyst. “What did he say?”

Komtur laughed, seemingly sincere.

“What did he say? He told me to screw off,” he said, trying to hold back laughter, “and blacklisted me, too.”

“Those Pandas are real assholes.”

The fun was over as abruptly as it had started.

“We should (censored) burn them all. Destroy them. Wipe them out.”

I could get the impotent rage of the head Watcher. Still, Pandorum and the Watchers were in different orbits. Even together, the North Alliance couldn’t challenge the Pandas. Their weight classes were too different. If Pandorum wished, they could easily kick them out of their lands and burn their castles from the ground up. So all the Watchers could do was to swallow their pride...and nurse a grudge.

The faction tags I got improved my mood considerably. Judging by their number, Komtur had added some from the clan warehouse — one outpost couldn’t have produced that many. Were they trying to apologize for the Panda’s double-crossing? My ass.

Liberty’s exam was set for Saturday morning, which was two days away. Olaf implied that they wanted to arrange another raid — souls were always handy — but I ignored him. I had had enough. My promise to Komtur was fulfilled, I had helped the clan to pay the Pandas and was in no hurry to gamble against the Balance. After all, both the Magister and Yamato had warned me against it. I decided to move on to trade issues, especially since the situation allowed me to finally act.

By now, almost the entire faction tag market in Eyre belonged to me. I took a measure of pride in that — the total value of tokens I owned was around fifty thousand gold, including the tokens I had earned during the raid, which were pretty much free. I had spent almost a month promptly buying all tokens that appeared at the auction, posting messages in our area’s trade chat, encouraging clanmates and alliance members to sell looted tokens to me, and at last, it paid off.

So what were those tokens? Simple: they were tags dropped by NPCs of an opposing faction. There were four types of them, ranging from copper to platinum. The first type was dropped by common archers and swordsmen, and the last, by rank four NPCs — lords, keepers, and generals. I had only a few of them, as enemy lords were a rare get.

Their purpose was simple, too. After the start of the war, special vendors exchanging tokens for reputation or reward had appeared in Eyre. There were several types of rewards, but the best, by far, was a faction set of five items. It came in four variants: cloth, leather, chain, and plate, for any archetype, starting with a mage and ending with a tank. It looked pretty cool, had good stats, but the best thing was its “personal” property: those items couldn’t be dropped. Bound items weren’t exactly unique in Sphere, but were highly prized, which automatically increased their price. Getting such a set wasn’t a trivial task: the number of required tokens was calculated to make a solo player spend a long time assembling it.

One platinum token, the property of a lord; five gold tokens, dropped by nobles and grandees; fifty silvers, and a hundred coppers, looted from soldiers of rank one or two — and that was only one item. Simple calculations showed that obtaining it required sending more than a hundred and fifty enemy NPCs to the nearest resp point. Moreover, a lord couldn’t be defeated without assembling an entire raid; killing a noble or a grandee in single combat also wasn’t possible. So pretty much, getting a set necessitated clan assistance or trade ventures.

When I had seen the faction vendor’s stock, I had immediately devised a simple plan. I only needed two things to implement it: reputation with Eyre Nation and a whole lot of tokens. Saving Endved had given me reputation, and now I had the requisite number of tags.

The problem was, upon buying a set item, it was automatically bound to the player and couldn’t be sold, traded, or given away to others, including auctions. I suspected that it had been added to prevent peddling faction rewards. There was a simple way to circumvent that, of course.

Late that night, I opened the faction war