Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris (phonics readers .txt) 📕

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 loss.

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