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

the forums, I saw that the local residents had been quite predictable in their response. The majority decided that the recipe was fake. Some were trying to find out what faction that was and where it was based, and the smartest ones wrote that it was a stupid attempt to jack up the ingredient prices. I drew up a sales graph of all the components of my recipe. It showed that their price and the sales volume had increased, but negligibly, only by one to three percent. Unfortunately, controlling any of them required huge investments, half a million at least, or better, a million: after all, clever dealers always kept part of their stock in reserve, kept in clan warehouses and their own. I didn’t have even a tenth of the minimum starting capital, so I had to make do.

I posted an incensed message that I was as pure as driven snow and as proof, put the first thirty potions up for auction, saying that I had sent them to the Bazaar via a broker.

In the meantime, I started to actively reduce the price of Dragon Blood, a rare and expensive item that was the key ingredient of the epic elixirs given by the Order as a reward. That’s how I did it: I flooded the auction with scores of small batches of blood, making large-scale traders fall down in the list. My lots were bought, and I put up new ones, buying and selling at the same time. My goal was to cut off the blood dealers’ market for a few days, making them drop the price. After calculating daily sales volume of that component, I decided that I had enough money for two days’ fight.

I dedicated the entire day and half the night to that exciting enterprise. The price slowly dropped down, but most sellers of Dragon Blood seemed unwavering: they didn’t drop the price in spite of all my fussing. Either they had lots of other stuff to sell, or they were as nervous as brick walls.

Whatever. Sooner or later, I would wear them down. I put up the Tincture’s recipe on the auction for a day, selecting the highest possible price, and posted on the forum that I decided to stop brewing elixirs, as it was too much hassle, and sell the recipe for good. Then I went to bed.

My plan was simple. I had information about a new set of rewards, the screenshots of recipes I had made back in the Magister’s citadel upon getting the Tincture of Fire. It was highly unlikely that anyone else had made it to the inner circle of the Order’s stronghold, making my knowledge unique, and I was going to milk it for all it was worth.

The pinnacle of the Order’s quest rewards were three epic-grade elixirs and one called Great. Undoubtedly, it was the best option when it came to fire resistance. The players farming fire mobs and the residents of Netherworld, where every other creature had a fiery aura, would love such potions. All those recipes, however, had one thing in common: making them required Dragon Blood.

 

I wanted to drive down its price, buy out as much of it as possible, creating a market shortage, and then throw in insider information about new elixirs, causing a sharp surge in demand for their ingredients. As I would possess the most important one, Dragon Blood, I would be able to dictate the price and get as much as I could. There was a problem, of course. Lots of players would go to Dorsa to check if the recipes were real and start working for the Order to earn reputation. I didn’t think the Magister would be thankful for such an invasion.

The Magister... In the rare moments I logged out of Sphere, I continued gathering information about his mission, finding Svechkin in the world of Dagorrath in Netherworlds. Alas, everything was harder than I had thought. The Magister’s former protégé had chosen his sanctuary correctly.... Or had somebody else chosen it for him?

In short, it was a closed world, something like a prison. Only a few of them existed in Sphere. Some had been closed due to unusual results of procedural generation, while others had been forbidden from visiting from the very beginning. Dagorrath was one of the latter.

There was a section dedicated to it on the forum. Players’ descriptions and comments contradicted each other. Some were excited, some seemed nauseous, and some were wondering how anyone could like such disgusting things. The locals had given their world a choice nickname, calling it The Hole. As I understood, it was a horror world resembling the most crazy fantasies of H. P. Lovecraft. It was a huge underground ocean — most locations were underwater. There was no sun, no day-night cycle, and no seasons, and it was swept in an eternal darkness. Terrifying creatures that had never seen light crawled in the depths of its black sea, while players visited those place to get a thrill, plus some good loot, of course.

There were no Teleportation Scrolls to that place. There were only two ways to get there. The easiest was to use an ordinary interworld portal in one of Netherworlds. I created a route — twenty-two worlds, nothing impossible, but the last three “switch points” were in the Dark Worlds under the control of the Pandas and their proponents. Something told me we wouldn’t be able to pass through. I was going to try, anyway.

There was also another way: go through the Endless Paths that bound all worlds together in a vast web, find a crossing point in one of Helt Akor’s unstable instances, and sail down Styx. Quite an adventure, especially for a newbie with a flaming sword.

Unfortunately, getting into Helt Akor and surviving the infamous Paths was a challenge in itself. Entire raids were assembled to enter there, and even now, only forty percent of