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

“Loosen yer muscles, young man. Ye can call me Rory and I’ll call ye Alex.”

The man stood up as well and moved toward the door. Before I could get there to open it for him, he stretched out his fingers to Louie’s back and petted him softly.

“We’ll do good business together, Alex,” he said. “Ye look sharp.”

“I hope not too sharp as to cut myself,” I replied, and opened the door.

The dwarf immediately burst into laughter and had I not been very aware of people in the building sticking their heads out of their doors to examine the source of the commotion, I might have laughed along with him.

“Too sharp to cut himself,” the dwarf repeated between guffaws. “Ye got a way with words, lad.”

A couple of days later, I was ready to throw eighty thousand dollars’ worth of steel arrows at the market. As promised, Rory had transferred his half of the initial investment into my account just a few minutes after he left my apartment on the day we met. As soon as I saw it, I put up an order to purchase nearly eighty thousand dollars in stems, and also transferred a small amount to my private customs merchant so I could order a couple of hundred pounds of steel.

The steel was delivered to my apartment since I was the one sourcing it from the Cosmos, though I was able to set Rory’s Newark address as the delivery station for the stems once each of the two big purchases was fulfilled. In the beginning, I was a bit concerned about Abrathion Halciu, my marketplace nemesis, seeing my large purchase order for stems and realizing I was coming after him with a new recipe for arrows, but when I didn’t get another message from him, I just let the thought rest.

Rory was crafting the whole day and had informed me that whenever he ran out of mana, he would deliver the crafted arrows to the DEM fulfillment center, which is when they would appear on my account as available for sale. I didn’t know much about crafting since the Dark Energy Marketplace handled the process so far and I wasn’t really in the mood to research it, especially since I was paying quite the price for someone else to do it for me, but Rory gave me a little rundown of how it worked.

Crafting was a class skill like any other. A person’s skill level would rise as they leveled up, with each skill level unlocking leveled recipes that person would be able to craft. Getting hold of those recipes, though, was an entirely different matter. Most of them were very expensive due to the fact that Dark Energy wouldn’t allow them to be replicated. As crazy as it sounded, even when he sent me an image of the Steel Arrow recipe and I wrote it down, the piece of paper did not magically change into a new recipe-type item. It was still just a piece of Cosmos paper.

Another reason for the ridiculous price of recipes was that they could only be found in certain—supposedly dangerous—places, something that gave powerful clans a monopoly where they were able to control said places. As much as this reminded me of guilds spawn-farming raid bosses in MMORPGs, I had to remind myself that those games were modeled after the Apocosmos and not the other way round. Having said all of that, Rory had the recipe I needed and that was all that mattered.

Once he had all the materials in his possession, it was a matter of minutes, if not seconds before he could craft the item. The recipe would remain in his possession while the materials and part of his MP pool would be used up. Once his MP bar was diminished, he would either have to rest long enough that his Regeneration Rate increased again, or take the crafted arrows to the DEM fulfillment center.

Do your thing.

I read Rory’s message on my tablet and switched tabs to put our forty thousand arrows on sale. The price of bone arrows had now been set by Abrathion to $130 per batch of twenty. Considering how much more durable steel arrows were, I could have easily pushed the price up to $180, perhaps even higher. But I needed cash flow so that Rory could start crafting again. That, and I couldn’t wait to shove my middle finger in the fucker’s face. Digitally, but still, in his face.

I put up the sale order for $150 per batch, which meant I was pushing $300,000 worth of product in one move. The amount itself was staggering but I mainly couldn’t help but think about how much of a bitch payback is. I simply couldn’t wait to rub it in.

Of course, this would have to be the first of many transactions before I reached my goal of retiring. Taking into account the 15% fee of the marketplace, only $255,000 would reach my account, half of which would belong to Rory. Still, that would mean almost $90,000 net profit. If we could scale this in a way that meant Rory could keep crafting without having to wait for the sale and get more cash, it would essentially be a license to print money.

“The order is up, buddy,” I said to Louie who was lying in the single spot of the kitchen that was bathed in the sun shining in from our little window.

“Good luck,” he said, not particularly excited. “Are you going to finally sleep now?”

“Are you kidding? I’m too excited to sleep. You should be excited too. Pretty soon, you might be lying on a beach sunbathing, instead of the kitchen floor.”

“The sunshine is the same everywhere,” he said and stuck out his tongue, panting in the heat.

The notification light blinked on the tablet and I tapped on it. The sales were already going through, but the notification was from a message.

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