BlueShear
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Chapter 10
🕑 Added 2024-10-07 04:52:45 +0000 UTCThere had been a time, long ago, when it’d just been him and his parents against the world. It was probably the last time he could remember truly being happy. So, when his father up and disappeared without a trace, and, not an afternoon later, his mother and distant uncle were summarily betrothed, suffice it to say, he hadn’t taken it all that well.
It didn’t help that, whenever he asked her why, he was only ever given vague assurances that they’d “needed his protection.” It would be weeks later that he learned of the true cause: the insurmountable debt they apparently owed to some very dangerous people. The debt which had resulted in his father skipping town, locked his mother in a loveless marriage, and shattered his once idilic childhood into a million little pieces.
He ran away the very next day.
Armed with nothing more than the clothes on his back, and the burning resolve to make his fortune, it would be an entire year later that such an opportunity finally presented itself.
It’d been a sweltering day, he remembered—muggy and unbearable. The kind of weather he’d since learned to associate with beast-tide season. It was a sad truth he became very well acquainted with in that year. That misery almost always had this way of compounding. For instance, how the sun’s relentless ire only served to make the reek of rotting flesh, and other gross bodily fluids, all the worse.
The flies were everywhere, like a dense cloud or fog. So thick in some places that they obscured visibility to less than a meter in any given direction. A rotten day made even worse by the constant skittering of tiny legs on exposed skin. It’d been unavoidable, he knew. No matter how he might have wished for total coverage, the day had simply proven too miserable for the idea to be anything more than a heatstroke waiting to happen. At least on the bright side the cloud of buzzing insects also acted as a fickle sort of shade.
Early on, he’d been fortunate enough to have one of the old guard show him a trick or two. Like how, by tightly binding his body with strips of cloth, he was better able to keep the more curious flies from places they explicitly weren’t welcome. The man going so far as to recount a time in which he’d failed to take heed of his own advice.
When he’d retired from work after a long day, only to find that he’d brought a part of the swarm along with him. Inside of his trousers, if his story was to be believed, though even back then Jun’d had his doubts. Apparently, it’d been one hell of a surprise for the missus later that night. At which point the rest of the old veterans had broken out into fits of uncontrollable laughter. That he hadn’t understood why that was at the time, didn’t stop him from taking the lesson to heart.
Thanks to the old man’s guidance—if not his vigorously pantomimed anecdotes—the insects, while still annoying, were ultimately made manageable. Harmless, so long as he blinked rapidly to keep them clear of his eyes. It was something you just got used to after a while. If you were truly committed to the grisly business of scavenging. It was the reason he figured most simply found they couldn’t hack it. Scavenging through the fields of dead or dying spirit beasts, left in the aftermath of a defeated beast-tide, was not for the faint of heart after all.
Very occasionally he’d spot another shifting form through the haze—sifting through a beast’s innards or rifling through its brains. In hopes of finding that lucky beast core miraculously overlooked by the soldier who’d made the kill. A fool’s errand, he knew. You don’t spend entire minutes locked in deadly combat with a powerful spirit beast, only to then forget about its precious core the second you were done.
Well, not without some pretty severe head trauma anyway. And Jun had already confirmed that, in none of the gossip surrounding the soldier’s barracks, was there mention of any severe head trauma or, for that matter, of any casualties. He’d therefore concluded that the chances of suddenly lucking into a fortune were extremely low.
And really, at the end of the day, easy money simply wasn’t the lot of a lowly scavenger. Hells, even when it did happen, he knew better than most that the chances of you holding onto your prize long enough to capitalize on it were so slim as to basically be impossible. Even several weeks later his ribs were still sore after the beating he’d received following his once in a lifetime discovery. It’d been his fault he knew. In his elation he’d been too vocal, too open, too naïve. He wouldn’t be making that mistake again.
The gig had been a fairly straightforward one, all things considered. You transported carcasses from the fields outside the walls, to the barrack’s resident quartermaster. Depending on how intact the bodies you brought in were, he’d either take the carcass off your hands—your only payment a sharp rebuke, slap on the head, and a lecture about its horrendous quality—or, if you were lucky, he’d palm you a few spare coins for a job well done. It went without saying that he’d then pawn off said valuable commodities to the highest bidder. Often at a markup so steep that it might as well have been criminal.
They all knew it was ultimately a suckers’ game for the lowly scavenger, but someone had to do it. And they didn’t seem to care how old you were, so long as you were able to labor through the day. From there, if the body was in workable condition, blood and organs would be extracted, then sealed. An assortment of jars which were then sold to alchemists, as well as a few large pill manufacturers. And from there…? Well, Jun hadn’t actually been able to scrounge up the information at that time. Industry secrets were always so hard to come by when you were only ten years old.
Very rarely a scavenger might stumble across a corpse both well enough preserved and of a distinctly higher quality—either due to the innate properties of its flesh, or that of its coat. For scavenger and quartermaster both, these finds were widely sought after. To the point that the normally miserly quartermaster had even gone so far as to post additional rewards for any scavenger able to retrieve any such finds. An extra two hundred spirit coins might not have sounded like much to some, but, for him at that time, it’d been a veritable fortune.
As soon as the notice went up, he’d made it his mission from there on to collect as many as was humanly possible. Not realizing that such a crudely scribbled note, tacked sloppily onto a notice board barely fit for more than kindling, would change the trajectory of his life forever. For better, and for worse.
It was while tentatively shifting through a pile of six pawed swamp leopards—fingertips burning from even the brief contact he’d made with their acidic blood—that he noticed something rather peculiar. Nestled between two of the child sized cats was the body of a twin tailed rough hide boar. One of, if not the, most common species of carcass found after a tide, he wasn’t so much surprised by its presence as he was by its appearance. Its coat was… well, its coat was all wrong.
Instead of the bleached white fur he was so used to seeing, this boar’s coat was a bright and vibrant red. And that wasn’t all. To this day, he still wasn’t entirely certain what compelled him. The hide of a twin tailed boar was said to be sharp enough to draw the blood of a cultivator in the foundation establishment realm. Something a steel blade, wielded by the strongest mortal alive, likely couldn’t hope to replicate if they’d been given the whole day.
For someone like him to caress such a hide willingly? A severed finger was the best possible outcome. And yet, when he reached down and ran his hand through its coat, he was only met by soft, slightly damp fur. Damp fur, and a familiar burning sensation. For a while he simply crouched there, dumbfounded. And then, all at once, the gears in his young head began to spin.
Some said their prevalence on a frontier battlefield was due almost entirely to their berserking nature. According to firsthand accounts, they often fought to their last, rather than retreat back into the expanse like any other of their kind. Because of their devilishly tough hides and unpalatable meat, they were disregarded as salvage by both scavenger and quartermaster alike. Merely left for the nighttime cleanup crews to dispose of.
A fact that might’ve proved trivial, were it not for—color altered as it was—its uncanny resemblance to a very different class of hide.
At that time, a single coat made from the furry mane of a dread blood python could easily sell for thirty-five thousand spirit coins apiece. He should know. In the scant few days he’d known her, his stepmother had been unable to go a full two minutes without expounding on and on about how exorbitant the price was, how exquisite it’s quality, or just how many people died just to get it to her.
Located atop the highest mountain slopes of the transcendental range—somewhere near the northernmost borders of the boundless empire—dread blood pythons were just about as rare as they were dangerous. It’s strength, environment, and quality of hide all culminating in the perfect recipe for a luxurious commodity. Essentially, coats of that make were so damned expensive because their materials were just that hard to get ahold of. And so, it only followed, that were someone able to, say, remove the danger, time lost, and scarcity from the equation, they could, theoretically, become a very rich man in a very short amount of time.
He recognized the acidic blood as being something pivotal almost immediately. It’d done something to the fur—softened it and changed its color most likely. There was just no way he wouldn’t have already heard of such a unique twin tail variant. Which, supposing that was true, would have to mean that what he’d discovered here wasn’t an isolated incident. He had to believe it could be replicated. Otherwise, there was really no point in entertaining the thoughts he was harboring in the first place. And if it had happened here, it was entirely possible it was, and or had, happened elsewhere as well. It might even be possible this was a known phenomenon, and simply no one before him had thought to connect the dots like he had. In any case, right or wrong, he knew what needed to be done next.
Without a second’s hesitation, Jun slipped a small knife from his boot sheath and drove it down into the boar carcass with all the strength he could muster. He tore into it methodically, again and again, until the once immaculate hide was little more than a hole ridden mess. Breathing hard, he wiped sweat from his brow, then immediately began piling the many leopard bodies in much the same way he’d found them—now heedless of the acidic blood that continued to seep through his cloth wrappings. When he’d finished there was no indication the impromptu burial site was anything more than what it appeared to be—not worth investigating. He could only pray it stayed that way until the pickup crew arrived.
Now standing atop the hill of rotting corpses, Jun looked out over a carpet of bodies, though not with the mute apathy for which he’d become so accustomed, but instead with eyes that practically shone with avarice. Then, without another backwards glance, he hopped down from his perch and headed for the city gates. He had a cleanup crew to sign up for.
The next year flew by in a whirlwind of activity. By joining the cleanup crew he’d easily located the refuse site. It was a hellish wasteland of decomposing corpses. For Jun, in that moment, he might as well have been looking out at all the riches in the world.
Using what money he’d earned during his stint as a beast scavenger, he’d hired some of the less than savory of his contacts to help with transport. Bully boys, pickpockets, and swindlers, the lot of them, they were rough enough to make you believe they’d grown up in the infamous third ring, and not the cushy domain of the second. Merchant and artisan’s sons, each and every one, they helped him transport everything on borrowed carts.
Once everything was safely secured in an abandoned warehouse he’d called home for some time, he immediately began the tedious process of bottling leopard blood. Whether it was because of the acidic nature of the stuff, or something else entirely, the blood never seemed to congeal, not even in the animal’s veins, which saved him a fortune on alchemical solutions. A lucky break, to be sure, though that didn’t mean everything went smoothly. For instance, it took a considerable amount of trial and error before he figured out what containers were able to hold the blood without slowly deteriorating due to its corrosive effects. Eventually though, that too was sorted, leaving only the issue of a competent tanner.
Naturally, in the beginning, he’d tried his hand at skinning and treating the hides himself.
…he’d seen the good sense in hiring professional hands quickly enough. And, after several weeks marked by nothing but rejection, he’d eventually managed to stumble onto a father and sons shop with amazing potential. Clearly having fallen on hard times, their work had nevertheless impressed him. He proposed they work on the first fifteen pelts for free, with promises to pay them back once everything sold. A little insulting, he now realized, though at the time he hadn’t really had much of a choice. Having used up the very last of his coin on transport and hush money, the only halfway tangible thing he’d had left were his promises.
And, against all odds, the two actually agreed.
A month later, with the first ten of fifteen hides on his person, Jun set out in search of a business that might prove amenable to his needs. Another miraculous stroke of good fortune there. Not only was the business he discovered in a reputable and established part of the city—located squarely on the main thoroughfare of the first ring’s wealthiest district—it was yet another instance of right place, right time. Because quite frankly? The business in question shouldn’t have been on the decline by any stretch of the imagination. And yet…?
Mistress Maisell’s Beauty Boutique had recently fallen on hard times. Not because the quality of her wares were subpar, or because her prices were unaffordable. Not for the genteel sort that once frequented her shop anyway. No, the reason for her empty store and drying coffers had been entirely political in nature. Long story short, there had been an… incident involving a princess, a faulty brassiere, and a room full of party guests.
That Mistress Maisell hadn’t even sold such items at the time, had of course been deemed irrelevant by the irate and mortified young lady.
“She will never sell another dress in this wretched city so long as I live!”
And so, there she was, sitting primly at her counter. Patiently waiting for her forced exile to come to a close. He still remembered how her eyes had brightened when she heard the tinkling of the doorbell. Just as well as he did the moment when her cheer utterly collapsed upon seeing him, all dressed up in his best torn trousers and patched tunic.
It would be an understatement to say she’d taken some convincing. Once she’d seen the uncanny quality of his furs, however, the woman had been all ears.
He sold every pelt he’d brought with him right there on the spot, and, after subtracting the tanners’ fee, immediately reinvested said coin into a system enforced contract. Both in hopes of making the terms of their further working arrangement official, as well as to demand complete secrecy with regards to the details of any future enterprise. Getting his three new business partners to sign had been rather easy. Getting his rougher associates to comply had been much, much harder. That said, thankfully, he ultimately managed that too in the end.
And from there, weeks turned into months as they expanded production, not to mention elevated their class of clientele. Which was saying something since, from the very beginning, their product had been marketed as a luxury item. Something geared towards young nobles with more money than sense.
When the aforementioned princess arrived at their doorstep, however, all of that had irrevocably changed. Because, instead of denouncing them as they’d feared, the young mistress became enamored with the soft red coats. To the point of even giving them a ringing endorsement. A couple of choice words were spoken in the right ears, and in less than a week it’d opened up the figurative flood gates on their entire operation. All of the sudden, they weren’t just catering to the fourth sons of minor nobility. But to kings, queens, dukes! In other words, high society. The demand for “Blood Python Coats” rose to such a degree that it was all that they could do to meet increasing demand.
For a full winter, spring, and autumn, fluffy crimson garments swept through the frontier kingdoms like a wildfire—everyone and their mother desperate to get their hands on this hot new craze. Many saw the bright red fur lining as a status symbol. The scarcity borne of labor shortage only serving to ramp up the prices, and in turn, demand, all the higher. And then there were those that simply sought to throw their money at the problem. Dropping entire small fortunes just to be the first in line. And so, it somehow happened that, by the end of that year, Jun, having only just turned eleven years old, made his very first ten million spirit coins, and earned his very first title.
By personally amassing more than 10,000,000 spirit coins before reaching your cultures majority year, you have been awarded the title: [Merchant of Promise]
|Merchant of Promise|
Allowed access to the System Approved general marketplace.
By the time the next year rolled around, the world of fashion had already moved onto the next big trend. And as a result, the once lucrative pelt selling business would slowly grind down to a halt. Thankfully, that year proved more formative for Jun than anyone could’ve possibly imagined, and he had been anything but idle in that time. Under the guise of the youngest son of a wealthy and influential lord, Jun made many connections, a few powerful allies, and spent every idle moment churning over new ideas. And though many in that small, provincial city hadn’t realized it yet, a new, blazing force of commerce was born that year. And if things went his way, that initial trial run of success would only be the first of many.
