A man walked out after Darrel asked for him and took the blade with him to the back. These sorts of things happened all the time, so the man didn’t even think to look at Ning before returning to where he came from.

Ning looked around the room, waiting, and looked at the prices again. “Aren’t these all pricey?” he asked. “Having a fire sword going for 200 Fire Coins. You would find something like that in a normal store at about 150.”

“The price them what is normal,” the young man next to him said. “It is not too pricey, especially given the design. Our converters work hard for that.”

Ning couldn’t disagree. Although it was just design, and he found that not necessary, he could understand how that could come to cost so much. But still, he couldn’t understand how that went past 175 or 180. 200 was just too much. “That’s what the price for such a thing is these days,” the man said. “We can’t do anything about it.”

Ning frowned a little. In the end, he shook his head. He couldn’t tell them how to run their business.

The man returned a moment later with a clearly surprised look on his face and finally looked at Ning, judging him closely. He even wondered if the man had stolen the blade, but that was not something he could say out loud. “May I ask where you acquired this sword?” he asked Ning.

Ning looked at the man, judging his expressions before answering truthfully. “I made it myself,” he said. He watched the man’s expression change from shock to confusion to doubt and back to shock.

“You made this?” he asked.

“Yes,” Ning said. “But… ” the man looked at Ning. More especially, he looked at his core. He couldn’t recognize the Essence in the core at all. Was that the next the man would ask him to join them, as the young man had?

“This is incredible, young sir,” the man said. “Would you like to join us?” “No,” Ning said. “I have no plans on joining any shop. Please give me your evaluation of the sword.”

“It’s incredible,” the man repeated himself. “There’s nothing else I can say about it. Its sharpness is flawless, and its durability is amazing. While there is something to say about the extent of its flexibility, it’s still realms beyond what a regular converter could make.”

“You sir are talented if you made this.”

“That’s a product of training,” Ning said. Hundreds of thousands of years of training, but he didn’t say that part.

The man thought of ways to get Ning to work for them, but Ning spoke before he could say anything else.

“So?” he asked. “How much will I get for it?”

“1000 Earth Coins,” the man said. “We can negotiate further if you wish to.”

Ning thought for a bit. Every place had its own conversion rate for its coins, but given that it was a regular location, he guessed that a 1000 Earth coin would be around 300 Fire coins. That wasn’t so bad when he thought about it. “Sure, I’ll take that,” he said. It was a pitiful amount for what he already had, but not nothing.

The man brought out the coins from his storage ring and placed them in front of Ning to do the transaction. After finishing, the man wanted to ask Ning to stay so that they could talk about some job opportunities, but Ning left before they could stop him.

Once he was out, he went on a tour of the city, to look through the rest of the things. After an hour or so, he came to understand a bit more about the city.

The city of Ulharis was divided into 3 sections.

The first area was the Core, which was where the Governmental buildings were situated, and the Star Beast Institute had its ground. It was a massive area that took over acres and acres of land.

The second section was the inner city. It was in a sense the commercial district, with an assortment of shops available there, but people lived there too, mostly the rich ones. The regular people lived in the outer city, the location where Ning was staying in a tavern currently. It was an amalgamation of all sorts of people and places. It was also the place where their food grew and cattle went to graze. None of the sections have physical walls separating them. If any, those would be large circular roads that went around the city. Even that wasn’t a good enough distinction and what you found in one section could be found in the other ones.

Ning took his new money and went around buying food and clothes for himself and for the kids. After he bought what he wanted, he went looking for the other 3 shop names that he had heard. action

To his surprise, he came across another King’s Gem before he came across any of the other shops. “He wasn’t lying when he said they have a monopoly. They have multiple shops in the city?”

Sure the city was big, but certainly not that big. Ning walked into that shop for a few minutes to check something. As expected, the prices here were the same as well.

He found the remaining shops a while later and went through them all. The prices were all the same here as well. Everything was overpriced, all for the sake of design.

‘That’s fine and all, but where are the regular shops, for regular people?’ he wondered. He found some a while later, on the edge of the inner city, and not a single one had customers like the big shops.

The outer building was in shambles, the stairway up to the shop itself broken in parts. The colors were drab and there were no Light signs to let anyone know this was a shop.

Ning had nearly missed the shop because of that. As for the inside, he decided to check how that was as well. So, he walked up the stairs and went in.