Sacrifice Mage-Chapter 45: A Ton of Treasures

The treasure that was piled in a crater, while interesting, wasn’t going to be divided or partitioned out or anything like that. Adventurer’s Guild policy was that all adventurers performing a Guild-sponsored expedition would need to hand in all recovered treasure. From there, the guild would carry out an evaluation and remunerate the adventurers based on the aggregate value of everything recovered.
“What if I
really
wanted to keep something for myself?” I asked.
“You’re free to perform expeditions on your own if you really want to get them from the dungeon yourself,” Cerea said. “However, the guild makes sure most treasures recovered by adventurers end up in general circulation in one form or another, so you can then purchase it there if you really want it.”
“Things have to be processed,” Ugnash added. “For instance, the mana cores we recovered aren’t normally usable by most people. The Adventurer’s Guild has links with other guilds, academies, merchant houses, and such to convert the mana cores into potions that everyone can drink.”
I nodded. “Huh, I see. That makes sense. Is that how they prevent lone adventurers or rogue groups from clearing out dungeons?”
“Smart,” Cerea said, flashing me an appreciative smile. She was still cagey around my transformed state, but it seemed to be helping that my mind was still mostly my own. Whatever impulses I felt, they weren’t overpowering my judgment. “But yes, even if other adventurers cleared out dungeons, they’d be hard put to find places to sell what they found.”
“There are some underground markets,” Khagnio said, surprisingly volunteering information. “But good luck getting a fair price if you don’t know the right people or finding opportunities to buy what you actually need. The Adventurer’s Guild and all its contacts have a strong hold over the entire market, and they’re pretty good at sussing out idiots.”
Good to know. It made sense the various guilds were strong and well-established enough that they’d have their sides of the economy in a secure chokehold.
The actual treasure
was
fascinating, though. I could easily see how someone could be tempted to claim it all for themselves. All the gold and silver, all the shining jewels, plus the other, more specific rewards that the dungeon had manifested.
“It’s crazy to think that a dungeon can manifest things like this,” I said, picking up some of the coins in the hole. They shimmered a brilliant gold and silver, though they weren’t familiar. The currency wasn’t the same as Zairgon.
“Dungeons are indeed wondrous beings,” Cerea said. She noted how I was inspecting the coins. “Don’t worry, dungeon coins are usually worth at least three times their equivalent real currency.”
“Usually?”
“Everyone might use the same currency on Falsient, but that doesn’t mean things don’t have a bit of a different value in different places.”
Falsient was the continent that Zairgon was situated on. I remembered seeing the map of it at the Mage Guild at one point, but I hadn’t really paid attention to the greater surroundings. I did recall seeing Cerea’s home, Claderov, on the northern portion of the map. But really, I needed to focus on getting used to Zairgon before I looked at the rest of the continent.
Now I understood why they hadn’t bothered taking more of the Brillwyrm corpses. Cerea began collecting the coins, her Aspect manifesting with little monochrome sparks that ate up the coins just like that.
Khagnio more or less swam through the coins to start picking out the more specific treasures that had caught his eye earlier. Ugnash and I joined him.
Several were different sets of robes and armour. Their discovery made me suddenly realize there was no handy little skill or any other ability from the Weave that revealed the properties of what I was looking at. Didn’t people getting transported to other worlds get Inspect or something like that? I couldn’t believe it had taken me this long to realize that.
Nobody there had any sort of evaluating ability either. It didn’t matter, after all. They were supposed to return it to the Adventurer’s Guild, who would carry out their own methods of appraisal that didn’t care about individual evaluations by adventurers.
That felt a bit short-sighted to me. What if the guild was stiffing others? Wouldn’t it be better to have some confirmation? Ugnash and Khagnio didn’t seem to care.
“There were cases regarding that before, you know,” Cerea said, ever the explainer. “There have been a handful of historical challenges to the value determined by the guild for some treasures recovered by adventurers. None of them stood up to official scrutiny, however.”
“Scrutiny, huh?” I said. “What kind?”
“Investigations by impartial parties. If I remember right, over a century ago, one of Councillors herself looked into the matter and simply performed evaluations of her own in front of a public gathering, which turned out to be the same as the guild’s. They’ve been exonerated ever since. The guilds have to answer to higher powers as well, most of whom are interested in keeping things fair, so it’s in
their
best interest not to mess with things.”
“Too much,” Khagnio added.
Cerea rolled her eyes. It was a little comforting to see how that was a gesture of mild disdain here on Ephemeroth as well.
A part of me wanted to posit that the Councillor could have been in the guild’s pocket too. Bribery wasn’t at all uncommon. In many places, laws only mattered insofar as one’s inability to pay it off, one way or another.
But it would also be presumptuous of me to apply the same line of thought here. I hadn’t seen any outright proof of unfair corruption, especially at a high level. I could withhold my judgment.
Well, no real corruption apart from how Ring Four was treated. Then again, that was less corruption and more just a very ingrained sense of prejudiced superiority.
“We do recognize some things,” Ugnash said. With most of the coins now inside Cerea’s dimensional storage, he was able to pick out some parchment from the bottom of the crater. “These are obviously dungeon maps. They should fetch a fair price.”
“Wait, how does that work?” I asked. “This isn’t a new dungeon, right? So wouldn’t other people have cleared it and found maps, or just mapped it themselves?”
Cerea inspected a gold and a silver coin side by side for a moment before throwing them both into her dimensional storage. “They do that, yes. But you see, the dungeon changes its layout every so often. Maps are almost never permanently useful. That’s why adventurers always look out for them.”
I shook my head. The more I learned about dungeons, the more I felt like there was just even more to discover.
“I recognize this sword too,” Khagnio said with another low, appreciative whistle.
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The blade in question was a scimitar with a red handle. I wasn’t so sure what was special about it, or how Khagnio apparently knew what it was, but the explanation arrived before I could ask.
“This is a Cartographer’s Blade,” he said. He turned his slitted eyes on me. So that was what excitement looked like on a Scalekin. “Kill somebody with this, and the sword will lead you to wherever they’ve been over the past day.”
I blinked. “That’s crazy.”
“Isn’t it, mageling?” Khagnio shook his head, almost looking as awed as Cerea did when she talked about the dungeon. “Imagine the kind of brains to come up with something like this
and
the skill needed to smith it.”
That did make me wonder what Gutran would have said to a sword like this. Could he make unique armaments like that?
We scoured the room for any other treasure and gathered them all up before heading out. Cerea mentioned she had barely any room left in her Dimensional Storage, so taking up any more monstrous corpses wasn’t an option.
“Isn’t the treasure going to get messy with all the monsters in there too?” I asked as we began returning the way we had come in.
Cerea’s eyes sparkled like I had just given her license to wax lyrical about her Aspect. “Not at all. Within my Dimensional Storage, everything is in stasis. It doesn’t matter how I store things. Nothing in there will interact with anything else. In fact, if anything has ongoing internal processes, they all freeze as soon as the entire thing is inside too.”
“Oh! That’s interesting. So if I put a clock inside there, it’d show the same exact time when I take it out too?”
“Exactly! It’s partly what got me fascinated with clocks and watches. Quite heady to realize I have the ability to stop time itself, even if it’s in a very peculiar fashion.”
That would also explain why she couldn’t just shove anything living inside her Dimensional Storage either. Stopping time would likely kill any living things too, and that sort of instant-death was probably too overpowered for the Weave to allow her to execute.
Much like how I couldn’t use my Affixes on living things directly either.
We passed by the carnage I had caused again. Well, me and Cerea together, technically, but we were all pretty aware that if I hadn’t transformed into a half-Brillwyrm, things would be looking a lot different. It wasn’t the same as the killing that Ugnash and Khagnio had performed too. For them, it was normal. Expected. Seasoned adventurers taking care of monstrous enemies.
For someone like me to leave a swathe of ripped-apart bodies, torn limbs, bits and pieces of flesh everywhere, and so much blood that it still hadn’t dried off, it was rather shocking.
We found the sheep where I had left it, but I didn’t approach. Ever since I had turned into a were-Brillwyrm, I kept feeling the undercurrent of violence. Of a
predatory
need to rip into flesh with my teeth. It had been there since I had transformed.
But now, seeing the sheep, it rose to the forefront.
Of course, I could suppress it easily. It was still tangible, though. The sheep sensed it, bleating madly as soon as it saw me. To be fair, it had done that whenever any of the monsters had appeared.
“Looks like I’m saved from cave-sheep duty,” I said, grinning.
“I pass.” Khagnio walked past the creature, completely ignoring its worked-up state. “You’ll turn back to normal soon enough, anyway.”
“…damn, you’re right.”
Ugnash kindly took charge of the sheep for now. He was surprisingly soothing with it, though the sheep did weirdly try to bite him for some reason. It just made Khagnio laugh.
We halted in the chamber with the dead Greater Brillwyrm, where Ugnash said that we could rest up. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed. Several hours since we had first entered, at least, but the way everyone else was settling down made me think it had been longer. Almost a day? I shook my head. No way we had been here for
that
long.
“If we push on, we can make it out in an hour or two, right?” I asked.
“We could,” Cerea said. “But I’m tired and famished and
terribly
stinky. I want to rest for a bit.”
That was fair. It had to be my monstrous form that wasn’t making me feel the same thing. And the fact that I had Sacrificed some food before coming to the dungeon. The reward for that was always never needing to eat for the rest of the day.
And since Sacrifice and Fervour had both been improving, it was also possible that I could get more out of Sacrificing the same amount of food. I could spend more energy doing whatever I needed to without feeling the first hint of hunger and thirst.
Now if only this pesky predatory instinct would leave me alone. I was tired of the drool I constantly had to lick up before it slipped out of my mouth.
With nothing better to do, I decided to rest as well. Some of them actually went to sleep. Cerea was able to clean herself up, eat some food that looked like hardtack, before lying against the dungeon’s rocky wall and closing her eyes. She was a snorer. Even Ugnash cuddled against the sheep and started breathing deeply before long.
I didn’t follow their example. Not at first. But then, the transformation began dying down.
And as it left, everything that my body had been suppressing now came rushing back like a volcanic eruption.
My stomach churned harder and harder as the images of the fight in the chamber flooded my mind, memories crashing on top of each other in a waterfall of blood and gore. Tearing limbs, the way scales split and flesh got squashed, the way the lava had cooked that monster…
The way the eyeball had popped
…
I was again glad my stomach was empty, even if I did feel bile climbing higher up my gullet, stinging all the way to my throat.
Why
was I feeling this way after I had fought so brutally against the Scarthrall? This wasn’t my first time killing. Sure, I had been more brutal this time, but I had literally popped a Scarthrall’s head like watermelon.
That memory did nothing to help my queasiness or the way my breaths were coming in a little too fast. My heart was palpitating. Sweat broke on my skin.
I was having a
worse
reaction than I’d ever had before. This was insane.
“Get some rest.” Khagnio’s voice cut through my agitated state. He was looking right at me. Unlike his usual scathing, conniving, denigrating self, he almost sounded kind. It sounded
wrong
on the Scalekin bastard. “First times are always hard. You’ll get used to it, mageling.”
“This wasn’t the first—”
My voice sounded so normal, so me again, I was temporarily shocked. And that shock brought me out of the moment for just long enough to think.
It was Sacrifice. I was absolutely certain that whatever rewiring of my brain had happened during the last transformation had somehow delayed my response to my very own acts, as if a part of me could
feel
what I was doing but just couldn’t process it.
Now that it could, all of it slammed home at once, rushing through my brain and worsening the physiological response as well.
I swallowed hard, trying to not let any of the emotions or the effects they had get to me. Khagnio was right, much as I hated to admit it. The best thing I could do was sleep it all off. I wasn’t sure if I
could
sleep, but I was beginning to feel exhaustion tugging on both my body and my soul. It shouldn’t be impossible to lull my mind into a nap.
Eventually, after way too much twisting and turning, I managed to lose consciousness.
I woke to screams and curses. A sudden attack? An ambush? My groggy, partly confused mind didn’t even register the redundancy.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I shot upright.
The others were getting up too. I didn’t pay them any mind. It was Khagnio who had arrested my attention.
“Pits-cursed
sheep!
” he shouted. “It’s—
argh
.”
In the gloom of the low light, I was still able to make out where the sheep was attacking Khagnio for some reason. When and how had it gotten away from Ugnash and loose from its rope?
The Scalekin was trying to subdue the struggling, fighting sheep without hurting it too much. But there was something wrong. Even my befuddled head recognized how the sheep seemed way too strong. How it wasn’t just trying to gore Khagnio. Its mouth chomped viciously, drawing blood through his scales.
How was a sheep that was so weak that it had bounced off my shield able to puncture the Vitality of someone far stronger like Khagnio to actually wound him?
Ugnash tried to rush over to help, but with a growling bray, the sheep suddenly tore free from Khagnio. Both of them were too surprised to react in time. The sheep bounded off, even its bleating cries going silent as it dashed off into the gloom of a different tunnel.
I just stood there and watched, mouth slightly agog, as Cerea got up next to me.
“What just…?” She yawned.
Khagnio scowled at me. “Your sheep just tried to eat me!”
I stared back. When had it turned into
my
sheep?