“We need the Quintessence for the research, not the stuff it’s wrapped around. The cheapest pea she has is Lead Scarabs there. Buy ten thousand of them,” I told Briggs calmly.

  “Done. What else?” he asked.

  “We can get aqua incanta and neutral balms from her for a quarter of the current production cost. She also has alembics for a song and dance. If we want to start up serious Potion production, another thousand alembics will save us about six months of work and delays.

  “Ten million prismatic tapers. A hundred thousand of each Scarab she has, other than Lead. Ten of each other Pea. Ten thousand prismatic taper Peas as a combat reserve for battle mages.”

  That was going to cost tens of millions of pyreal, but Briggs didn’t bat an eye. We were going to walk away with like eighty Tapestries of pyreal. Eighty years of a thousand people spending a goldweight a day.

  Losing a decade meant nothing. It was free money, and if he Burned it all away making stuff that they needed, so be it.

  “And here I was thinking ten thousand pairs of shoes and sets of clothing from the peddler might be a little excessive.”

  “Magical clothing that auto-sizes to whoever puts it on.”

  He blinked again. “Damn!” he muttered. “Fifty thousand, then…” Enough to give every male, female, and child in the Freehold Alliance at least two sets.

  “Missed the things on the top left there?”

  Helplessly, Briggs looked back again, even as he took out three more stacks of MMD notes. Four vaguely egg-shaped stone-like objects with lines crossing them waited on the racks there. “Never seen them before,” he admitted.

  “Be surprised if you had. Those are reusable mana stones, Briggs.”

  His breath hissed out. “Capacitors for mana for the old Artifice system…” Which naturally had blown the fuck up during the Fall and made a mess of many archmages selling them… or adventurers who had them in their packs or in storage, just like their fully charged counterparts.

  “And something nobody remembers how to make now, once again. We can make mana charges, even back in Ispar, but we couldn’t make potentially reusable ones.”

  “How important are those?”

  “Recharging charged magic items is always one of the trickiest things to do with Artificing. You ever hear of someone recharging a Wand? None of the Isparian Artifice could be recharged personally at all. You had to use Mana Charges or the Stones.”

  “Figuring out how to recharge the Stones means potentially figuring out the rest of the Isparian Artifice with your own power, and a potential leap to figuring out Wand recharging with your own power, too?” He let his unique single-note whistle simmer out carefully. “If it can be done without goldweight, that’s huge, Ryin…”

  “I know. I don’t know metal and prices. Is it worth the pyreal to buy maces as just raw metal? I know we’ve got the lugians pulling out metal for us now that the Gotrok are gone, but I still wonder.”

  He glanced back in the direction of the smith, calculating. “It would take care of backed-up demand by weight. The weapons themselves are basically beginner Weapons at best, only good for… training…”

  “Like the leather and armor that fits to whoever wears it?”

  He sighed and made mental notes that he was going to be some making armories with training sets. Probably have to paint them bright yellow or something, too. “Okay, so at least a couple thousand sets of everything there, too.”

  “That cheese looks like a good solid cheddar wheel, and the peddler’s got unlimited milk, if you care to grab some of that, too, as well as flasks for a basic kit.”

  “We’re going to be spending a lot of money here,” Briggs remarked thoughtfully.

  “I’ll have to make custom pits so the components don’t crush one another and such, and use TK to stack everything, but that’s nothing,” I agreed. “That milk looks to be almost half-gallon jugs, so fifteen or so to a cubic foot, eight thousand cubic feet. A hundred and twenty thousand milk jugs to fill a cube.”

  “What are you going to make with that much milk?” he wondered.

  “A lot of butter, cream, and cheeses.”

  “How many Tapestries do you have available?”

  “If I set here and regain mana, all that we need.”

  His hairy ear twitched. “One of the Scour teams said they found another few thousand MMD notes they had ignored earlier in the chests… damn, they were finding some under the rubbish stacked up in the Apartment drops, too. They’re scrambling for them now.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  “Just one of those notes is 500 goldweight.” There was almost nothing more valuable that the men could find now.

  “Which means we’re racing the Freeholders to all the cabin and chest sites across Dereth, and they don’t even know why.” There’s no way the news could be kept secret.

  “Assuming that they haven’t been looted already, at least once we start making purchases,” I pointed out. “The only way that we’d be looking for the notes is if we found a place we could spend them at. So, they’ll instantly be looking for the place… and if they find it, they’ll spur a System purge and reset all that much faster.”

  “Mmmm. So, you’re saying we can convert and buy as much as we like as fast as we like, but as soon as this starts becoming widely-known, the change will happen faster.”

  “Just like spurring things with your Source Aura. If we buy things and just stick them somewhere nobody knows about, they probably won’t notice anything, or take no action. If we start opening up the food and repressed economy suddenly, the reaction from the System will likely be very quick.”

  “I’m going to pull both Kris and the Mick off Freebooter Island and onto wild runs to the housing settlements that we know of. Elysa and her people, too."

  “Hire Oswald and all his people, too.” He shot me a look. “They won’t blab to the Freebooters, it’s not good business. We’ve got enough Scouts and Scour teams to hit every settlement in Osteth, but the North is big and there’s a LOT of ground to cover.”

  “So, you’re going to stay here until all our initial purchases are completed, Tapestry everything, and bring it all… where?” he asked specifically.

  “I could drop all the military supplies in Freehold itself without any problem, just put up warehouses that aren’t as empty as they seem to be. Ditto the soft goods.

  “I was thinking of putting the pyreal reserve and smeltery under Fort Candeth.”

  Briggs considered that, then grinned in admiration. “That’s a good plan. Martine is beyond bribing with material goods, I’m pretty sure, but sitting on the national reserves will appeal to his sense of pride. But I’m pretty sure we should at least allocate some to general coinage.”

  “We can do that, but just be aware it will constantly be Burned away to make magical stuff by anyone who picks up basic Artificing in the Matrix system. So at some point you’re going to need alternate coinage, regardless,” I pointed out.

  He waved it away. “That was going to happen in the future, regardless.” He paused at the idea. “What did they do on Terra-Luna?”

  “The Archmage left them a Crystal Converter that could monetize Loyalty.”

  “Monetize?…” He blinked again, then smiled ruefully. “I’m guessing nobody knows how to make something like that yet…”

  “Not yet, no,” I had to admit. “Weekly or daily trips to Ael’s base of operations to cash in that Loyalty, too. Gotta collect them Death Coins and stuff.”

  “Oh, damn, that’s where those come from?” He sighed in realization. “Okay, secrecy paramount as long as we can. That means Master Ben Ten and myself can’t be seen coming out from here. I’m pretty sure we weren’t seen coming here at all…”

  “I can create a fake rockfall that blocks off the main entry entirely. We were idiots and Sealed all the spawns, basically broadcasting that we were here.” I swatted my own head.

  “Nice. That will make it obvious if someone wants to get in, too,” Briggs grinned nastily. “And you’re the only one with a working Teleport lock coming in to here…”

  “And Endure,” I pointed out with a roll of my eyes, pointing at his Greathammer. “You think I don’t know that?”

  “You’re not supposed to notice the big, dumb Hammer is alert and aware,” the Hammer visible on his shoulder rumbled in a metallic voice.

  I just laughed. “Actually, Briggs did a good job concealing that. But you forget I have an intelligent item, and you guys can sense one another of you close by.” I held up my hand and waggled Zeks his way.

  “Oh, right. Sorry, boss,” the Hammer apologized, and his wielder just chuckled.

  “No need, Endure. We weren’t trying to fool the Magos, just everyone else who wanted to underestimate you.”

  “Special Purpose Power kick in yet, Endure?” I asked the Hammer politely.

  “We are debating options, Magos,” the Hammer said unhappily.

  “Defend Briggs, his friends, and allies,” I said simply. “Start with Mass Cure Light Wounds, upgrade to Mass Cure Serious Wounds over time and take the Caster Level all the way to Twenty.

  “Your name is Endure. Nothing says that like going on far past when others would drop, and restoring a Warlord’s army to him even more quickly… and keeping him in the fight constantly.”

  Briggs just glanced at his Hammer. “That does simplify things. The classic Defeat Evil or Defend Humanity just seemed to have too many holes in them, and Defend Good didn’t leave much open for Neutrals who are also allies.”

  “And if I were to lose Briggs?” the Hammer asked unhappily.

  “Then you get to pick one of his friends, family, or allies to extend your Purpose too.” I turned to Briggs and pointed at him. “And no, you do not get to do a Special Purpose Power with Naming Karma. Goldweight and make it permanent. If you do it with goldweight, Endure should be able to Invest itself with time, not needing you to do so.”

  The Hammer perked up a full inch in great interest. “That would take care of the Naming Karma weakness, Master!” the Hammer said brightly.

  “And we seem to have come into the funds necessary to do just that suddenly,” Briggs nodded agreement. “Okay, let’s start getting this stuff done, Ryin.” He turned fully back on the Sho woman in the archmage robes waiting with eternal patience for them to resume their business or depart, unmoved by the passing of the world.

  I pulled out another Itemized sheet of cloth, broke the paper, and Zeks sent it spinning down perfectly into place in the empty pit.

  Scant seconds later, tons of pyreal were sluicing down into the pit, magically being stacked perfectly atop one another to maximize the room within, and a fortune which totally did not belong in Dereth was being generated as monumental amounts of System imbalance and ignorance of economics came back to sync really badly with the new change in magic that was prevalent now.

  Someone was manipulating the System, and that someone had gotten lazy with their updates when nobody was dealing with things. Everything that had interacted commonly or uncommonly with people seemed to have been hit, but that didn’t seem to have applied uniformly to things that weren’t reacting with people at all.

  We’d just have to see just how much we could exploit the ever-loving Hell out of the loophole left behind by whoever wasn’t watching as closely as they should have, and get everything we really wanted done as fast as we could.

  Whether or not we could get the rest done at all was more a function of time then secrecy, as someone was going to notice the bug in the System and close it. As long as we didn’t overdo it on our end, who knew how far we were going to be able to take this?

  This chapter is based to an extent on an event in early AC I have mentioned before, where the Devs accidentally changed the prices in two locations, where you could buy pyreal peas at one archmage and sell them at another archmage for a profit. People were making thousands of MMD notes per hour doing this, which would have totally broken the money system in game. They ended up having to do a full rollback and adjust the buy/sell rates so that it couldn’t happen, wiping out the easy fortunes.

  Money naturally became less and less valuable as time went on, so gambling halls for nice rewards and other things were put into the game to consume them and give them value once again. Regardless, there were people who easily built up mule characters full of tens of thousands of MMD notes.

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