I reached the City and headed to a nearby butcher’s shop to sell the Goat. As I waited to be helped by the butcher, I thought over the ironies in a spiritualist’s life that occurred when hunting higher ranked beasts. The initial point was that the value of the cores from such beasts usually exceeded the value of the entire carcass by many orders of magnitude. Further, as a rule, higher ranked beasts tended to be larger, and thus provided even greater amounts of edible meat. Indeed, in my last life, I remember many battles where we would kill the beast in the middle of nowhere, roast a great feast, take a week’s provisions, but ultimately leave hundreds of pounds of flesh for other beasts to scavenge upon.

As a further point though, certain beasts contained some mundane material which was highly sought after. For instance, some creatures had iron bones, thus providing access to an alternative source of valuable iron to cities for either refining into steel or smithing directly into tools or weapons. Further, certain high ranked beasts had exotic materials which were so valuable that such beasts were specifically sought out by spiritualists because they required such materials on a personal basis. Such rare materials were almost never available for sale and thus, arguably, such high ranked beasts were—in very small part—invaluable.

These and other considerations flowed through my head when I finally got around to haggling with the butcher over what was ultimately a pittance. Ultimately, I settled on a leg of the Goat, plus enough other meats from his case to feed me for two weeks. I was also to receive the hide later after he had removed it.

With meat in hand, I left and considered calling it a day. That said, there were a number of purchases I had been putting off due to lack of funds, and now was as good a time as any to make those. Which meant I first had to visit the moneychangers.

***

Through the front door, the moneychangers building consisted of a single, dimly lit room four meters wide by eight meters deep. At an incredibly small desk at the front sat a young man with pale skin, and long oily hair plastered to his skull. His clothes didn’t quite fit and, despite being somewhat average in stature, he fit neither the chair he sat in nor the desk he was writing on.

He looked up at me nervously, “Can I help you?”

“I’d like to exchange an E-Core.”

“Master Locke, this gentlemen would like to exchange an E-core,” he turned his head to yell to the back of this admittedly small room.

“Yes, I heard him alright boy,” came a voice from a desk at the back of the dim room. “Tell him I’ll be a minute.”

“He’ll be a minute.” I could of course hear this entire exchange and was rather befuddled why they bothered. I glanced left and right, though there was nothing else in the front of the room; neither bench nor chair for visitors. “What do you do?” I asked absently, while looking at the ceiling.

“Me?” I nodded. “I’ll exchange any G and F cores, and help Master Locke with balancing the books.”

“I see,” I said, though I really didn’t.

“Boy!” the old man shouted, “bring the gentleman back here.”

“If you would s-sir?” the boy stammered in a half bow. I walked past him and towards the back of the room. An old, balding man of short stature sat behind a huge desk almost as wide as the room itself, and nearly as deep. He sat on a huge leather chair which looked to be made of Red Bear leather, and was highly varnished. The old man wore the formal black and white jacket and collared shirt of the civil service, but otherwise was unadorned. He was still scribbling into a ledger with a quill as I approached, and waved absently at me to sit down. Besides his ledger and writing implements, the only other items on this vast canvas of his desk was a precise set of scales and weights, and several lenses for examining cores. He stopped writing, slamming the ledger shut, “Boy! Come put the reconciliation ledger away. And remind me tomorrow to visit Bruno at the South Gate branch again. If this deficit keeps going, I’ll have to hire a daily runner just to keep the vaults balanced.”

“Yes Master,” the young clerk said scurrying around the desk to grab the ledger and then he rushed through a back door.

“Trouble?” I asked casually.

“No, no, nothing to concern yourself with. There’s been a surplus of D and E-ranked animals being exchanged at the South Gate, with a corresponding loss here, and it means that we’re accumulating marks and the South Gate branch is running a deficit. We haven’t adjusted the distribution from central, and doing so is an incredible pain, so we have to make branch-to-branch transfers ourselves. It’s easy for you spiritualists, oh, cores are a universal currency, you quip, and yet the operation of a fully functioning currency system based on the merely killing of beasts is hardly the work of simpletons, yes? For every hunter outside the gates, there’s an accountant,” he sighed. “It’s easy to lose perspective when something complex runs smoothly.”

“That’s certainly true,” I said thinking back to my old life.

“Now,” he said, with a bit of enthusiasm in his voice, “I heard you have an E-core to exchange.”

“Yes, I do,” I said, and plopped the pinky nail sized marble in front of him.

Master Locke—so I gathered—picked the core up delicately between his thumb and index finger and examined it closely, first with the naked eye, and then a series of lenses that became increasingly powerful. As he did so, he commented, “Seems about the right size, though I’ll have to weigh it. Mountain Goat? And a fresh one?”

Raising an eyebrow, “That’s right.”

He glanced at my face, smiled, and continued, “Contrary to the rest of the continent, we are not so backwards as they think.”

“Wait, how do you know what they think?”

“It’s not hard to see it in their faces passing through here. Learning to swing a sword hardly teaches one to express disdain on your face in polite company.”

“Wait, foreign spiritualists pass through Dorflich? I’ve never heard of this.”

“Oh yes,” he nodded approvingly—though more at the core than our topic of conversation— “One or two a year. Powerful ones too,” he emphasized, placing the core on the scale, and beginning to add weights.

“C-rank, then.”

“Them. And… higher,” he said with emphasis and a sly grin, though that disappeared when he glanced at my face. “You don’t seem surprised,” he stated, peering closely at me. “Are you from around here?”

“Yes, I grew up nearby, but I’ve… traveled,” I demurred.

“Well, that’ll certainly broaden your horizons,” he said grimly, and removing a weight, “Congratulations sir, it is indeed an E-rank core. I assume you’ll want it all in marks?”

“Yes, please.”

“Alright, based on the weight, it’s valued at 11,283 marks. With the 1% exchange fee and the 12% tax, that’ll be 9,816 marks.”

I frowned at that, “I’ve never heard of a fee or tax at Dorflich’s moneychangers.”

“Ah, have you never changed an E-ranked core or higher?” I shook my head. “I thought so,” he replied and pulled open a drawer to begin counting out marks. “The G and F-ranked cores are so numerous and valueless that charging any sort of fee or tax on them is more work than it’s worth. We do it purely as a public service, mind you, and most merchants are pleased enough to receive them in lieu of marks. That why I don’t mind the boy in front handling it. But, come E-rank, well, that’s where the money starts counting,” he grinned wickedly mid-counting out my marks. “The 1% fee is how this office makes its business, and while we’re not entirely a private enterprise, we don’t receive city funding either. On the other hand, the 12% tax is the primary means by which the City government funds itself.”

“That’s enough?”

“Oh quite. You know how quickly the value of cores rises. The Queen kills a C-ranked beast once a year and that’s ten percent of the budget covered. Shockingly that’s not a just some silly ritual. In any event, the tax has been working well for longer than I care to remember and our history is scattered with mistakes to the contrary. They once tried taxing property owners, but that went out the door about as quickly as it came in. And then they tried taxing food and beverage, but that just led to civil unrest. No, best to just take from the rich; they won’t notice it’s gone anyways.”

“I ain’t that rich.’

“If that’s not true, what is?” he said, grinning at me like we shared an inside joke. His eyes narrowed fractionally, as he handed the marks over to me, and I started counting them. “Strange,’ he said.

“Hmm?”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were an old man.”

***

With my marks in hand, my first purchase was a set of whetstones from a nearby stone shop (though I really had to question her business model). With those in hand, I stepped into a nearby clothing shop and was measured for five new outfits. In my prior life, I had eventually adopted a standard set of clothing as a uniform and I was in large part recognizable for it. I had worn that for so long, that I felt compelled to adopt a similar uniform for this life—albeit much earlier. The lady running the store was rather sharp though, and when I described what I wanted, she instantly saw my own intent and made several suggestions which, I had to admit, did improve the appearance.

Ultimately, I ended up with: a pair of black Boar leather, knee-high brass-buckled boots; three pairs of baggy pants, made from a blue cloth; held up by a black, Boar leather belt with a brass buckle; three shortsleeved pullover shirts made from the same blue cloth; a V-necked, sleeveless vest, made from a white cloth, with a decorative blue embroidery along the edges for the head and arms, and brass buttons on the front; a long-sleeved, dark brown Boar leather duster, coming down to just below the knees, with breast pockets inside and outside, and matching brass buttons along the open front; a pair of white Mountain Goat leather vambraces, worn on the outside of the jacket; fingerless, black Boar-leather gloves, with a patch of the same blue cloth sewed onto the back; and a high-crowned, wide-brimmed, brown-scaled Raptor hide hat, with a ring of white Mountain Goat fur on the crown, just above the brim. Of course, even using cheaper materials readily available in Dorflich rather than the rare beast materials I had used in my previous life, these custom clothes cost nearly four thousands marks in total. They were going to take two weeks to complete and, with my purse much lighter, I went on to my last stop of the day: Dolores’ smithshop.

“Back so soon?” she said, coming from the back.

“I said it’d only be a few weeks,” I said quizzically.

“Yes, yes, but you looked like fresh meat. Every farmers’ boy who comes into the City thinks they’re going to strike it rich, and then a month later, bam!” she slammed the table to emphasize her point, “they’re eating hand to mouth.”

“Yes, well I know how to manage my own affairs,” I said rather brusquely. More pleasantly, “I’m here to trade in this sword, and order two weapons,” I said handing her the sword by the sheath.

She pulled the sword from the sheath and swung it around twice, noting the balance, then held it up to her eyes. “This sword has seen action. And not just some Squirrels,” she muttered. Then, eyeing me from over top of the blade, “What’d you kill?”

“Mountain Goat.”

“Oh! An E-rank. Your party must be pretty happy about that. But you know, my custom work starts at a thousand. You really ought to think about saving that blowing it all on a custom sword and, uhh… what was the other thing.”

“A staff.”

“A staff? Just a steel staff?”

“Yes, 192 centimeters.”

“Hmm. Well, I can do that for 200, and I don’t mind selling that to you. But my point about the sword stands. You should at least wait until you’re E-level for that.”

“My share was 2,000.” I said, feigning a smaller party and thus a larger cut. I didn’t know how she would react if I tried to argue it had been a solo job. “I’ve got room in the budget.”

“Alright, fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you,” she said, pulling out a large journal from behind the counter. “Now, I remember you mentioned a diamond cross-section. What else you want?”

With a smile, we began discussing my sword.