Chapter 359: A coin’s edge
The funny thing about being placed into a stressful situation is that it can cause one’s perception of reality to suddenly become skewed.
Things that would normally bring joy, now bring anger.
Things that would would annoy them, suddenly make them calm.
Time itself suddenly seems to move slower or faster depending on the amount of stress, physical or otherwise, someone puts themselves under.
But occasionally, it can bring innovation.
________________________________________________
“Mew…”
“It’s okay kitty, Jasper will get us free…,” Janice comforted the mewling kitten.
‘If I kick against the bag I could end up hurting Janice or the kitten, I need something to cut through the sack, but what?’
The three of them has been stuck in this sack for the better of an hour, or what they assumed was an hour. Not a lot of light got through the sack’s materials and neither of them had any means to tell time.
Jasper was doing his best to try and figure out a way for them to escape, but as far as he could tell, that required a knife that they did not have.
However, as Japser tried to readjust his position to make himself and Janice more comfortable in the sack, he noticed something poking his sides.
‘Wait…I do have something to cut through the sack!’
Jasper quickly reached into his pocket and fished out one of the silver coins that the strange woman had given him earlier.
Once he confirmed it was in his hands, he proceeded to feel the edge of the coin with his thumb, an action that confused the small girl.
“Jasper?”
“Please be there, please be there…yes!”
For the past few years, Pearl Tusk Harbor, and the greater Iron Heart Kingdom as a whole, there had been a bit of a crisis involving people shaving bits of metal off of coins and making fake ones out of them.
While it wasn’t a massive deal, due to many cultivators making use of a barter system moreso than currency, it should be noted that this has been leading to multiple incidents of people using these coins during monetary exchanges and then cutting their hands and fingers against the horribly cut edges of these tampered coins.
While Jasper had no understanding of the greater economic issues pertaining to the usage of fake currencies, nor the medical concerns that can occur when getting injured by a piece of metal that had been exchanged again and again between multiple hands or varying levels of cleanliness, he understood that every now and again when he was given a coin in charity, that the edges were occasionally sharp to the touch.
He had made sure time and time again that such coins didn’t harm Janice, but now was the first time he felt happy about seeing this type of coin.
“Jasper? What’s that?,” Janice asked.
“The key to our freedom,” Jasper whispered confidently.
Coin in hand, Jasper proceeded to rotate ever so slightly and place the edge of it against the fibers of the sack. Once in place, he began to move the coin up and down with his fingers and saw against the fabric until he caused a tiny tear to form.
When Janice saw the hole she almost squealed with delight.
“Jasper you-!”
“Shhh! Not yet Janice,” Jasper whisper scolded, “wait until we get out first.”
“Oh…okay,” Janice nodded and whispered.
While Jasper could have tried and cut through the sack in this moment, it wasn’t a good time for him to do so.
When the hole opened up and gave way to unobstructed light, Jasper saw that the floor beneath them at this moment was made of wet wooden planks and not stone cobbled roads.
Which that meant that for all intents and purposes, they were double stuck.
‘Where are these guys taking us?’
________________________________________________
“Did we really have to take a canal to get to this hotel? You know how I get about sea sickness,” Simo grumbled as he held onto their “cargo” with a green look on his face.
“Oh quiet down,” Graff shot back as he continued to move the gondola through the canal, “just focus on keeping the sack quiet and not on the moving water.”
“Fine…,” Simo groaned.
In their early days as criminals, Simo and Graff learned a couple of tricks and acquired some standard tools that made their trade easier to perform.
First, they learned how to use their aether to muffle sounds and mess with people’s perception.
While they could just hide the stuff they pilfer in their pockets and in sacks, such things were rather obvious to the naked eye if spotted. By making use of aether however, it made it much harder for untrained warriors to notice what was right in front of them.
Activities such as larceny and enslavement were still frowned upon and against the law, at least in this part of the continent, but anyone that would be able to pierce through their tricks were too far up the totem pole of cultivation to care about their activities.
Second, they acquired a gondola for private use.
Due to Pearl Tusk Harbor being…a harbor, the citizens of the city had ready access to a huge amount of water in the form of the nearby ocean. As such, the city builders made it a point to incorporate several canals to act as a means for small to medium cargo ships to come and go, while also giving the general populace an alternative to just walking.
Restaurant boats, taxi boats, gondolas, the occasional giant sea creature mount, the canals of Pearl Tusk Harbor were open to all sorts of strange and wonderous means of aquatic movement.
That being said, it also served as a rather convenient means to transport illicit material with little hinderance or inspection, since not a lot of people were willing to pull over a random gondola that was sitting in the middle of a canal.
Too much effort, too much traffic would get diverted, and way too much water was involved.
Lastly, and more importantly, they learned how to navigate the city…sort of.
The two of them had familiarized with the traditional routes that were the quickest and easiest means to get to and from points A and B, A being their target and B being the nearest fencer, but they hadn’t exactly planned on what to do if those usual routes get…obstructed.
“Oi, why are you turning here? Didn’t you say the hotel was like twenty minutes forward? I’m about to vomit into the canal over…,” Simo moaned.
“Normally yes,” Graff answered, “but it looks like there’s a traffic jam in the canal. Some jackass tried to ride a Starry Speckled Narwhal from the oceanside and ended up jamming into a vegetable freighter, tusk first! And these jackasses decided to make their ship out of Black Iron ebony.”
“Wait…ain’t that wood incredibly expensive and basically makes the ship-”
“Impenetrable to 2nd tier aether beasts? Yeah, which is why they’re having a massive issue just trying to yank the narwhal out.”
“Oof.”
“Come on, put your back into it!”
“Muu…”
Right in front of the duo, accompanied by several other blocked small maritime vessels, a team of Acolytes were busy trying to remove an embedded narwhal with star patterned skin from the hull of a medium size vessel made of black wood. Surprisingly, the narwhal’s tusk did not pierce the actual boards of the ship, but had somehow managed to get it jammed in between the boards, causing the current predicament.
There was apparently some back and forth between just removing part of the planks or sawing the narwhal’s tusk off at that point, but both parties found the ideas to be absolutely reprehensible unless they were properly compensated, neither of which were willing to do so.
“Come on man, I got a shipment of mangoes to deliver like…twenty minutes ago!”
“Honey. Do you think we can just pull over to the side and carry the gondola over to the other end?”
“I tried that one other time, and they fined me five gold coins for it.”
“What the fuck? That’s bison shit!”
“Right?!”
“Stupid fucking flying ordinance…”
Conversations like this was popping up all over the blocked canal, but it wasn’t the norm.
A good chunk of people just decided to throw up their hands and take alternative routes.
They’ve lived in this city long enough, they knew what alternative routes to take to get to their destination, or at least somewhere to moor their vessels as they waited for this bullshit to end. Well, most of the people leaving for alternate routes knew where they were going.
“If I recall correctly, we’re suppose to take a right at the ice cream shop and a left at the noodle shop?”
“I thought it was a right at the grilled corn stand and then right again at that one place that does eel.”
“The eel and pie shop or the grilled eel shop?”
“You can grill eels?!”
It has been gossiped in the underworld, that Simo and Graff managed to last this long through sheer dumb luck.
________________________________________________
“Gah…my teeth still hurt. At least I can go see a dentist after I’m done unloading my stuff…”
