Chapter 360: Sooner than expected
“Godsdamned Zhen Clan child knocking out my teeth! All I took was a lousy hippo calf…that was worth a lot of money, but still…,” Victor grumbled as he made his way through the city’s backstreets, “if I ever see that kid again, I’ll fucking bite his neck open!”
Please note that while Victor was talking tough shit at this moment, if he had learned the Zhen Clan had arrived in town that morning, he would have run straight into the desert for two weeks without stopping.
He had arrived to Pearl Tusk Harbor about a day prior to the Zhen Clan’s arrival, and had been more or less been regathering his lost nerves and double checking the schedule for the black market and who’d be buying or selling there.
Victor might have been injured, but money was money and he needed it, especially now.
“Stupid missing teeth, gimping my ability to take stuff…,” Victor grumbled for the hundredth time today alone.
He idly began to poke at the holes in his mouth where several of his teeth used to be. It was a habit he picked up after suddenly and violently losing his teeth. He had made notes to try and find some kind of aether pill that could restore broken teeth…so far, no luck.
“What the hell is a dentist?,” Victor asked himself as recalled the threat of “dental work” being performed on him. He wasn’t sure what it entailed, but he really, really didn’t want to find out.
As he stewed on these thoughts though, Victor eventually arrived at his destination, a rundown restaurant called the Gilded Urchin.
As the name implies, the restaurant used to serve a dish made from Golden Urchin, they look like normal sea urchins except the flesh was gold colored, until it was discovered they were selling counterfeit urchins.
It wouldn’t have a been big deal if they had used a gold leaf to coat the urchin flesh, but nah, the original owner decided to use fool’s gold instead. It didn’t end well for the owner when this was discovered, he was tossed into the ocean with a pair of iron boots, and the rumors say that one of the owner’s eye ended up being found inside of a pearl that sold for a gold coin.
But nowadays, it was just a dive restaurant that doubled as the entrance for the local underground market.
‘As dumpy as the last time I was here,’ Victor remarked as he entered the run-down restaurant, making notes of the furniture still being swollen with seawater, the bar that desperately needed to be wiped down of vomit and the one guy who was still sleeping in the corner next to an empty mug. If the man’s coat hadn’t changed every time Victor came to this particular restaurant, he would’ve sworn the man was actually a corpse that hadn’t rotted away yet due to how fucking cold this place was.
Granted, the unfriendly atmosphere made it a natural repellent against civilian types and stuck up elites who “heard rumors”, so he didn’t mind too much.
Victor proceeded to walk deeper into the restaurant’s interior and leap over the unattended, puke covered bar. He then began to look over the collection of bottles stocked in the wall.
‘If I remember correctly, the bottle should be…here.’
Victor reached out and pulled on a bottle from the wall, causing a clicking sound to occur in some hidden mechanism behind the wall, causing the bottles before him to become fuzzy and illusionary.
‘Why on Valresta does the Market Master insist on such a costly door?’ Victor asked himself, ‘a mechanical door like back in the capital would be cheaper than a freaking array….faster too!’
The reason why Victor immediately go through the wall once he confirmed it was partially illusionary, was due to the fact that the array hadn’t fully done it’s job yet.
The entrance to the black market of Pearl Tusk Harbor was made concealed by a special array known as the “Walking Ghost Door” array. It sounded weird, but it was a just an array that turned any solid surface into an illusionary one that allowed people to walk through like it wasn’t physically there.
It was discovered early on that this particular array could technically be inactivated by removing a small part of the array and then reactivated by putting that small piece back, so it became a rather popular array to use for sects and those who wanted to make “impenetrable fortresses”.
No need to worry about battering rams or locking the gate if there was no fucking gate in the first place.
Granted, there was a bit of a delay that occurs when the array becomes active and when it becomes inactive. Unfortunately, this would be one of the reasons why the array would fall out of favor in the public eye.
There was this famous incident known as the “Sun Cavern Cult Massacre”, where the titular cult was absolutely destroyed by an unknown beast that crawled out of the underground and destroyed their mountain home, the Sun Temple, and slaughtered all of the disciples and elders that were home that day in glorious hellfire and fury, until the beast itself was defeated and sealed beneath the crumbled mountains.
At least, that’s what the Nova Temple, the successor cult of the Sun Cavern Cult, told people when they asked about what had happened to their ancestor cult and the original temple home.
The truth of the matter was a lot more embarrassing.
On the day of the “massacre”, an elder had misplaced the piece of stone necessary to complete the array for their “door”, so the cult was essentially trapped beneath at least several dozen meters worth of stone and dirt.
Nobody that day died of starvation, dehydration or suffocation, but that’s because someone had the bright idea to try and punch their way out of the mountain. Evidently, none of them realized that the wall they were using as their door for years was a load bearing wall.
Surprisingly no one died from the resulting cave-in, but the moment was so embarrassing that everyone present agreed to either fake their deaths or injuries and pretend that the original cult was wiped out by some ancient beast. The Nova Temple would then be established a few weeks later.
The only ones who knew the truth of this matter were the now grand elders of the Nova Temple, some bards that many assumed were just drunk as all hell, a couple of trusted confidants who had close ties to the original cult, and a pair of interdimensional, anachronistic gremlins who happened to have hard records of about twenty different versions of that “massacre” story.
Surprisingly, all of the variations were about the same, except for the description of the ancient monster looked like.
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=Honestly, a giant badger is terrifying on it’s own, no need to have it breath sandstorms.=
=I think they were in the wrong region for that.=
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‘Alright, now it’s done.’
Once the array had finished activating, Victor proceeded to walk straight through the shelf of bottles and down a flight of seemingly endless stairs, that were soaking wet. He of course made sure to reset the door behind him as to not be rude and accidently let in some wannabe “bringers of justice”, or another orphan.
That had already happened once before, and that guy ended up becoming a local “prince of thieves” and no one wanted that to happen again. The local black market could handle one young upstart at a time, not two.
As Victor kept walking down the stairs, he eventually reached a point where he could see a source of light coming out from below.
A few steps later, Victor had entered what was essentially a second city built underneath of the first one, granted this place was less upright trade town and more like…the physical geographic embodiment of the sentence, “it’s only illegal if we get caught”.
All pearls come from oysters, but sometimes those oysters get rotten.
As Victor took in the sights of ramshackled buildings made of driftwood, the smell of questionably sourced foodstuffs and the sniveling of caged persons, he finally felt comfortable.
‘Goodbye Pearl Tusk Harbor, Hello Rot Oyster Canals.’
“Oi, I’m rowing here!”
“Fucking out of my way before I slice your knob off with my blunt knife!”
“Hey there big man, want to take my little protege here for a spin? Don’t worry, he’s fully house trained.”
“Slaves for sale, slaves for sale! We also have a family discount! Buy the kids, I’ll throw in their parents for free!”
Once Victor took in a deep breath of that stale, sinful air, he immediately began walking towards a specific direction.
‘Alright, let’s see if my favorite fencer is open for the day.’
