Chapter 009: What The Valis!?
[Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing.]
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{MIDDAS, SOLYRA 18, 999 — 10:23}
{LUCIAN GILFORD}
The morning market of Orario was awake in full—alive, messy, and loud enough to drown out my thoughts if I let it. The sunlight came down between awnings in broken shafts, warming the dust that never seemed to settle, catching the copper glint of coins as hands traded them faster than I could count. I moved slowly through the east end of the square with my phone in one hand, the screen dimmed just enough not to look like an artifact of heresy.
It wasn't shopping I was doing—it was reconnaissance. Every signboard, every shouted price, every haggled transaction went into my mental ledger. The notes app on my screen looked more like a war strategy than a grocery list.
Bread came first—small, dense loaves of dark rye, a few cracked from baking on too-hot stone. Ten Valis apiece, or a little less if you bought five. Ten cents for something that could break a tooth. Affordable. Painful.
Next came onions at four Valis each, carrots at three, and potatoes at five. Cabbages twelve. All dirt cheap—literally grown in it. The air smelled like root cellars, tangy greens, and smoke from nearby cookstalls that grilled meat over open flame.
I typed as I walked:
Bread (rye) — 10 Ʌ̶
Onion — 4 Ʌ̶
Carrot — 3 Ʌ̶
Potato — 5 Ʌ̶
Cabbage — 12 Ʌ̶
I passed a farmer selling eggs from a wicker basket, each marked with a little chalk symbol. "Thirty-five Valis," he told me in that half-comprehensible city dialect. I caught the number fine. The rest was a guessing game.
I bought one, cracked it slightly with my thumb—it was clean, shell smooth and pale. A city hen's work. Not bad.
Eggs — 35 Ʌ̶ each
Dozen — 400 Ʌ̶
That meant a dozen eggs ran me about four dollars back home. Normal. Acceptable. For once, the economy wasn't trying to mug me.
I drifted further down the row toward the butcher stalls. Flies buzzed around hooks that gleamed with fat and salt. Beef ran 240 Ʌ̶ a kilo, pork 190, chicken 160. The meat wasn't cheap, but it wasn't robbery either. The butcher's apprentice hacked ribs from a side of goat with the same nonchalance as a deli clerk slicing ham. The smell of iron and smoke hit me like nostalgia for barbecues I'd never attend again.
Milk sold in rough ceramic jugs at 120 Valis each—about two liters. Butter cost two hundred per pound. A wheel of cheese, maybe three kilos' worth, came to six hundred flat. I couldn't help noting the absurd symmetry between their copper economy and the way I used to think in nickels.
I might've stopped there if the smell of cinnamon hadn't ambushed me.
It rolled down the aisle like perfume, thick and sweet and almost out of place amid the scent of livestock. The spice vendor's booth glowed with color—tiny jars, tins, and folded pouches arranged like treasures on velvet cloth. I stepped closer, pretending I wasn't doing mental math.
Her smile was practiced, the kind that came from selling miracles by the pinch. "Traveler? Looking for flavor, yes?"
I glanced at the labels. Cinnamon (20g) — 1,500 Ʌ̶. Peppercorns (50g) — 900. Cumin — 1,200. Nutmeg — 1,600. Saffron — 2,200.
I blinked, half expecting a zero too many. Two thousand, two hundred Valis for a single gram of saffron—twenty-two dollars, more expensive than half the illegal substances on Earth.
"Two thousand two hundred," I repeated.
She nodded proudly. "Best in Orario. Fresh shipment from the south—very rare."
"Yeah," I muttered. "Rarer than good sense."
She didn't catch that. I typed quickly:
Saffron (1g) — 2,200 Ʌ̶
Cinnamon (20g) — 1,500 Ʌ̶
Peppercorn (50g) — 900 Ʌ̶
Then, underneath: Spices are economic insanity. Investigate imports, margins, cartels.
A dwarven man at the next booth caught my curiosity. His stall was neater, with tiny vials of bright-red powder and flakes that looked suspiciously like crushed chilies. "Fireflower pepper," he called it. "Hot enough to make a dragon sweat."
"How much?"
He held up three thick fingers. "Three thousand. Worth every coin, friend."
I smiled, writing it down, and moved on before temptation struck. Even my reincarnated wallet couldn't justify buying a bottle of fantasy Tabasco at thirty bucks a shot.
I hit the grain stalls next. Barley flour went for fourteen Valis a kilo. Wheat flour was twenty. Salt sold in scoops—forty for the coarse kind, seventy for fine. Neither looked like much, gray and clumpy and filled with grit. The merchants swore it was noble salt from the Rakian flats. I'd seen better road salt back home.
Costco would've given me ten kilograms of pure sea salt for less than a silver coin.
I noted:
Salt (coarse) — 40 Ʌ̶
Salt (fine) — 70 Ʌ̶
Flour (barley) — 14 Ʌ̶
Flour (wheat) — 20 Ʌ̶
The imbalance was ridiculous. A person could eat for days on ten Valis' worth of bread but spend an entire week's wage on spices to season it. The only reason this economy hadn't collapsed was probably divine inertia.
I bought a jar of honey for ninety Valis, partly out of curiosity. The vendor's accent thickened as she explained its uses—half of which I didn't understand, but I caught "wounds" and "good for heart." Sweet and medicinal, like most things in a world that didn't believe in sugar.
The market noise swelled—coins clinking, steel scraping, vendors calling from every direction. A troupe of kids ran by with paper windmills, chased by a merchant shouting about stolen figs. I took refuge under an awning, my thumbs flicking through my growing list of entries.
Cheese — 600 Ʌ̶ / wheel
Butter — 200 Ʌ̶ / lb
Olive oil — 750 Ʌ̶ / jug
Honey — 90 Ʌ̶ / jar
It was a living museum of pre-industrial capitalism: Guild regulation on necessities, chaos everywhere else. I could practically hear the invisible hand slapping itself silly.
Still, it told me what I needed. Food staples were cheap, spices were criminal, and salt was the hinge point in between. Perfect.
A loud haggling match broke out near the next corner—a fishmonger arguing with a catgirl over the freshness of his catch. I caught maybe three-quarters of their words, enough to know she was winning. The fish, for what it was worth, cost eighty Valis per kilogram. Not bad for something hauled in from the coast every few days.
By the time I looped back toward the square's east gate, my phone screen was a column of Valis figures stretching half a page long. A few merchants had started giving me funny looks—probably wondering why I was cataloguing their prices instead of buying anything. I smiled politely and made myself look less like an auditor from a divine tax office.
I paused at a bench beside a fountain, watching water spill from the stone basin in clean sheets. The irony made me laugh quietly—clean water, freely flowing, while half the city paid through the nose for bottled purity they couldn't replicate.
My thumb hovered over the notes app. I added one more line:
Imports viable. Priority: salt, spices, bottled water. Potential: honey, oils, grain by bulk.
I shut off the phone and leaned back. The bells from Babel tower tolled the half-hour, a deep chime that rippled through the market like thunder. People paused, counted the sound, then went right back to bartering.
I watched them for a while—the rhythm of trade, the smell of bread and sweat, the sheer life of it. For all its inefficiency, Orario worked. Barely. But it worked.
And for someone like me, that meant opportunity.
If inefficiency was currency, then this city was already printing my fortune.
The crowd had thinned to a steady current by the time I made my second pass through the square. The market's chaos had shifted gears—less of a brawl now, more of a rhythm. Merchants shouted with half their earlier energy, and customers bargained in softer tones, like the city had collectively decided to take a breath.
I walked slower, cutting through pockets of shade as the sun climbed higher. The heat had that late-spring sharpness to it—warm on the shoulders but dry enough to make you wish for wind. A woman passed with a tray of skewers balanced on her palm, the scent of grilled lamb trailing behind her. I didn't buy one. My brain did the math automatically: two skewers for forty Valis, about forty cents. A fair deal, but not when your total balance sat just above six thousand.
My phone buzzed softly in my hand as I checked it again. Balance: 6,468 Ʌ̶. The number looked both comforting and pathetic. I'd had more in loose change in my glove compartment once. Now it was the thin line between me and hunger.
A horse-drawn cart rattled by, its driver shouting at a pair of boys too slow to move. The wheels splashed through a puddle that hadn't quite dried from the morning's street wash, spraying the edge of my boots. I stepped aside, muttering under my breath. The air tasted of wet dust and ash from nearby braziers.
When I finally reached the fountain, I slowed to a stop. The stone rim was worn smooth by years of use, and the water's sound was just loud enough to drown out the noise of trade. I sank down onto the edge, exhaling as if the act might return a bit of control to the day.
I thumbed my phone awake again. The notes app opened to my market list, a grid of goods and prices that made the city's economy look halfway rational on a five-inch screen. Below that, in smaller font, the app's budget tab blinked softly, syncing against whatever eldritch accounting magic let the Warehouse track my finances.
Funds available: 6,468 Ʌ̶. Pending orders: 1. Debt: 0.
"Debt-free," I murmured. "So that's what reincarnation gets you."
The number mocked me in its neatness. I scrolled through the entries again: salt, flour, honey, spices. All commodities, all with margins that could work if I could afford to scale. My thumb hovered over the add-order icon out of habit before I sighed and locked the screen.
A kid ran past, laughing, sloshing water from a wooden bucket. The splash caught the sunlight in midair, scattering it into shards before hitting the cobblestones with a slap. I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and stared at the rippling reflection of Babel's distant spire in the fountain's surface. The tower rose like something out of an architectural fever dream—half divine, half human ambition, completely overkill.
My phone reflected beside it, a black rectangle glowing faintly with a number that felt too small for what I needed. I'd never thought I'd miss credit cards.
The air smelled faintly of yeast and smoke from nearby bakeries. The Guild bell tolled from somewhere down the main avenue—once, twice, then a series of smaller chimes marking the half hour. The crowd moved again, slow and steady, as if time itself had weight here.
I stood, slipping the phone into my pocket. There was no point sitting still when I could at least look like I had direction. The faint ache in my legs reminded me that I'd been on my feet for most of the morning.
As I started down the cobbled street leading away from the fountain, a pair of merchants argued over the price of oil at the corner stall. I caught the word "shortage" and another that sounded like "Rakia," followed by a stream of vocabulary I still didn't know. Language, I thought, was my next bottleneck. Numbers I could manage; conversation was a losing battle.
I made a note to find someone willing to teach me—maybe one of the Guild clerks, if they didn't charge through the roof. Or maybe Ilka, if she was patient enough. She struck me as the type who liked explaining things to people who looked like they were trying.
The streets angled upward toward the Warehouse District, the stones uneven and sun-warmed beneath my boots. Between buildings, I could see the city spread out in tiers, smoke rising from smithies and bakeries, a tangle of rooftops that felt both chaotic and alive. I found myself counting chimneys without realizing why, as though some small, practical part of me wanted to know how much firewood the city burned in a day.
The scent of roasting nuts drifted from a cart up ahead, sweet and buttery, pulling my attention. The vendor called out something cheerful, holding a paper cone high. Ten Valis. Ten cents. I shook my head and smiled. He grinned back anyway, unfazed. Orario ran on optimism as much as coin.
I turned down a narrower street lined with faded wooden signs, most painted in old lettering I couldn't read. A few had symbols—hammers, pots, fish. The path eventually opened toward the Great Warehouse District, where the buildings grew wider, squatter, their walls coated in the faint grime of a city that traded too often and cleaned too rarely.
By the time the spire of the Guild Hall dipped out of sight behind me, the city noise had softened to something manageable. Here, the hum of industry took over—hammer strikes from a smithy, the rattle of wagons, and the low creak of a pulley lifting a crate somewhere behind a warehouse wall.
My phone buzzed again. I checked it out of habit.
Battery: 100%. Time: 10:54. Balance: 6,468 Ʌ̶.
Still perfect, still unhelpful.
I kept walking, slower now, hands in my pockets, the faint weight of my remaining Valis feeling heavier with each step. Every vendor I passed had something I could buy and resell for a sliver of gain, but the margins were microscopic. Salt was the only thing worth testing first—but even then, I'd need containers, branding, maybe something like the pamphlets the Warehouse gave me.
I could already picture it: "Gilford Salt — Purity You Can Taste." It sounded like an ad campaign for disappointment.
A soft laugh escaped me, quiet enough that it blended with the clatter of hooves nearby.
If I wanted to survive here, I needed to play the long game. And for that, six thousand Valis wasn't a fortune. It was a clock—one already ticking down.
The walk back to the shop was quieter than I expected. The streets here had a slower pulse — the sound of hammers striking iron, of pulleys creaking as crates rose and fell, of men calling instructions to each other in a rhythm that felt practiced, old. The Great Warehouse District smelled like wood oil, hemp rope, and the faint metallic dust of old industry.
I turned the corner to my little storefront and paused. The hand-painted sign above the door still looked barely dry, the letters uneven but legible: Gilford General Store. The paint I'd borrowed from Yora had gone a little too glossy in the sun, but it gave the place a stubborn sort of life.
Inside, the air was cooler. The shutters filtered the midday light into thin gold strips that fell across the empty shelves. A few nails stuck out where I planned to hang baskets or tools, and the faint scent of old wood and drying paint lingered. My case of bottled water sat behind the counter — the last remnants of my initial inventory, reduced now to a handful of bottles I hadn't sold yet.
I dropped onto the stool behind the counter, pulling out my phone. The app loaded with its usual soft hum, a kind of quiet I was starting to associate with the Warehouse itself.
Order Status:
2 Cases (Kirkland Signature 16.9 fl oz, 40-count)
Delivery Scheduled: Solyra 19, 999 @ 07:00
Tomorrow morning. Right on schedule.
I scrolled down to the small print that had become familiar: "Ensure adequate space for delivery." I looked around the shop and tried not to laugh. The whole back wall was empty; space wasn't my problem — money was.
Balance: 6,468 Ʌ̶.
That number glared at me from the top-right corner of the app, stark and unflinching. Six thousand four hundred sixty-eight. A small fortune for someone who sold potatoes, a joke for someone trying to build an empire.
I flicked the screen off, leaned back, and let the silence sit. The floor creaked somewhere behind me, old boards settling. For the first time since arriving here, I actually felt still — no crowds, no shouting, no haggling. Just me and the faint hum of a city outside that hadn't yet realized I existed.
Then the bell above the door chimed.
It wasn't loud, just a small, delicate sound — the kind of ring that didn't belong in a place like this. I straightened instinctively, almost guilty, like I'd been caught doing nothing useful.
Two figures stood in the doorway. The first was tall, graceful in that way that wasn't learned but lived — long green hair that brushed her shoulders, eyes calm and pale as spring glass. Her clothes were refined, tailored in the way of someone who could afford silence as a luxury. The other was shorter, younger — maybe late teens by human standards — with blonde hair tied back by a thin ribbon and the kind of nervous posture that said she wasn't used to being the first through a door.
They didn't look like customers. They looked like the kind of people who noticed things.
"Good morning," I said, keeping my tone neutral. "Welcome to Gilford General."
The younger one glanced around, her eyes flitting between the shelves, the counter, and the faint light spilling through the shutters. "Um," she started, her voice soft but clear, "are you… open?"
"Technically," I said. "Though I wouldn't say I'm stocked."
The tall one stepped forward, her gaze steady but not unfriendly. "You're the merchant the Guild mentioned."
"Am I?" I raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised. "They're talking about me already?"
"A new store opening in the Great Warehouse District tends to draw attention," she said simply. Her tone carried a hint of amusement under the formality — like she knew exactly how absurd that sounded in a city this large. "Especially one with… unusual products."
I glanced back toward the few remaining bottles of water on the counter. "Right. The bottled water."
Her eyes followed my motion. For the smallest fraction of a second, curiosity softened her expression — not greed, not disbelief, but genuine intrigue. Then it was gone, replaced by composure again.
The younger elf, though, wasn't as subtle. She stepped closer to the counter, peering at one of the bottles as if it were a relic from the Age of Heroes. "It's so… clear," she murmured. "I've never seen water like this."
"That's kind of the selling point," I said, resting my elbow on the counter. "Clean, sealed, doesn't go bad. Costs a bit more than a bucket from the well, but people seem to think it's worth it."
The green-haired woman tilted her head slightly. "And where do you obtain such things?"
I smiled faintly. "Let's call it a trade secret. It keeps the competition guessing."
That earned me the faintest flicker of something like a smile. "A wise merchant, then."
"Optimistic," I corrected. "Wise is a stretch."
For a heartbeat, silence settled between us — not awkward, just assessing. She studied me the way a scholar studies an artifact, noting edges and imperfections. I had the feeling she was already ten steps ahead in whatever quiet investigation had brought her here.
The younger one broke the stillness first. "I'm sorry, but… you're human, aren't you?"
"Last time I checked," I said, glancing at my hand like it might've changed since morning.
"Oh! No, I didn't mean- I just-" she fumbled, cheeks flushing as she glanced at her companion for rescue.
"It's quite all right, Lefiya," the elder said gently. Then, to me, "She's curious. Not many humans open shops without a Familia to support them."
"Ah," I said, nodding slowly. "Yeah, that part's been… complicated. Let's just say I work with a supplier who doesn't need divine paperwork."
That earned me a very small, very careful pause. The older elf's gaze lingered, something almost sharp flickering in it before smoothing over. "How convenient."
I shrugged. "You could say that."
The younger one — Lefiya — was still staring at the bottle on the counter. "May I?"
"Sure."
She picked it up gingerly, holding it to the light. The seal crinkled softly in her hands. "It's so light," she whispered. "And there's no smell."
"That's sort of the goal," I said, watching her curiosity with a mix of amusement and pride. "Pure water, no impurities. It's meant for drinking, not worship."
She blinked, half confused, half embarrassed. "Right."
The taller woman let the corner of her mouth turn up ever so slightly. "You speak like someone used to explaining themselves."
"Old habit," I said. "Where I come from, people tend to ask a lot of questions about things they don't understand."
"A sensible approach," she said softly.
"I wouldn't go that far," I replied, grinning.
She studied me for another long moment, then inclined her head. "We won't keep you. I only wished to see this store for myself. The Guild's report was… interesting."
"I'm flattered," I said. "Though I'm not sure I've done enough yet to earn official attention."
"Sometimes," she said, turning toward the door, "attention finds its way regardless."
Lefiya set the bottle down carefully, as if it might shatter from mishandling. She gave me a small, polite bow before following the older elf out into the light.
The bell above the door chimed again.
I stood there for a long moment, staring at the door they'd just walked through, the silence stretching thin around me.
The Guild was talking about me already. That wasn't good.
Or maybe it was.
The bottle Lefiya had set down still sat near the counter's edge, condensation faint against the plastic. She'd cracked the seal, maybe without even realizing it.
I circled the counter and picked it up. The cap was loose enough to tell the story—opened, inspected, unsellable now. I turned it once in my hand, the light catching along its side, then sighed and set it aside with the others. That made six unopened left.
Six until tomorrow morning.
I thumbed the cap back on, more out of habit than hope, and muttered under my breath, "Should start charging for curiosity. You wanna inspect it? Fifty Valis."
The words hung in the air, half-joke, half-truth. I leaned on the counter, looking at the nearly empty crate, and tried not to think about how thin the line was between novelty and survival.