The negotiation dragged on for more than two hours. It was a war of attrition, with each man using every rhetorical trick in the book. When William finally emerged from the room, he had secured nine hundred and fifty cores.
It wasn't even close to what he had initially expected. The old man's stubbornness was a force of nature. William felt a pang of regret for not going all-out in the middle of the battle to personally dissect the monsters for their cores.
The number of dark-gold bears alone had been in the hundreds of thousands! And here was this patriarch, harassing him over a few hundred units.
Even when William had lowered his number to an even thousand, the old patriarch had stubbornly held the line at nine hundred and fifty, refusing to budge on the final fifty just to prove a point. William had finally agreed, mostly to extricate himself from the exhausting mental loop of the conversation.
