Chapter 263: Testing
Benton had spent nearly a week in subjective time forging the twenty-five blades. In real time, less than a day had passed, meaning it was early morning of the next day. He had to admit that his Aura definitely saved Time.
Ugh.
Oh well. That one wasn’t even funny to him. Too on the nose. That was the thing about comedy, though—no one succeeded with every joke.
Funny favored the bold.
He grinned. That was a good one.
Anyway, once he finished creating trade goods, his goal was to rebuild the towers before heading to Vermillion Incomparable Rain Town to create a new Grand Defensive Array for Fatty Ren’s palace.
The problem was that he wasn’t sure whether or not the swords he made were valuable enough to get him the materials he wanted. They seemed good to him, and his Analyze technique placed a very high value on them. But it was impossible to know what a cultivator would require in exchange for a treasure like the ones needed to create his qi sources.
Of course, the obvious solution was simply to ask Kang Ya-Ting. He was a man who understood cultivators and the value of cultivation treasures to a greater extent than Benton.
The issue there was that he had been getting a lot of aid from the man lately. It was fine to ask a friend for a favor every now and again, but becoming a burden was not okay. And honestly, that sentiment was as true on Earth as it was on a cultivation planet.
Benton needed to resolve that imbalance in their relationship. He would ask Kang Lin if there was anything her grandfather needed. A gift of a pill, a weapon, or even a cultivation method or technique would be a nice way to return the friendship to a more equal footing.
In the meantime, Benton would need to deal with the current situation more adroitly than he normally managed. Instead of straight up asking what the value of the swords were, he’d send Kang Ya-Ting a list of the blades with their associated arrays and traits and ask him to share his message with the two elders that had materials for trade. The elders could select one of the swords directly, request a custom weapon be forged for them with traits similar to one of the blades, or ask him to wait to see what might be available at the auction.
The response would tell him everything he needed to know. If either or both took one of the swords or requested that he forge something custom for them, it would be obvious that the blades were absolutely of the same order of magnitude of value as the materials. If neither did, though, he’d know that he likely hadn’t gone big enough with his crafting and would have to hope that quantity made up for quality.