Chapter 13: From Tough Guy to Married Man
Ambrose must've said a dozen times over that the living mercury wasn't worth the price. And express delivery to a location that required a teleportation circle for living beings built from scratch? The extra fees alone were criminal!
Sure, a tiny vial of the stuff could dissolve millions of gold coins in seconds, but it really wasn't worth it.
Even so, the Dullahan insisted. He slammed down the gold and even tipped extra.
Ambrose tried to find a reason, any excuse to refuse, but the man's determination was unshakable. With no way out, Ambrose had to trudge back to Alkhemia. There, under the astonished stare of the clerk, he paid an eye-watering sum for a genuine bottle of living mercury.
He checked it himself. It was the real deal.
Then he returned to his old castle, set up the teleportation circle, and spent half a day delivering the thing to the Dullahan's vault. In the end, he earned a profit of twenty thousand gold.
It wasn't because he was greedy! The prices had gone up, so obviously his commission had to scale accordingly, right? You could hardly expect a broker to make only three thousand in commissions regardless of whether a deal was worth ten thousand or a hundred thousand.
And teleportation circles weren't cheap either! The materials might not be worth much, but the craftsmanship was worth good gold!
A teleportation array handcrafted by a legendary spellcaster, with labor, logistics, and hazard pay included—two thousand in profit would've been a scam. Twenty thousand was a fair day's work. Ambrose could proudly pat his bony ribcage and swear that no lich charged more honestly than he did across the whole continent.