Chapter 195: Eye on the Prize
Balthazar’s groggy eyestalks jolted awake as he realized his precious gold bar was gone. Jumping onto his eight legs with a start, the crab looked around frantically, searching for the missing ingot.
“No, no, no…” he mumbled, lifting his backpack to check the ground under. “Where is it?!”
The merchant had no shortage of currency in his Bag of Holding Money, but no matter how much gold he owned, the simple possibility of any of it going missing terrified him.
And seeing his only ingot of gold disappear felt like an irreparable loss.
He had grown incredibly attached to his treasure in the less than one day he had owned it. To say nothing of how hard he had worked to acquire it—by stumbling upon it in an abandoned storage room.
Balthazar had earned that bar of gold by nearly getting his shell crushed to keep it. He was not going to let it slip between his pincers.
How could a heavy bar of solid gold just vanish from my side like this?
The crab’s eyes rolled up to the sky. Instinctively, his suspicions went to the damnable birds. Usually when things went missing around his pond it was always the work of one of them, swooping down to pilfer his belongings like the pests they are.
No, it would have to be a massive bird to fly away with a solid gold ingot. It would whip up a windstorm just trying to take off. We would have noticed it.