Chapter 444: Room
Chapter 444: Room
The souls noticed them. A small carcass-laden hunting party was, apparently, a normal sight. Many souls did not even glance up, but a few did. One older soul, standing in the doorway of what looked like a tavern, watched them pass with a small considering nod, the kind of nod a person gives when they are filing the existence of new hunters in their part of the city.
A young woman selling small jars of glowing salve from a stall called out as they went by, asking if they wanted a hunter’s restorative for cheap.
"Maybe on the way back," Kael called.
"I’ll be here," she called back, easy.
It felt, briefly, like a normal city.
It also felt, more than briefly, like a city where Bruce was an outsider. He noted the way certain souls clustered with their own kind in certain blocks. Humanoids in some areas, the more clearly bestial souls (the four-legged ones, the winged ones) in others, mixed gatherings around the busier squares. He noted the way the city’s foot traffic parted, faintly, around any soul who carried themselves with obvious authority. The city had ranks, and the ranks were visible in posture, in glow, in clothing.
He noted that he and his two companions, fresh off a carriage, with cheap clothes and a dirty load, were near the bottom of that hierarchy.
He filed that.
The Guild building came into view ahead, with its green banners. They turned in toward the side door the guard had described. A loading area opened up there, a wide covered yard behind the main building, with several long counter-tables, several weighing scales of a kind Bruce did not immediately understand, and several Guild clerks in green sashes processing other hunters’ hauls.
A clerk waved them over to an empty table.
"First time selling?" the clerk asked, looking them over. He was a small wiry soul with a worn-down patience that meant he had probably seen ten thousand first-time hunters in his life. He glanced at their Guild tokens, which Bruce had remembered to clip visibly to his belt. "F-ranks. Mm. Lay it out. I’ll grade it."
They laid it out.
The clerk worked with the speed of long practice. He examined each piece, meat, hide, plate, antler, for a few seconds and called out a value to a second clerk at his elbow, who recorded it. He moved fast. Bruce, watching him, tried to learn the categories on the fly. Prime cut, twelve. Secondary, eight. Hide intact, fifteen. Hide damaged, this one’s torn at the flank, eight. Plates clean, six each, six pieces, thirty-six. Antlers full set, ten.
The numbers added up faster than Bruce could track.
The clerk got to the cores last. He picked one up, held it to the light, weighed it briefly in his palm. He did the same with the other four. Then he set them down in a row.
"Five F-rank cores, clean kills, no damage," he said. He glanced up at the three of them. "These are very clean. Whoever’s killing isn’t tearing the cores. Good work. Each is worth, twenty F-rank soul points."
A pause.
Bruce had been expecting a few points, the way Kael had estimated. Twenty per core was significantly more.
The clerk caught his expression. He shrugged. "Cores from clean kills go to the alchemists and the trainers. Bad cores go to the dye-makers. Clean ones pay better. Yours are clean." He scribbled. "Five cores, twenty each, hundred points on cores alone."
"A hundred?" Theron said.
"A hundred."
Bruce’s mind moved through the arithmetic.
A hundred from the cores. Plus the meat, plus the hides, plus the plates, plus the antlers. When the clerk finished totaling everything and announced the final number, it landed at something between two hundred and three hundred F-rank soul points. The clerk gave them the final figure, divided three ways equally because that was how Bruce asked for it to be split, and each of them received a little under a hundred points.
Bruce’s window opened in front of him without him needing to call it.
Soul Points: 87
Eighty-seven F-rank soul points, where there had been a zero a few hours ago. Twenty-seven times more than the ten the gate guard had demanded for the first day’s keep.
He blinked at the number.
Beside him, Theron was looking at his own window with a slow, dawning expression, not surprise, exactly, but a quiet realization that he had just earned, in one afternoon of hunting, more value than the gate guard had said would keep him alive for a day. Kael was, predictably, grinning.
"I told you," the dragon said. "Before lunch. Although it was after lunch. So technically I was wrong. Generously wrong."
"Eighty-seven points," Theron said quietly. "I have eighty-seven points."
The clerk, who had been moving on to the next pile, glanced up. "First-day take?"
"First-day take," Bruce confirmed.
"Solid one." The clerk gave him a small look, not approving, exactly, but the look of a working man recognizing other working men. "If you keep that pace, you’ll be fine in this city. Most don’t. Most newcomers find one rabbit and want to celebrate."
"We had three companions in the dungeon," Bruce said. "One of us cooks."
The clerk’s eyes flicked to Kael’s horns, briefly. "Ah. Fire."
"Fire," Kael agreed.
"Cook your own kills, eat the good ones, sell the rest. Don’t bring me cooked meat to the exchange next time. You’ll get more selling cooked food in the food district directly. Stalls there will pay you for prepared cuts. The Guild only handles raw."
"Noted," Bruce said.
The clerk nodded, finished his last entries, slid them three small soul-stone slips with their take recorded, receipts, Bruce understood, and called for the next hunter.
The three of them stepped back from the table.
They stood for a moment in the loading yard, slightly stunned in the way good news sometimes stuns people more than bad news. Bruce had expected to scrape together the ten F-rank points by sundown and call it a successful first day. He had eight times that.
He thought, briefly and with some private satisfaction, about how this compared with his physical-realm life. In the physical realm, his very first day as a young surgeon had been mostly failures, too slow, too tentative, told off by every senior in the room. He had taken weeks to feel competent. He had taken years to feel good.
His very first day in the Soul Realm: eighty-seven points. He had no skill at hunting beyond what he had improvised. He had no knowledge of this realm beyond what Kael had told him. He had, when he started this morning, a near-dissolved soul with cracks running through it.
And he had still managed eighty-seven points, because, he understood now, he had two things that compounded together. He had decades of experience from another life that translated directly into the thinking this realm rewarded. And he had companions whose talents combined cleanly with his own.
The lesson, he filed away carefully, was simple: in this realm, partner well, and apply what you already know.
He looked at Kael and Theron.
Kael had earned the same as Bruce. His fireballs had done as much damage to the herds as Bruce’s bullets, and the dragon was already running through plans in his head. Bruce could see it on his face. Bigger dungeons. Faster pace. Maybe an E-rank portal in a few weeks.
Theron had earned the same too. The young man was holding his soul-stone receipt slip in both hands, very gently, the way a person holds an object they cannot quite believe is theirs. He was glowing brightly, physically, in this realm, brightly, in a way that had as much to do with eaten meat as with the joy of having made his first wages in this place.
"What now?" Theron asked.
"Now," Bruce said, "we get a room."
"A room each?" Theron asked.
"Yes," Bruce said. "But we find something cheap. We trust each other. And we share kills tomorrow anyway. Then food for tonight. We have enough points to buy a proper meal at a stall. Then we sleep. Then we hunt again at first light."
"That," Kael said, "is the most working-class thing I’ve ever heard a man say."
"You have a better plan?"
"I have that plan. I’m complimenting you." He cracked his neck. "Room. Food. Sleep. Hunt. Welcome to the Soul Realm working life, gentlemen. Let’s go find a bed."
The three of them, registered F-rank hunters, eighty-seven soul points to their names, full bellies, healed souls, and a path stretching ahead of them so clear it almost made Bruce nervous, turned and walked back out of the Guild’s side yard.
The first day was almost over.
Bruce, walking through the warm gold streets of Xiltra with two strange companions and his own quiet thoughts, felt the thin thread leading back to his body in the labyrinth far away. He sent a small wordless feeling along it, toward Sophie, toward the still cross-legged figure she was watching over: ’I am all right. I am safe.’
He did not know if it reached her, but he hoped it did. Sighing, he kept walking.