Vermillion Bird Guild (Imperial Capital Branch)
“Sister Bai, I’m back!”
Hearing the familiar voice, Bai Jie looked up, her gaze settling upon two familiar figures.
‘Hmm? Why are their hands empty?’
Seeing them enter empty-handed, Bai Jie couldn’t help but feel a flicker of doubt.
She then addressed them, “Please wait a moment. I need to verify something for this student first, then we can talk.”
At the front desk, a male student currently stood.
It appeared he was also there to submit resources.
The several ore chunks displayed on the counter served as silent proof.
Before long.
The young man, clutching an unknown card, departed from the Imperial Capital Branch, a look of excitement plastered across his face.
‘Hm?’
Aya Tone blinked.
‘Free labor?’
‘It’s as if I’m seeing a reflection of my past self in this student,’ she mused.
‘The thought alone brings tears to my eyes.’
‘You worked so hard, student.’
“Sister Bai, who was that just now?”
“You mean that young man?”
“He’s the top new recruit. He just recently completed his assessment and earned the qualification to enter dungeons alone. Last night, he took an E-rank dungeon pass and delved into it for an entire night.”
“And this, is his harvest from one night.”
As Bai Jie spoke, she gathered the ore chunks from the counter into a basket, then placed it onto a designated platform.
Before Aya Tone could get a clear look, a flash of light erupted.
The basket, laden with ore, vanished as if absorbed into thin air.
‘Spatial transfer?!’
As if sensing Aya Tone’s gaze, Bai Jie smiled and explained, “This is for stocking these ores in the warehouse.”
Though these ores were still unprocessed and contained numerous impurities.
Furthermore, ores extracted from E-rank dungeons were not typically valuable.
Nevertheless, they couldn’t simply remain on display at the front desk indefinitely.
It wouldn’t look good; they weren’t some meter-grade, high-purity crystals, after all.
“Oh, oh, oh, how enlightening!”
This was Aya Tone’s first time learning about such a warehousing system.
Normally, Li Jia handled these matters; Aya Tone’s sole responsibility was to ‘shoot, shoot, shoot’ throughout.
Honestly, without Li Jia by her side, Aya Tone felt a peculiar sense of unease.
‘At the very least, I have to carry things myself now.’
‘Hmph! Useless Bamboo…’
‘Hm?’
Beside her, Miao Qingzhu’s brows furrowed slightly, as she subtly scanned her surroundings.
‘It feels as though I’ve been inexplicably scorned,’ she thought.
Yet, after a full sweep, she found no one speaking ill of her.
‘Strange…’
“Sister Bai, could you help me calculate the value of this?”
From her four-dimensional pocket, Aya Tone pulled out several bulging snakeskin bags.
They had only explored three E-rank dungeons last night, and these few bags represented their entire haul.
‘Because any more, and we wouldn’t have been able to carry it…’
‘The first day of missing Li Jia…’
Bai Jie acknowledged, “You’ve worked hard.”
‘So they were in a storage space all along. No wonder I didn’t see them,’ she realized.
Bai Jie made to open the bags and begin counting.
Typically, resources of this quantity would be counted in a designated counting room.
However, at this hour, with only a few of them in the guild, such a hassle was unnecessary.
“This is—!?”
As Bai Jie pulled open the bag’s mouth, her pupils involuntarily constricted.
Inside, it was filled with nothing but magic crystals.
‘By weight, there must be hundreds of them,’ she estimated.
An E-rank dungeon typically contained a maximum of thirty monsters possessing magic crystals.
The remaining monsters were often weaker in combat capability than even pets on Blue Star.
‘It seems this bag contains the sum total of all the magic crystals. The rest… must be ore, then,’ she mused inwardly.
Regardless, she decided to count the magic crystals first.
‘Begin counting!’
Time ticked by, moment by agonizing moment.
Each tick-tock seemed to hammer relentlessly at Bai Jie’s nerves.
Unbeknownst to her, beads of sweat had already begun to trail down her cheeks.
…101, 102… 163!
‘My goodness gracious…’
After counting a single bag of magic crystals, Bai Jie’s heart remained in turmoil for a long time.
‘This!’
‘This is far too much!’
‘Even if they were only E-rank magic crystals, this quantity far exceeded the maximum yield an E-rank dungeon could produce.’
‘Made a killing?’
‘No!’
‘Even more exaggerated than that!’
The income from these magic crystals alone could rival the combined total earnings from two E-rank dungeons.
And it wasn’t over yet.
‘There were still those ores…’
Bai Jie’s gaze, now burning with fervor, fell upon the remaining snakeskin bags.
“Th-th-this—!?”
When Bai Jie opened one of the ore bags, she was utterly speechless with shock, completely incoherent.
‘Aba aba…’
She struggled to find words to describe the profound shock reverberating through her heart.
‘She had underestimated it,’ she realized.
What lay within this bag was hardly mere ore.
Instead, they were clearly high-purity crystals, already refined.
They required no further tempering; they were ready to be directly crafted.
‘Could all the others be like this too?’
With this thought, Bai Jie’s trembling hands untied one bag after another.
‘Gulp…’
‘They’re all like this!’
This was truly the first time she had encountered such a phenomenon.
What Bai Jie didn’t know was that at the Vermillion Bird Guild headquarters, a specialized department had been established solely to recover all resources produced from the dungeons Aya Tone cleared.
The output was high, and the quality exceptional.
Each time, the yield far surpassed the dungeon’s inherent value.
Yet, Aya Tone herself remained oblivious to this fact…
She had always believed that earning 150,000 from Fire Finch for clearing an E-rank dungeon was her way of getting back at Fire Finch.
Little did she know, Fire Finch resold the goods for far more than that 150,000.
‘Someone is still too naive,’ she mused.
Upholding her professional integrity as a front desk attendant, Bai Jie steeled herself and completed the daunting task of counting all the high-purity crystals.
She felt as though all the surprises she had experienced in her life combined couldn’t compare to those packed into these mere ten-odd minutes.
“Sister Bai, so, how much? How much?!”
Aya Tone rubbed her hands together, eager to know her earnings for the night.
‘This was crucial, determining whether she could afford a decent hotel for the night.’
‘If so…’
‘She even wanted to buy some souvenirs from the Imperial Capital to take back.’
…
Uncharacteristically, Bai Jie did not respond immediately.
At this moment, she was contemplating whether to report this matter to the Guild Master.
After all, crystals of such purity far exceeded her authority to decide upon.
‘But at this hour…’
5:26 AM.
‘The Guild Master is surely still asleep; there’s no way to wake them,’ she concluded.
Bai Jie hesitated for only a moment before making her decision.
‘In that case!’
“Miss Aya Tone, please wait a moment.”
Bai Jie, carrying a bag in each hand, laboriously dragged them to the front desk’s teleportation array.
She then operated a computer connected to the internal network.
‘The price of these high-purity crystals won’t be cheap,’ she mused.
‘And with those magic crystals…’
“Thank you for your patience, Miss Aya Tone.”
“No hurry at all, no hurry.”
Happily, Aya Tone leaned against the front desk, unconcerned with her image, rising on her tiptoes and stretching her entire body forward.
Her gaze landed on the computer screen.
‘Wow!’
‘So many zeroes!’
‘Units, tens, hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, hundred thousands!’
‘Over six hundred thousand!’
This was exponentially more than the 150,000 Fire Finch had given her.
Aya Tone’s eyes were already glazed over by the sheer number, “Hehe, so much money!”
‘Wait!’
‘Why is it worth so much?’
Aya Tone keenly noticed a discrepancy between this figure and her expectations.
But the next second, she chose to abandon such thoughts.
‘Who cares?’
‘With all this money, I’m going to book a really nice room later.’
‘And then sleep soundly.’
‘After running around all night, I’m inevitably feeling a bit drowsy.’