Druidic Cultivation | Fourty-Five

Depending on how long the haggling goes, the departure of from the city might be tacked onto this chapter at a later date. 

* * * 

Feng Jiao approached the torn up rug with his two friends in tow, silently appraising the old man as the man started through Jiao. His milkey-filmed eyes told Jiao that the man was truly blind but his ability to track Jiao seemed to suggest the opposite. 

“Shoes off when you enter my shop, young ones.” The old man’s voice was raspy and deep as if he hadn’t had anything to drink in years or suffered some fire-related accident in the past. Both Duan Cao and Wang Jing flinched hard when the man’s voice slithered its way into their ears, apparently having arrived at the assumption that the man was mute as well as blind, and removed their shoes, Feng Jiao kept walking. Outside of formal occasions, Feng Jiao almost never choose to wear shoes. Even when he did, it was always sandals of some sort to afford him as much freedom as possible. 

After all three children stepped onto the raggedy carpet the old man stopped following them with his eyes and resumed his blank look into the sky, goofy grin and all. Jiao studied the geezer for a few more breaths before looking around at the various trinkets laying on the carpet. 

The old man seemed to have some of everything; weapons, pills, clothes, and more. The pills Jiao ignored immediately. Although he had some botanical knowledge most of it did not align to the standards of the world he’d been reincarnated into. Not only would he not be able to identify the ingredients in a  pill, even if he did he wouldn’t know if it was a real pill or not as he wasn’t an alchemist. There was no chance for him to find a real good within the pills so he didn’t try at all.

“Ah ha, that robe is made from the silk web of an Infernal Recluse, a breed of powerful spiders that descended to our realm from the sixth plane of Hell. The ones in our realm in no way compared to their ancestors but their silk is still immensely powerful and has a natural resistance to fire.” 

Cao dropped the robe she’d picked up almost as soon as the man started talking but he continued his description. She looked down skeptically at the dark red kimono and even felt it again. No matter what angle she approached it from, however, it seemed to be nothing more than a silk kimono. They could test the resistance of the item but, if they broke it, the man was likely to charge them an exorbitant price for the robe. 

Cao set the robe back down and continued browsing. Each time one of the three friends picked up an item, the old man would immediately rattle out a description. Each item, if you believed him, was apparently more extravagant than the last. Naturally they were all likewise expensive and none of the three had much coin. Were it not for the fact that they were all so absorbed by the old man’s descriptions they’d likely have moved on by then.  

“Ah, that’s the weapon of choice of a Pyro War Priest, the militant enforcers of the Church of the Infernal. It’s forged from black iron and magma-aligned beast cores. Although it looks like a simple kukri right now that is because it has not been utilized in a long time. Simply dip it in the fresh heart blood of a core-ranked fire or magma beast to revitalize it.

“Oh, good eye! That’s necklace is enchanted to help one survive a fall from thousands of feet. It's a must keep for any who practice flying type hallowed arts, you never know when you’ll run out of Qi in an extended battle.”

Artifacts that had no visible runes, enchanted items that had no glow, pills that would extend life, robes to soak of blows, even beast eggs that couldn’t hatch. He even said he had a one-time elixir that would improve the strength of one’s martial spirit! The man was a master of worthless treasures. Any one of the items could have been real and, at the same time, none of them at all. Even so, Feng Jiao found himself falling in love with the way the Bazaar ran. It was almost like a lucky encounter on demand, anyone could gain themselves a treasure if fate allowed it.

After an hour of browsing, Feng Jiao realized that the rug the old man was seated on seemed to be far larger than it appeared from the outside. Another thing that confused Jiao was the fact that he could no longer hear the crowd outside of the rug. Looking around, the crowd was still there but seemed to not have faces, each person blurring into the next. Unlike before Jiao and friends entered the old man’s “store”, nobody was looking at the man and his wares. It was almost as if the old man had vanished and nobody could notice him.

The implications of this were not lost on Feng Jiao and he went back to look at the artifacts. He’d not picked up every single one but, if he was right, the old man was likely an artificer of some sort. It wasn’t a long jump from formation mastery to artifacts and there was definitely at least one formation under the man’s rug if not several compounding formations. 

While rooting through the artifacts again, Feng Jiao stumbled upon something he hadn’t noticed before. Under a bronze wok, one that the old man insisted would imbue ether into foods, was a large lump of rock. The rock was oval shaped and about a foot long, with a wider bottom. The rock itself was black but seemed to have a red sheen that alluded to a texture that Feng Jiao couldn’t feel on the smooth surface of the rock. Jiao stared at the item as if he were willing it to fork over its secrets and, after a time, he realized that the old man wasn’t talk.

Turning his head, he found the old man staring directly at Feng Jiao with his head cocked like a confused dog. 

“What is this, old man?” At this point, Feng Jiao was convinced he’d found the golden egg. Why else would the man be staring at him with suck a shell-shocked expression on his face?

“Drake egg.” Two words, spoken as if the man didn’t have a care in the world. No background information, like before, and no emotion in his voice at all. 

“Like a dragon?” Jiao had to admit that the large stone in his hand was oddly egg-shaped and incredibly dense. He’d expected the man to tell him it was some sort of defensive artifact or a lump of invaluable ore, not a dragon’s egg. 

“Are you asking what a drake is?” 

“No, I know that a drake is a western dragon. Four legs and wings and the whole shebang. I’m asking if you’re seriously telling me that this is a dragon egg.”

“No, I said it is a drake egg. It’s an egg with a drake in it. It’s been fertilized and is a male but is unable to hatch. You should be able to hatch it with a powerful enough flame essence or if you go to the sixth plane of hell.”

Feng Jiao burrowed his brows, sure that the old man was playing a trick on him somehow. Obviously anyone in the Bazaar was allowed to lie about what they were selling, but everything about the situation was screaming at Jiao that he’d found the right item. He was just sure there was another trick to it. It didn’t really matter at the end of the day though, because…

“I believe you old man but I have to apologise for wasting your time. I don’t have enough money to afford anything that you’re selling. If you’ll excuse me, my friends and I have somewhere we need to be. Cao! Jing!” Cao was once again handling the red silk robe while Jing was swinging around an offensive artifact in the shape of long and skinny sword. The two of them reluctantly put down the things they were playing with and came over to Feng Jiao.

“Not so fast, my new little friend. I do not even accept coin here in my marvelous shop. You have to pay taxes for coin related exchanges. No, I do something better. I trade treasures for treasures.” The old man’s sightless gaze wandered down to Feng Jiao’s hand. Jiao covered his left with his right but before he could remark the old man cut him off, “I don’t want your ring. I’d just like to see what you’ve got squirreled away in it. You never know if you have something I might like.” 

Jiao’s eyes widened as he realized that he did, in fact, have a few treasures in his ring. Jiao sat down cross-legged in front of the old man and waved his left hand over the rug. Qi was consumed and his items were returned to the material plane in front of him. Forgoing the coinage, Jiao withdrew his leaf-headed spear head, a few herbs he’d gathered, some interesting bones and teeth he’d found in the forest and, finally, the two drops of pre-constitue core from the grey banded mamba he’d slain. 

“Mm. Mm. Interestingly shaped spear head but otherwise plain. It seems to have been smithed by an expert but with cheap materials and in a rush, what a shame. Various beast bones and herbs, would probably make a good broth if you boiled them. And, oh! A preconsitute poison-aligned core. Neat but not particularly useful. Nothing you withdrew is as valuable as the drake egg, are you sure there is nothing else in there?”

A frown danced across Jiao’s face as he was now sure that there was something special about the lump of metal in his hands. There was no way it was a dragon egg but he felt like it was definitely a valuable alloy of some sort judging by its density and smooth surface. The foot-tall ‘egg’ weighed nearly eighty pounds and, if nothing else, would make a good weight for training. He only had so much space in his ring, after all, and the more dense something was the more he could efficiently use the space.

Waving his hands again, Jiao dumped out the few handfuls worth of rocks he’d kept in his ring the day of his fight. All of them were beautiful and polished looking and he’d not left him at the caravan for fear of thieves. Jiao noticed an almost imperceptible twitch of the old man’s brows when he did so and knew that the game was on.