Potions for Sale (3)
Morning sunlight spilled through the floor-to-ceiling windows, quietly filling the office.
A desk free of even a speck of dust, documents stacked in perfect alignment. In a landscape rarely seen since the gates appeared, the automatic door slid open and someone stepped inside.
He was a burly man with an abnormal amount of body hair.
The moment he entered, he sought out Ha Yun.
"Your hunch was right. He said he just transferred what he'd bought at the auction house into new bottles and resold them."
"You didn't use violence, I trust?"
"Of course not. I just sat him down for a friendly chat and asked where he'd gotten them."
So you did use it, then.
But Ha Yun saw no need to say that out loud.
"How much did he say he paid?"
"Fifty Credits a bottle."
The man said it with a look of pure disbelief. Just how many times over had the guy flipped them for?
Thinking back on it now, the reason Lim Yeonsu had spilled everything so readily was probably because he had something to feel guilty about.
Ha Yun didn't get angry about that part. She couldn't exactly condemn Lim Yeonsu just for swapping the bottles and reselling them. He hadn't committed a crime—he'd simply put luck, effort, and time into buying good merchandise at a bargain price.
But the fact remained that the person who had actually crafted the potions hadn't received a fair price for them. That sat poorly with her.
"So what do we do now?"
He was fully on board with Ha Yun's recruitment plan. He already knew from experience that specialty potions—not mere healing draughts—could dramatically cut a dungeon's clear time. If someone who could make potions like that joined the clan, sweeping every dungeon in Seoul wouldn't even be a dream.
Watching the man burn with enthusiasm, Ha Yun spoke calmly.
"Then would you mind helping me organize these documents?"
"…I'm a beastman, you know?"
He launched into excuses about how he'd developed dyslexia ever since becoming a beastman, but Ha Yun's exhausted gaze made it clear she had no intention of yielding.
That was when a welcome sound reached them.
A message from the clan member assigned to monitor the auction house. They checked it at once.
"Faster than expected."
They had no way of knowing how long potion crafting actually took, so they'd braced themselves for a potentially long wait. For new stock to appear in a single day was nothing short of excellent news. If potions like these could be knocked out overnight, there would be far less hesitation about using them.
They examined the newly listed potions. Once again, the item registered was a fatigue recovery potion. The price: seventy Credits. Twenty Credits higher than before, but still absurdly cheap.
"It isn't someone else, is it?"
"We'll know once we check."
Whether it was the same person didn't matter much. As long as the potions were genuine, it made no difference who had listed them. Of course, if they turned out to be fakes, appropriate retribution would have to follow.
The auction began. The instant it did, someone bid on the entire lot at seventy Credits. They assumed it was Lim Yeonsu.
"Still can't let go of the greed."
"After pocketing hundreds of times the markup, it's hard to forget."
But those free-money days were over now. Before Ha Yun could even raise the bid herself, someone else jumped it to five thousand. Her finger hovering over the button, she looked surprised.
"Looks like we're not the only ones who know."
"Come to think of it, that guy said he'd gotten five bottles. I bought three, so at least one or two other people must know about them."
Instead of scolding him for leaving that detail out, Ha Yun simply watched the bidding war climb back and forth. And when the price finally reached thirty thousand Credits a bottle, she entered fifty thousand.
Twenty bottles—one million Credits. Even the man watching beside her looked stunned.
"Useful as these potions are, fifty thousand Credits apiece is a bit much, isn't it?"
Truthfully, even accounting for their unique properties, the fair market price for a fatigue recovery potion topped out at around thirty thousand Credits. Ha Yeonsu had enough auction house experience to gauge their worth precisely. A million Credits wasn't a crushing sum for them, but it wasn't pocket change either.
Ha Yun hadn't paid the premium simply to monopolize the potions, though.
"This should have made our presence crystal clear to the other party."
The seller would now have a solid grasp of what their potions were actually worth. And toward the people who had shown them that value, they would feel goodwill, not resentment. That alone put Ha Yun a step ahead of anyone else.
If other parties later came seeking a partnership, bringing up this incident would make it highly likely that priority went to them.
And Ha Yun had no intention of stopping here. The system's anonymity was airtight—if a seller refused to reveal their identity, uncovering it was extraordinarily difficult. Under ordinary circumstances, identifying the other party was nearly impossible.
"I'll go meet them myself."
Ever since the gates opened, people had awakened to all kinds of skills. Among them were abilities that could track a person through residual traces.
The moment I received the million Credits, I went straight to check the front door. I shut the windows and drew the curtains, then pulled the blanket over my head and stared at the transaction amount displayed by the system.
Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands… No matter how many times I counted, it was a million.
A million? An actual million?
My heart hammered wildly. I'd set my sights on getting rich off potions, sure, but I never imagined I'd hit the goal in two days.
Considering the government sold bread for fifty Credits a loaf, a million Credits would buy twenty thousand of them. At two meals a day, that was ten thousand days' worth—roughly thirty years of bread money.
In a world like this, I wouldn't have to worry about food for thirty years?
There wasn't some kind of mistake, right?
If a single person had bought them, maybe there was room for error. But this was the result of an open auction with any number of bidders. No room for misunderstanding. My potions simply had that much demand.
Honestly, I never thought what I'd made was worth that much. Even wound-healing potions only went for a few thousand Credits, and the shoddier ones sold for less. Potions with vague uses were worse—something like a web-dissolving potion barely fetched a few hundred.
And a potion that just eased some fatigue was going for fifty thousand Credits?
I'd figured it was roughly on the level of an energy tonic. I never imagined the value could be this high.
"Ah. Aah."
My chest suddenly tightened. The moment yesterday's potions—sold at fifty Credits a bottle—flashed through my mind, my head went hot.
"You… free-money bastard…!"
But who was I supposed to blame? The one who'd listed them at fifty Credits was none other than me. Nobody had held a knife to my throat, so I couldn't go crying to anyone about it either.
Right. Failing to do proper research and slapping up a careless listing was entirely my fault. The two hundred fifty thousand Credits I'd failed to pocket stung more than the million sitting in front of me, but I managed to pull myself together.
Fine. From now on, I'd just be careful not to make the same mistake.
With that resolution, I started laying out plans for the future. A sudden windfall like this meant I no longer needed to stick to my old methods.
No real need to go outside and forage for herbs anymore.
If there had been a single most dangerous moment since my awakening, it was stepping outside to pick plants. Exposing yourself in an environment with no guaranteed safety was about as big a risk as it got.
The auction house was a space where anyone could freely list goods, and thanks to that, every kind of bizarre item imaginable showed up there. Everything I needed was among them.
Stock up on empty bottles… buy all sorts of herbs…
I purchased plenty of materials for potion crafting. Even after buying what felt like a considerable amount, the million Credits showed no sign of dwindling. Part of that was because nothing I'd bought was particularly expensive—but a million Credits was also an absurdly large sum for ordinary shopping.
So as I continued browsing the auction house, something caught my eye.
"Byproducts?"
Monster byproducts. One of the largest sources of income hunters earned from clearing dungeons was the materials harvested from monster corpses. Shells, fangs, claws—anything used in equipment crafting had high demand. But digestive organs and other miscellaneous parts had no real use. Government research institutes bought them up for next to nothing, supposedly, but even that couldn't keep pace with the supply.
And so those would-be discards were listed on the auction house for dirt cheap.
Maybe I'll buy just a little?
I wasn't fully proficient with my Alchemy skill yet, but I had a vague sense that things besides mana-infused herbs could serve as potion ingredients. Monster body parts seemed promising enough, so I hit the purchase button for the smallest available unit.
And immediately regretted it.
Even at the minimum quantity, the monster byproducts arrived stuffed into a sack the size of a grown man. The squelching texture transferred straight through to the hand holding it.
"Kyaaaah!"
I couldn't bear to hold it a second longer and let go. The sack hit the floor with a wet slap. The cord tying the mouth snapped, and the contents spilled across the living room.
I'm… fucked.
A creeping stench left me lightheaded—and at the same time:
"Huh?"
My Alchemy skill began running completely wild.