The Dead Sea Trolls
Miya was the one who dismantled the dead Sea Trolls. All it really involved was pulling the magic stones from their bodies, but she made it look effortless. She finished each one in about a second.
“Miya, that’s enough. Twelve is plenty.”
“Okayyy~!”
I wanted to process them all at once, but that wasn’t an option. Even with the anonymity of the auction house, dumping too many at the same time would draw unwanted attention. These weren’t ordinary trolls, after all—they were Sea Trolls. Since they lived by the sea, someone might be able to pinpoint our location.
Of course, even if they figured it out, my territory wouldn’t be in any real danger. If anything, the opposite worried me more. This land was mine. Touching it meant touching me. And if Asne got angry about it?
I have to protect these people…! No one can ever find this place…!
If I asked her, she wouldn’t go on a killing spree. She could simply put them to sleep and drive them off. But if people kept bothering us, there were things even I might not be able to control. So I had to do everything possible to prevent that from happening.
“The magic stones… half are 8th-grade and half are 7th-grade.”
The stones harvested from the twelve trolls were evenly split between those two ranks. I could have sold them, but I had a better use in mind. I was going to expand my territory.
Using the magic stones, I immediately widened the borders of Nohwado. After using all twelve, half the island now belonged to me. The efficiency wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but that was probably unavoidable. 11th-grade magic stones were in a completely different league. The gap between each rank grew massive once you reached 6th-grade and above.
“As for the corpses, straight to the auction house…”
For the Sea Trolls, we had only removed the hearts to extract the magic stones. Strangely enough, a troll’s regenerative power still worked after death as long as its blood hadn’t clotted. That was why their blood was the main ingredient for potions. As a result, the corpses looked completely untouched from the outside. They were in pristine condition.
I listed them on the auction house. Since there weren’t any other troll corpses up for sale, I checked the last recorded sale price. An average of four thousand gold per unit. Interestingly, the bodies were selling for more than the magic stones themselves.
Let’s set the minimum bid at four thousand and run a one-hour auction. I should add a note too. ‘Sea Trolls have poisonous barnacles attached to their skin, so it’s recommended to remove them or perform detoxification beforehand.’
I had worried that the poison might make them unsellable, but I wasn’t desperate for money. If they didn’t sell, I could just lower the price. As it turned out, that concern was completely unfounded. One hour later, all twelve had sold—for a whopping seven thousand gold each.
Around 4 p.m., the time when Minsoo listed the Sea Troll corpses on the auction house.
At the headquarters of Hakwooseon, Korea’s top alchemist guild.
“What? Buy it immediately!”
“But sir… it’s a Sea Troll!”
“Ah… those cause a low chance of poisoning when you make potions with them. Check the price and—wait, what? ‘Poisonous barnacles on the skin, so please remove or detoxify’? What the hell? Who is this seller?!”
Troll corpses were worth a fortune. Just the potions you could make from one body’s blood alone sold for five thousand gold. And that wasn’t all. The tendons could be used for strength-enhancing potions, the bones for defense potions, the organs and meat for stamina supplements, and the hide for armor materials. There wasn’t a single part that went to waste.
The only problem was that a few months ago, after they had acquired one Sea Troll, a customer who used the resulting potion suffered necrosis at the application site. The buyer had filed a complaint with the main office, experiencing both pain and healing at the same time. That incident had made people a bit wary.
Sea Trolls had only been successfully hunted once before. A party including 8th-grade hunters had spotted a troll near Baengnyeong Island, but after barely managing to kill a single one, they gave up. At the time, the Sea Troll’s strength was said to be comparable to an 8th-grade monster. That corpse had sold for twenty thousand gold.
Back then, lacking information, they had processed it like a regular troll and ended up causing poisoning. Ever since, people had simply assumed Sea Trolls were strong but useless as potion ingredients.
However, the seller’s note on this new listing clearly explained the issue. The barnacles contained the poison—handle them accordingly.
“A one-hour auction… How much guild funds do we have available right now?”
“Eight hundred thousand gold, sir!”
There were four major alchemist guilds in the country. Hakwooseon was only nominally number one; the others were roughly equal. But if they could secure these Sea Troll corpses—especially with the exact location of the toxic component clearly stated—they might be able to research the barnacles and develop a potion related to decay poison.
“For now, observe the situation and compete only up to ten thousand gold per corpse!”
“Understood!”
The poison potion that could be applied to weapons was something only Hakwooseon could produce. The other three guilds might be able to extract the toxin, but crafting an actual poison potion would be difficult for them. They would probably try to interfere, but they wouldn’t go above ten thousand gold. That was why Guild Master Jegal Ryong had set that limit. The previous Sea Troll had sold for twenty thousand gold, after all.
At the time, they had taken a significant loss. Selling potions from one troll’s blood brought in five thousand gold, and the remaining materials another three thousand. They had paid twenty thousand because it was an 8th-grade specimen and they thought it might be special. Instead, all they got were complaints about skin necrosis. The compensation alone cost them ten thousand gold. Revenue from the corpse: eight thousand. Compensation paid: ten thousand. Net gold loss: twenty-two thousand.
And that didn’t even account for the manpower and time spent making the potions, or the stress from dealing with the claims. Just hearing the words “Sea Troll” had been enough to make him irritated.
But now the seller had provided the key to eliminating the side effect. If the price was right, this was a chance to turn a profit.
I could even make an 8th-grade poison potion. The effect would probably be necrosis… That would be incredibly useful for clearing 8th-grade gates. We could solidify our position as the undisputed number one alchemist guild…!
It wouldn’t be made overnight, of course, but simply having the capability would be an absolute win. So they participated fiercely in the auction for the full hour. In the end, they won one corpse for seven thousand gold.
“Guild Master! We secured them at an average of seven thousand gold each!”
“Excellent! Immediately begin careful separation of the barnacles, collect toxin samples, and start analysis!”
“Yes, sir!”
With the entire Hakwooseon guild mobilized, they succeeded in creating an 8th-grade decay potion in just one day, maintaining their unshakable position as the top alchemist guild. Naturally, this caused the market price of Sea Troll corpses to rise even higher—a development that worked entirely in Minsoo’s favor.
Meanwhile, Minsoo was…
“We don’t have any technicians…”
“Sorry, Minsoo…”
“I’m sorry, Lord…”
I had wanted to develop Nohwado now that it was part of my territory, but I hit a wall right at the building stage. I couldn’t bring in outside labor either. The whole point of choosing an island far from the mainland was to avoid being noticed by people. Calling in workers would completely defeat that purpose.
“Can’t be helped.”
I couldn’t create something out of nothing. I would have to make do with what I had. And what did I have? Gold. The auction for the Sea Troll corpses I had just listed was still climbing. Seeing the bids rise little by little, it didn’t look like they would go unsold. And that wasn’t all. There were still over a hundred more corpses waiting in those waters.
“What do you two think is most important in a house?”
“A house? Umm…”
“A house, you say? Since the sea is my home… if I had to choose, perhaps cleanliness? In that regard, my lord’s territory is the finest home imaginable. The water is pure and the mana is pristine.”
Miya fell into deep thought at my question, while Asne gave an answer that completely defied my common sense. She was trying to compliment me, but I couldn’t relate at all. And Miya’s response was even more heartbreaking.
“I’ve never really lived in a house before, so I wouldn’t know!”
She answered with such a bright, sunny smile that I nearly teared up.
I took out my phone to turn it on, but the battery was dead. I bought a disposable portable charger from the auction house, plugged it in, and let it charge for a bit. While it was charging, I looked around Nohwado.
Destroyed aquaculture farms dotted the sea, while the land was covered in ruined buildings and barren earth. There were even remnants of rice paddies and fields, suggesting farming had once taken place here. The only reason it was hard to tell was because no one had maintained the island for so long that weeds had grown thick and wild.
The island itself was quite large.
“At least a few thousand people must have lived here… and now it’s completely deserted…”
“The weak get taken from. It’s common sense.”
“That’s right. It’s common sense.”
“…Yeah.”
It wasn’t just this island. All the islands in the South Sea—known as the Archipelago—had been abandoned by humanity. The same was true for the West Sea and East Sea. The only place where people still lived in any significant numbers was the inland area of Jeju Island. And that was only because the Jeju Guild held the line. If not for them, everyone would have fled by plane long ago.
After touring half the island, an hour had passed and all the Sea Trolls had sold. The twelve corpses fetched an average of seven thousand gold each. Adding that to my existing balance brought my total to over eighty-nine thousand gold. In Korean won, that was nearly nine hundred million.
“Good. Looks like money won’t be an issue… Time to do what I was thinking about last time.”
With my phone now charged, I reopened the website I had briefly looked at before. It was full of photos and various options. Curious, both Miya and Asne leaned in to look at the screen with me.
“A house?”
“It’s a house, right?”
“If building one ourselves is too difficult, we might as well just use one that’s already made.”
It was the container house I had thought about back on the first day when Miya and I pitched a tent in the mountains. Though they called them container houses, they were essentially pre-built homes for sale. There was no need to stick to the old movable container style anymore. These were houses you could simply click and have installed wherever you wanted. Most weren’t even shaped like containers—they were designed to look like normal houses.
“This one looks good.”
I checked the serial number of the model I liked in the catalog and decided to purchase the corresponding item from the auction house.