Gray Wolf Hide
On nights when the farm had nothing to do, everyone holed up in their own rooms, busy with a tablet or a console game—but around mealtime they still gathered, ate, and talked.
"Once we're out, what'll sell the best?"
"Has to be the Recovery Herb, right? I've never even seen A-rank Recovery Herb before."
"Sunro Mushrooms seem pretty popular too. Still, Recovery Herb's the obvious one, isn't it?"
"Come on. Everything else is small change."
How much were the trade goods we were taking out this time actually worth? Which of them would be crowned the main MVP? The standard for that, as always, was money.
"Sell it all and we could buy a building, couldn't we? Oppa, you already spend more than half the year stuck here farming. Even if you just sit on the place, the price'll shoot up."
"What building? Turn it straight into items and climb a biome or two, and that building's already buried in the dirt."
In the end, the MVP we'd picked going in was the Recovery Herb berries. I didn't think that guess would miss by much. Lee Jihyun had tossed in a small variable—our alchemist saying the ointment made from the leaves might actually outsell the potion made from the berries—but it wouldn't change the result in any way that mattered.
Something else, though, had come screaming up from a corner none of us expected.
"An acquaintance of Dad's friend is an armorsmith. Showed him the gray wolf hide, and he said he absolutely has to be the one to work it. Guilds are already lining up, begging him to put them in touch somehow. What do you want to do?"
"It's that serious?"
"He says if we just let him do the work, he'll only charge for materials."
"Wait, what..."
This was the part I couldn't quite get my head around.
Lee Jihyun? She hadn't been awakened as an alchemist for long, she had no money, and she was clinging to a stack of principles about not getting lowballed and tied down somewhere this early while she still had her eye on the future. I could accept that signing a deal with me that was a little unfavorable right now wasn't a losing trade for her. It wasn't only about grinding experience and pushing her level; she had no cash, so the contract was also a way of drawing on money she didn't have yet.
But a blacksmith known to Dad's friend, the accessory smith? And one with the skill to handle A-rank hide and turn it into armor—that was no nobody. Birds of a feather, as always. This wasn't some F-rank with a single skill cranking out knockoff clothes in Dongdaemun. A smith who made armor sold professionally to hunters didn't have to be a famous master for his rates to be brutal, or for his time itself to be something you paid to buy.
So why would someone like that?
Sure, A-rank hide was hard to come by. But was it really this hard?
"Oppa. I've gone a little dull since I came to the farm, but A-rank hide? That tracks."
Strictly speaking, the gray wolf hide was B+, with about four or five pieces grading out at A-. In armor terms, that meant one part could be made from A- hide and the rest would have to be crafted at B+. He was offering to waive the labor on everything else just to get his hands on that single piece of A- hide.
"Clearing an A-rank dungeon isn't easy to begin with, and bringing the hide out without damaging it is even harder..."
In Farming World, you learned Butchery the moment you started the game. Reality, of course, didn't work that way. Unless a hunter had actually learned Butchery, a monster didn't pop apart at the click of a button, neatly disassembled, with the hide peeling off on its own. So once a dungeon full of monsters whose hides could be made into armor was cleared, professional butchers went in with the skill and skinned them properly. Even then, the hide's condition came out anywhere from zero to a hundred percent depending on how damaged the corpse was, and it went without saying that the finished armor changed with that damage.
Which meant the hides I'd brought back—ninety-five to a hundred percent—were, to any smith who worked leather, the kind of material they couldn't help lunging at with their eyes on fire.
"Guess I ought to raise my Butchery level a bit."
My Butchery rank was F. Even so, the hides had come out with almost no damage, because I'd killed nearly every gray wolf by taking its head. A few times I'd been in a mood and split one clean in half, but there weren't many of those. With the rest in such good condition, a couple of flawed pieces mixed in wouldn't look like much of a blemish.
Keep hunting that way, and I could keep harvesting the hides at their full value. Still, you never knew how things would go, so the easiest way to bring them back with their worth safely raised was to rank up Butchery.
Either way, it was unexpected. I hadn't imagined the reaction would be this good from a place I hadn't even been thinking about. We'd talked about turning the hides into armor and selling them for a decent price, but hearing this from a blacksmith already meant things had gone past what I'd pictured.
"He said if we decide what armor to make from the A-rank hide and tell him, he'll have it done within three days."
"Hm... Then the A-rank is a chest piece. For the B+, one chest piece, pants, gloves, and a neck guard. Ask him to make those for now."
"Got it."
I was planning to sell the A-rank piece at auction. The B+ gear set, I'd wear myself when I went after the Corrupted Ogre this time. There was definitely a gap between B+ and A, but from where I stood it wasn't a gap big enough for me to feel. Putting A-rank armor—high demand on the market right now—up for auction and raising Gwangjin Distribution's name would be a far bigger gain.
Gwangjin Distribution needed to grow, partly to pay back the hardship Dad had been through and to get revenge on Hyeonjong Distribution for all the trouble they'd given him. Just as important, growth meant I could get whatever items I wanted as easily as placing an order, simply by telling Dad. I was going to keep bringing back more and more resources that had to be sold, and even now we couldn't collect the full payment in one go and had to split the deals. How were we supposed to do business like that? I couldn't just dump the goods somewhere else, either. The only option was to grow Gwangjin Distribution bigger.
So this auction was set to feature the Corrupted Recovery Herb Ointment, the chest piece that would be made from A- gray wolf hide, and the Corrupted Recovery Herb Potion as well. A few Sunro Mushrooms had been packaged up like gift sets and slotted in early to catch the eye, but those didn't even have the seniority to elbow their way into the real conversation.
"What'll go for the most?"
Add up the volume, and of course nothing could touch the Corrupted Recovery Herb Ointment or the recovery potions. But piece for piece, depending on how much of a master's hand went into the armor made from A- hide, it might smear the ointment right off the board. A recovery potion, judged by unit price alone, wasn't even in the same league.
"The armor, obviously?"
That seemed the likely bet.
Two days until the armor was finished. We decided the auction would go ahead the very next day. In the meantime, Kim Sujeong and I started quietly getting ready to head back to the farm.
"The solar panels. Could you show us how to install them and hook up the power, too?"
"You're going to do it yourselves?"
"Yes. It's somewhere your technician can't come."
"We make service calls all over the country..."
"Can you come into a dungeon?"
"Ah... in a dungeon... installing this..."
"Lots of people are doing it these days. You haven't tried it?"
"Is there a sun in a dungeon?"
We were buying them because I'd been told that storing power through solar panels during the daylight hours would be enough to run a refrigerator and the other electrical things for a cabin about the size of one hut. Then an unexpected problem came up.
"Hm... is there no sun...?"
"I think this is the first I've heard of a dungeon having a sun."
In a way, the solar-panel guy was right. The sun existed in the solar system. The inside of a dungeon was another dimension—why would anything like a sun be in there? Fortunately, on that exact point, there was a paper from overseas.
"I looked it up. The sun rises inside dungeons too, doesn't it? It's not the sun, exactly, but something similar, and they say it charges solar panels. I checked all of this before we came."
"Oh. Is that so? Foreigners really will try anything."
Dungeon or rift dimension, both had night and day, so I'd figured it would be similar enough—but thanks to Kim Sujeong's preparedness, we didn't end up throwing the money away.
I crammed the solar panels in until my belt was full, picked up a crash course in wiring the power on the way back, and already my chest felt light and steady with anticipation.
"A Farming World with a refrigerator."
A fridge. A freezer. A kimchi fridge. Things like that would have been nice in Farming World too, but they were the appliances especially beloved in zombie-apocalypse games—worlds where keeping food and being able to eat it cold was a blessing. The rift dimension was no different.
"We're going to have a lot to take this time."
The moment I thought of electricity, too many things came to mind. An air conditioner. An air fryer. Things you couldn't unlock until at least a level 3 or level 4 biome—and now I could replace them with ordinary goods from Earth.
Wash a body worn out from wandering all day in warm water, switch on the air conditioner, pull a can of beer from the fridge, crack it, and let out that satisfied ahh. Just imagining I could do that on the farm, a sense of accomplishment rose in me higher than it ever had before.