Chapter 37: A Lucky Find
This morning passed without any surprises. As usual, Zhou Ning made his way to the Alchemy Building. However, since his alchemy skills had already reached the intermediate level, mooching off low-level materials at the school lab was no longer cost-effective. So he was planning to resign in a few days and rent an alchemy lab outside campus.
Although he didn't gain much experience, Zhou Ning prided himself on being professional at work—no slacking off. After sneaking a peek at the forums in the lab, he brewed a few low-grade potions and managed to scrape together a few hundred experience points. Shortly after, Rosie came to take over, and the two of them, with a practiced familiarity, had lunch together.
To Zhou Ning's surprise, it was still Sherlock who came to pick up the firearms at noon. As the captain of the Sunwatchers' Third Squad, didn't he have any subordinates? Who knew why he was being worked to death?
"Five handguns, two rifles—total: 111 Vecktas." Zhou Ning handed over the weapons to Sherlock.
Sherlock took the guns, counted them, and handed Zhou Ning a stack of bills. "Count it."
"No need. It's not like this'll be our last deal, right?" Zhou Ning's heart leapt with joy, but he played it cool, slipping the bills into the inner pocket of his jacket with a smile.
"You're not wrong," Sherlock chuckled and handed him a pouch of bullets. "Here are 50 rounds. The processing fee is the 10 Roshens apiece you quoted. If you have any new firearms in the future, you can bring the finished products—bullets included—to the West Lin General Store in the western part of the city. Someone there will handle it. You know how it is—we'll be busy for a while."
"No problem," Zhou Ning agreed immediately, taking the bullets. Official institutions really were generous—50 bullets meant nearly 50 Vecktas in income, padding his wallet nicely.
In Bryston's currency system, the Veni was the base unit, with the Veckta being the highest.
1 Veckta = 10 Roshens = 100 Venis.
So 50 Vecktas was a substantial sum.
The only issue was that Zhou Ning could only produce potions and bullets in the school's alchemy lab, which was attached to the alchemy shop. But that lab was frequently rented out, and material reserves were limited, making batch production impossible. After mulling it over, he decided to move his plan up and rent an alchemy lab off-campus.
He tore open a weather predictor stick—one red line and one light red line appeared. That meant there would be extreme weather this afternoon—either heavy rain or snow. The worst-case scenario was acid rain, but it probably wouldn't come to that.
Zhou Ning rented an umbrella from the shop and walked toward the edge of campus.
Speaking of umbrellas, there was a joke here. Zhou Ning always found it odd that in the game, even though umbrellas existed, people often rented them. So he asked an NPC about it. Without hesitation, the NPC answered, "Umbrellas are expensive!" At first, Zhou Ning thought the NPC was just being silly. Later, he found out why people in the Apocalypse world borrowed umbrellas—turns out, in the game, umbrellas were actually a kind of affordable luxury. One of the wealthiest tycoons in Darkland had built his fortune selling umbrellas.
Transportation options in Apocalypse were also surprisingly abundant. Even just in Darkland, there were public carriages and intercity trains. Later in the northern regions, there were flying mounts like griffins and even airships.
A curious blend of fantasy and science—pretty fascinating.
In Darkland City, public carriages were pulled by two strange creatures that resembled kodo beasts. People called them "horned horses," standard northern beasts. The carriage could seat more than a dozen passengers and stopped on request—very convenient.
Five minutes later, a carriage passed by. Zhou Ning waved to stop it.
"Blair Bookstore in the Old District," he told the driver.
"Blair Bookstore? This line doesn't stop there. You can get off at the Red Kineleaf Tailor Shop and walk five minutes. You'll be there," the driver replied.
"Works for me." Zhou Ning nodded without concern.
"Three kilometers. Fare's 6 Venis," said a woman in her thirties who was collecting fares. She held out her hand and gave Zhou Ning a flirtatious wink. "Don't think you can ride for free just because you're good-looking."
She was the ticket collector.
"Got it." Zhou Ning pulled out 6 Venis from his pocket, handed it to her, took the ticket, and got on board.
The carriage was nearly empty—hardly anyone riding. That probably had something to do with Bryston's economic downturn in recent years.
Zhou Ning took a seat and closed his eyes to rest. He had two goals for this trip to the Old District: buy materials and rent an alchemy lab—and snag a lucky find.
Ten minutes later, the carriage stopped.
After getting off and navigating by memory, Zhou Ning made his way to a storefront called "Blair Bookstore."
The owner was a portly man in his forties, wearing a monocle and lounging in a recliner while reading a newspaper. Piles of old books were stacked around him.
This had to be the place.
Zhou Ning felt sure and smiled slightly. "A friend told me you have a set of alchemy books by Wendegoon?"
"Wendegoon?"
The shopkeeper sat up, removed his monocle, thought for a moment, then nodded. "I think so. I'll have to look for them."
Blair Bookstore was the only secondhand bookstore in the Old District. Business wasn't great, but it had a massive collection—so it made sense the owner couldn't recall where specific books were stored.
Zhou Ning nodded. "I'll leave it to you, then."
About half an hour later, the shopkeeper rushed back holding a stack of old books. "Here—five volumes. See if these are what you're looking for."
Zhou Ning flipped through one, confirmed they were indeed Wendegoon's works, and felt a thrill of joy inside. But he kept a straight face. "That's the set. How much?"
"These are from the Old Falric era—20 Vecktas, minimum." The owner blinked his small eyes. He had actually picked these up for just 2 Vecktas, but seeing how eager Zhou Ning was, he quoted a price just high enough to sting, without scaring him off.
Zhou Ning curled his lip and turned to leave. The shopkeeper panicked and grabbed him. "Then how much are you offering?"
"I'll give you one Veckta, tops."
"What? One Veckta? Why don't you just rob me?! These are from the Old Falric era!" The shopkeeper grew agitated, offended by what he considered an insulting offer.
"Three Vecktas. Not a Veni more."
With that, Zhou Ning turned to leave, counting in his mind: one step, two steps, three steps…
"Wait!" After a brief inner struggle, the shopkeeper stopped him. "Lowest I'll go is five Vecktas. Gotta earn something for my trouble, right?"
Zhou Ning stopped immediately, turned around. "Deal."
The shopkeeper: …
In the end, both sides were satisfied. Zhou Ning left with the set of old books in hand, feeling like he had struck gold.
The books' author, Wendegoon, had been an alchemist from the Old Falric era who developed his own self-contained system of alchemy, combining engineering with alchemy to create mechanical constructs. He sealed these constructs into specially made cards—sort of like Yu-Gi-Oh!.
If he'd been born in modern times, Wendegoon would've been the Seto Kaiba type—a genius founder of something like Wendegoon Entertainment Group, complete with a duel hologram system. Success would've come easy.
But instead, he went down the dark path of "life synthesis," attempting to give his mechanical constructs real life.
In the end, this triggered a six-nation crusade. Wendegoon vanished without a trace.
In Zhou Ning's past life, a player had found a clue and discovered Wendegoon had encoded his alchemical knowledge into a set of old books using a cipher.
That player eventually decoded a unique alchemy system but kind of squandered it—using it only to make little mechanical pets. Even so, he still made a decent amount of money from it.
This time, Zhou Ning had arrived two years ahead of that player and successfully snatched the book set first.
He found a secluded spot, tucked the books into his inventory, and made a beeline for the Trade District.
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