Chapter 20: Chapter 19: THE STONEBROOK MARKET DRAMA AND THE SECOND BOW EXPERIMENT
The morning sunlight of StoneBrook grew warmer, illuminating the cobblestone streets crowded with throngs of players. After hearing the players’ conversations on the street regarding the mass buying spree conducted by the large clans, I immediately stepped toward Kitsuna’s makeshift stall at the corner of the market area. My main goal was very clear: I needed jewelry or magical accessories capable of boosting my Strength (STR) attribute so I could draw the string of the Laminated Ironwood Longbow that was sitting uselessly in my inventory.
As soon as I arrived in front of the fox girl’s shop, the surrounding atmosphere looked exceptionally busy. Several players were seen arguing in high-pitched tones, while Kitsuna herself seemed overwhelmed organizing her piles of merchandise with her pair of orange ears twitching in stress.
"Yo, Kitsuna!" I greeted while slipping between two large-bodied Warrior players. "Do you sell rings, bracelets, or necklaces that provide STR stat bonuses? I need several pieces right now."
Kitsuna looked up, her tired eyes instantly lighting up slightly upon seeing me. However, that sparkle immediately dimmed, replaced by a long sigh laden with frustration. Her bushy tail waved sluggishly behind her waist.
"Ah, Syl... I’m so sorry, you arrived too late," Kitsuna answered while shaking her head with a gloomy face. "All physical enhancement-type accessories, especially those with STR and AGI bonuses, have been completely sold out since dawn today. The Golden Lion clan, DragonSlayer, and several market middlemen bought everything up without negotiating the price. They even paid down payments for items that haven’t been crafted yet!"
I clicked my tongue in annoyance, folding both my arms across my chest. "Damn it... Their monopoly is really going too far. Is there truly nothing left, Kitsuna? Not even Common-tier accessories with the lowest stats?"
"Completely empty, Syl," Kitsuna emphasized with a guilty expression. "The other merchants in this district are also experiencing the same thing. If you really need an STR accessory today, you have to hunt for it yourself from monsters or... well, craft it yourself if you have crafting skills."
"Alright, thanks for the info, Kitsuna. Don’t get too stressed out dealing with those clan monsters," I said, trying to offer a comforting smile before turning around to leave the market area, which was growing increasingly noisy and stuffy with the ambitions of pioneer players.
A lingering sense of irritation gnawed at my heart. This large clan monopoly was starting to ruin the gaming experience for solo players like me. However, Kitsuna’s last words actually triggered a new realization in my head. Craft it myself?
I gently tapped my forehead. "Why should I bother searching the market? I’ve already reached [Carpenter] Level 10. I can try carving my own wooden accessories from the leftover materials at the workshop!"
Without wasting any more time, I directed my footsteps back toward the Crafter’s District, which was still relatively quieter compared to the city’s commercial zone. I walked toward the public woodworking shop where I had spent time yesterday afternoon, sat down on a round wooden stool, and opened my storage space to check my remaining raw wood materials.
On the workbench, I stacked several pieces of hard Oak wood and leftover pine wood from my previous practice. I picked up a whittling knife and began focusing all my concentration on carving small pieces of jewelry.
In Second World Online’s system mechanics, there was a strict rule regarding the use of additional equipment: each character was only allowed to wear a maximum of 3 active accessory slots that could provide accumulated stat bonuses to character attributes.
Meanwhile, for accessories that were purely decorative or fashion items like the clover hairpin and phoenix hairpin I made yesterday the system provided them in free and unlimited Vanity/Cosmetic slots, which naturally did not provide any status bonuses aside from visual aesthetic value.
"Three active slots... That means I have to maximize these three slots to patch up my lack of strength," I muttered while moving the tip of the whittling knife with extraordinary smoothness.
My fingers danced across the pieces of oak wood with absolute grace. Over the next hour, fine wood shavings rained down onto the table as three basic-tier carpentry artworks were created.
Ting! Ting! Ting!
[System: You have successfully crafted ’Oak Ring of Strength’ (Common)! Exceptional craftsmanship quality!]
[System: You have successfully crafted ’Pine Beaded Bracelet’ (Common)! Very neat craftsmanship quality!]
[System: You have successfully crafted ’Carved Wooden Earrings’ (Common)! Perfect craftsmanship quality!]
I immediately opened the description windows for the three new items with high hopes. However, as soon as my eyes read the rows of green numbers displayed on the item information panels, a long sigh laden with deep disappointment escaped my lips once again.
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[Oak Ring of Strength] (Common) -> Effect: STR +1
[Pine Beaded Bracelet] (Common) -> Effect: STR +1
[Carved Wooden Earrings] (Common) -> Effect: STR +1
==================================================
"Each one only adds one STR point?" I complained while rubbing my temples.
Considering the raw materials I used were merely basic-tier wood without additional magic gems or monster cores, getting stat bonuses from Common-tier items was actually a very good result for a level 10 craftsman. If I were a normal human race player or a normal Warrior, wearing these three accessories would directly grant me a clean +3 STR bonus.
However, for my character, the system’s mathematical rules worked in a very cruel manner.
I opened the main status panel and checked the character’s innate traits section: Trait: [Albinism]. This rare racial trait granted me high magical purity and extraordinary agility bonuses, but as a balancing trade-off, all raw physical attribute enhancements (STR and AGI) whether from stat point allocation or equipment bonuses would suffer a 50% penalty deduction.
I tried equipping the three wooden accessories into my active slots.
[System: Active Accessory Bonus Calculation: +3 STR (Reduced by 50% due to [Albinism] Trait) -> Total Net Bonus: +1.5 STR (Rounded down to +1 STR by system).]
"Damn it... it’s really almost useless!" I cursed in a frustrated tone while staring at my own palms.
With my base strength value sitting at 2 points, the net addition from these three accessories could only raise my strength figure to 3.5 points (or 3 functional points). This number was still far below the 5 STR threshold required by the system to draw the monster-tendon bowstring on my Laminated Ironwood Longbow!
The experiment to patch up my physical attributes using ordinary wooden jewelry was officially declared a total failure. I had to find another mechanical approach on the bow itself, rather than on my character’s fragile physique.
I unequipped those three unsatisfactory wooden accessories and placed them back into my inventory. When I opened the virtual wallet tab to plan purchasing new wood materials for re-experimenting on the bow’s structure, my eyes suddenly bulged seeing my current financial balance.
[Financial Balance: 0 Gold Coins | 10 Silver Coins | 45 Copper Coins]
"Only ten silver coins left?!" I shrieked softly, almost jumping out of the workshop stool.
I just remembered that yesterday afternoon I had wasted 15 silver coins just to buy five logs of Ironwood and one Monster Tendon String, most of which ended up as scrap wood due to failed experiments. With this pitiful balance of 10 silver coins, I wouldn’t have enough capital to buy high-quality materials if my new bow experiment suffered another failure.
"I have to liquidate my trading assets as quickly as possible. Looks like I’ll have to sell the oak bow and some of the items I crafted yesterday," I decided firmly.
I immediately rose from the workshop stool, packed all my belongings, and stepped back toward the crowded market area. This time, I walked toward the NPC market manager’s booth located right next to Kitsuna’s stall.
Under Second World Online’s rules, players were permitted to set up independent trading stalls in official market zones by paying a land rental fee to the city’s managing NPC.
"Hello, Uncle. I’d like to rent a temporary booth slot for the next 24 hours," I said to the iron-armored guard NPC.
"Of course, young Adventurer. The street stall rental fee for a full day is 1 Silver Coin. Do you agree?"
Although it felt slightly expensive for my thinning wallet, I immediately paid the one silver coin. My financial balance now officially shrunk to 9 Silver Coins.
Ting!
[System: You have successfully rented Trading Stall #104. Please set your store name and place your merchandise into the virtual showcase.]
A simple wooden table with a small fabric tent automatically appeared on the empty lot right to the right of Kitsuna’s stall. I pressed the shop menu panel, then typed in my booth’s name quickly: [Syl’s Booth: Sale of Wooden Bows and Accessories].
Once the booth was set up, I began pulling items out one by one from my dimensional storage space and arranging them neatly on the showcase table. I placed the [Handcrafted Oak Shortbow] (Common) that I crafted yesterday with exceptional workmanship quality, hundreds of arrows of [Standard Wooden Arrow], the three STR-boosting wooden accessories I had just made, along with a dozen decorative clover hairpins and phoenix hairpins that held high aesthetic value.
As for pricing, I had zero intention of joining the crazy speculation or inflating prices like the big clan middlemen. My primary goal was merely to dump these excess items so my dimensional storage bag wouldn’t be full and to get quick cash as capital for crafting. Therefore, I set the prices of all those items at the most reasonable standard average market price limit.
Of course, my greatest treasure, the [Laminated Ironwood Longbow] (Rare), remained safely stored inside a locked slot in my personal bag. I wasn’t foolish enough to sell the first Rare-rank weapon on this server to someone else.
Kitsuna, who was sitting sluggishly next to my stall after her merchandise had been completely bought out, turned her head with wide eyes upon seeing my showcase table suddenly filled with quality items.
"Gosh, Syl! You opened a stall too?!" Kitsuna shrieked, her ears immediately standing straight up. She scrutinized the oak wooden bow and the piles of arrows on my table with the gaze of a professional craftsman. "Crazy... the craftsmanship quality of these arrows... the consistency rate must be over 95%! And this shortbow... the flexibility of its wood fibers is truly perfect! Why are you selling luxury goods like this at standard average market prices, idiot?!"
I smiled casually while sitting down on a folding chair behind the stall table. "I just want to clear out my storage bag so it doesn’t get full, Kitsuna. Besides, I need quick silver coins to buy new wood materials this afternoon."
Before Kitsuna could give an economics lecture on how to extract maximum profit from an inflated market, what I feared or more precisely, what I hoped for happened with insanely extraordinary speed.
Several players wearing clan emblems on their cloaks, the middleman traders who had been circling the market since dawn like vultures, caught sight of my new booth offering weapons and arrows at standard, reasonable prices.
"Hey! Look over there! There’s a new booth selling a bow and hundreds of arrows at normal prices!" shouted one of the middlemen from the Golden Lion clan.
"What?! Don’t let DragonSlayer’s underlings beat us to it! Buy everything right now!"
In a matter of seconds, my simple stall was immediately swarmed by dozens of players jostling one another like a horde of zombies eyeing fresh meat! Their hands reached into the air, brutally pressing the purchase button on my booth’s virtual showcase panel without even reading it first!
Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting! Ting!
[System: ’Handcrafted Oak Shortbow’ has been purchased by Player ’Vanguard_01’ for 8 Silver Coins!]
[System: 100x ’Standard Wooden Arrow’ has been purchased by Player ’Lion_Merchant’ for 5 Silver Coins!]
[System: ’Oak Ring of Strength’ has been purchased by Player ’Greedy_Merchant’ for 3 Silver Coins!]
...
Kitsuna and I could only sit agape, transfixed watching the crazy scene unfold before our eyes. In a span of less than three minutes, every item I had arranged on the showcase including the decorative hairpins and clips that were actually useless for combat was cleanly swept away without leaving the slightest bit behind by those hoarders!
My showcase table was completely empty once again. When I checked the financial balance in my virtual wallet tab, a wide, deeply satisfied smile automatically blossomed on my lips. My financial balance, which was initially in the critical zone of 9 silver, had now skyrocketed dramatically to 42 Silver Coins and 80 Copper Coins! My supply bag was clean and light again, and my wallet was now thick enough to fund whatever experiments I desired.
While waiting for my booth’s active rental time to expire and enjoying a brief moment of rest with Kitsuna who was still shaking her head at the incident I pulled out a virtual browser tablet from the game interface to monitor the current situation on Second World Online’s official community forum.
As soon as the forum page opened, I was immediately greeted by a storm of extraordinarily massive digital drama. The atmosphere on the community forum turned out to be ten times more chaotic and heated than what I had imagined at the dinner table last night!
As it turned out, the mass buying spree and hoarding of raw materials conducted by large clans like Golden Lion, DragonSlayer, and the merchant guild middlemen had triggered the largest record of social resistance from the non-clan player community in modern virtual gaming history.
[OFFICIAL SWO COMMUNITY FORUM]
[TOP THREAD #1] BOYCOTT THE BIG CLANS! NO CRAFTSMEN SHOULD JOIN THEM!
[TOP THREAD #2] POTION FAMINE! INDEPENDENT ALCHEMISTS HAVE NO HERBAL RAW MATERIALS!
[TOP THREAD #3] HAHAHA! LOOK AT THE BIG CLANS LOSING THEIR SHIRTS DUE TO A WOOD TSUNAMI FROM LOGGERS!
I began reading the details of those popular threads, and slowly, a very funny and ironic macro-economic picture formed inside my head.
Those big clans indeed possessed an abundant capital of gold coins. They had managed to buy up almost 80% of the iron ore, medical herbal plants, and raw wood supplies available in the StoneBrook market this morning. However, in their greed and arrogance, the clan leaders forgot one most crucial human variable: they did not have an adequate number of craftsmen within their own internal clans!
Most players who chose production subclasses like Blacksmith, Alchemist, and Tailor were casual players, art lovers, or independent solo players who valued creative freedom. When those big clans tried to force and recruit these independent craftsmen to work as cheaply paid ’factory laborers’ to process the mountains of materials they had hoarded, the production players simultaneously staged a mass refusal!
They refused to join any clan, even refusing to accept crafting orders from arrogant big clan members!
As a result, those large clans were now experiencing an extraordinarily severe headache. Their clan storage warehouses were crammed full with tons of raw iron ore and thousands of bundles of medical herbal plants that were frozen into dead assets because there were no skilled hands capable of turning them into weapons or potions!
Worse yet, this boycott by independent alchemists triggered a terrifying snowball effect across the entire server. Because independent alchemists no longer had access to herbal raw materials, they stopped producing HP and MP Recovery Potions for the public market!
The availability of potions in StoneBrook dwindled drastically, approaching zero! Ordinary casual players and non-clan adventurers who wanted to go out hunting monsters suddenly couldn’t obtain healing potions. Without potions, they didn’t dare enter the forests or new hunting grounds because the risk of death was too high. Consequently, monster hunting activities on the server slowed down drastically, causing the supply of new monster materials to stall even further!
"Truly a perfect vicious cycle," I laughed amusedly while reading the forum analysis to Kitsuna. "Big clans hoard materials -> Craftsmen boycott -> Alchemists can’t make potions -> Regular players can’t hunt -> Big clans get condemned by the entire server!"
Kitsuna laughed out loud while holding her stomach, her fox tail wagging very rapidly out of joy seeing those market bullies get their just desserts. "Serve them right! That’s what happens when they treat us craftsmen like slaves who can be bought with money!"
However, the funniest and most epic part of today’s economic chaos didn’t stop at just the alchemist boycott. In thread number three, I read about an exceptionally crushing retaliation from the Independent Woodworkers and Loggers Union (Lumberjack Alliance).
The logger and carpenter players, who were sick of the behavior of big clan middlemen trying to control pine and oak wood prices that morning, responded in an extremely brilliant and radical way. They organized a mass mobilization movement! Hundreds of players wielding felling axes simultaneously invaded the level 1 to level 5 forest areas outside the eastern and northern gates of StoneBrook!
They conducted massive, brutal, and non-stop tree felling for hours!
In just half a day, thousands of Softwoods, Pine Logs, and other logs resulting from the mass felling were transported using carts and crazily flooded into the StoneBrook public market!
The law of supply and demand instantly worked with a vengeance. Due to an abundant supply of fresh wood overflowing the market in a matter of hours, the selling price of wood commodities which had been artificially pumped high by the big clans was instantly shattered and went into free fall, hitting rock bottom!
One pine log that had been bought up by clan middlemen that morning at an inflated price of 15 Copper Coins plummeted severely this afternoon, becoming worth only 2 Copper Coins per log on the public market!
The large clans that had spent dozens of gold coins this morning to buy up and hoard raw wood now had to swallow blood. The asset value of their wood stock inside their warehouses shrank by more than 80% in the blink of an eye! They officially suffered an extraordinarily massive investment loss and became the laughingstock of millions of players in global chat forums!
I turned off the tablet screen with a small chuckle that still left satisfaction at the corner of my lips. I stood up from the stall chair, then patted Kitsuna’s shoulder familiarly.
"The chaos out there is truly entertaining, Kitsuna. But for me, the collapse of wood prices in the market today is the greatest blessing from the heavens," I said while winking one eye at the fox girl.
"What are you going to do now, Syl?" asked Kitsuna curiously.
"I’m going to take advantage of this dirt-cheap market momentum," I answered firmly. "I’ll buy the best materials at rock-bottom prices, then return to the workshop to make a new bow that is truly worthy of my character’s stats."
I bade Kitsuna farewell, closed my booth rental which had finished its duty, and stepped toward the market’s logistics trading center, which was now being flooded with cheap wood logs from independent loggers.
With a capital of 42 Silver Coins feeling warm inside my wallet, I shopped like a wise sultan. I no longer bought high-risk and expensive ironwood. Instead, thanks to the market price crash, I managed to buy 10 high-quality Oak Logs, 20 mature Pine Logs, along with several special supporting materials at absurdly cheap prices: my total shopping only cost 4 Silver Coins!
Besides wood, I also went to the NPC tailor and hunting gear supplier shop to look for an alternative to replace the [Beast-tendon Bowstring] that yesterday caused my first bow to be unusable because it required 5 STR.
"Uncle, do you have a bowstring that possesses a high level of elastic flexibility, but doesn’t require high muscle tension force to draw?" I asked the weapon-selling NPC.
The old NPC stroked his beard, then pulled out a spool of silvery-shining thread from inside his wooden drawer. "Ah, Elf Adventurer. You are very lucky. I just received a supply of [Refined Spider-Silk Bowstring]. This string is processed from the gland fibers of tropical forest spider monsters. This string does not require heavy physical strength (STR) to draw because of its super elastic nature."
"How much is it, Uncle?" I asked with sparkling eyes. This was the perfect component!
"Because prices are currently unstable due to today’s market chaos, I’ll sell it to you for just 5 Silver Coins."
Without haggling further, I immediately paid the five silver coins. My financial balance was now left at 33 Silver Coins, but all the raw material components to create my dream bow were now complete and in top condition inside my storage bag.
I ignored all the shouts of the clan middlemen who were weeping over their wood stock losses on the side of the road, turned around with my cloak fluttering lightly, and walked quickly back toward the tranquility of the Crafter’s District.
Upon arriving at the quiet public woodworking shop, I stacked all the mature oak wood materials and the silvery spider silk string on top of my favorite wooden workbench. The midday sunlight illuminated the iron anvil and a whittling knife gleamed on the table.
"Now... let’s begin the second experiment," I whispered softly to myself, rubbing my palms that felt itchy with the desire to create.
I would no longer try to fight the natural physical weakness of my albino Elf body by forcing the STR attribute. This time, by combining composite wood lamination techniques, Level 10 [Carpenter] proficiency, and an elastic magic-conducting silk string, I would design and give birth to a new version of the Laminated Ironwood Longbow a masterpiece long-range bow designed exclusively to submit to the finger (DEX) and (INT) of the Albino Elf Goddess! The project to prove a true craftsman in StoneBrook had officially begun again.
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