Interspecies Trader

"It has an interesting taste… It's not bad."

"Thank you."

"Let me go fetch my bottles."

She returned to her house and came out with five bottles. These were standard-sized bottles from this world, which could contain around two liters of fluids each. She returned the 50 lods I gave her previously with a grin.

"I'll get 10 liters."

"Thanks for the business."

It was mostly good for her. She acquired something that would have normally cost her 100 lods for free. Still, it wasn't too bad for me either. That money paid back my initial investment. In the worst case, I would only lose some time for today if I couldn't sell anymore.

The woman filled her bottles from the basin and got ready to leave.

"You should buy a water tank when you have enough money. You're wasting precious water by letting it evaporate like that."

People from the inner world were quite sensitive about anything related to raw materials and goods. Water in particular was especially precious since it was so limited and costly.

"I'll do it as soon as possible. That's why, please get the word around about my cheap water."

"Heh. Why not. I'll tell the people I know. I've always felt that water was too expensive anyway. Your rates are just fine."

She left after saying that, going back to her home. A bit later, I saw her going out again to work on the fields surrounding us. Even though the inner world was a bit behind my world technologically, it wasn't by that much. They had landline phones, generators, batteries, and quite a nice range of selnic items. That's why people could communicate using phones from inside their houses. I heard it was even possible to phone folks from other domes as long as one paid a hefty fee. I hoped the woman had phoned some of her friends about my stall before going to work but I couldn't count on it.

After that single sale, things went back to the previous state. Frankly, this was a place without many people and most of them were probably at work in the city. A few women who passed by looked at my stall but none seemed interested in buying.

After one hour like this, I decided to take things in hand. I went to the surrounding houses and knocked on their doors. Whenever someone opened them, I tried to sell my water. Success was very mitigated. Most of my potential customers just weren't interested or didn't believe me, even when I tried to make them come to my stall. Fortunately, the low prices attracted the attention of a few of them.

Just like the woman I was renting the spot from, they also checked the water to see if anything was wrong with it. When they realized it was fine, they also bought in bulk, arguing that they didn't know how long this opportunity would last. Every time, I asked them to tell more people about me.

This was how I spent most of my first day as a trader. It was extremely different from how I envisioned my life a few weeks prior but I was still happy about it. I liked talking to people and trying to convince them to buy from me. The joy of succeeding in a sale was also one of the main attractive points. There was nothing quite like it.

Eventually, it got slightly late, and I chose to stop for now. I could continue and aim for the workers coming back from the city center but this small business was only half of my schedule for the day.

I checked my earnings. I sold my water only 6 times in the whole day but each sale was relatively large. I ended up making 380 lods. The water itself cost me nothing but I had to subtract the 50 lods for the rent. So, my first day of revenues was 330 lods. Not too bad.

I didn't have time to relax. I quickly cleaned up my stall and put everything in my dimensional storage again. I then teleported to the market close to the city center. I was there just in time before people closed for the day. My goal here was to use the money I earned to buy selnic items. The prices in the market were slightly lower than in shops and that was the reason why I wanted to buy from there. In exchange, they had fewer options since they couldn't display that many items in the limited space they were allocated.

I had wondered which item I should start to sell in Geola. After thinking about the circumstances and my budget, I found the best possible choice. I quickly checked what was available in the market and chose the place that sold the cheapest fans and batteries. Right now, the season was spring and the weather was comfortable. However, I learned that we were located relatively southernly and that the temperatures would go up a lot more. Battery-powered fans were the perfect item to sell in those circumstances.

The principle of selnic items was simple. One just needed to inject sel into them to make them work. However, doing that was no different from the old enchanted tools that were used in the past and were still being used in the outer world. The revolutionary aspect of selnic items was that they worked in combination with selnic circuits, generators, and batteries.

Generators harvested sel from the air, the ground, or water. That sel became stored in batteries, which could be recharged a certain number of times. Those batteries would then be placed inside selnic items and used to power them, by circulating sel through circuits.

This was the basic concept. However, in reality, everything would be connected through selnic lines and there wouldn't necessarily be a need for a battery in each item. They could just be plugged into the grid and take sel from there.

The outer world didn't have any such selnic grid, though. That was why I could only try and sell items powered through batteries to them. Still, even that would be an incredible change. Not only were selnic items more efficient and durable but there was also no need to constantly inject sel into them. How wonderful would that be for people who only knew about enchanted goods?

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