Berserker: A LitRPG Urban Fantasy Adventure (Apocosmos Book 1) by Dimitrios Gkirgkiris (books for 20 year olds txt) 📗

Louie was way too naive and innocent. Not that I could blame him. He was practically a baby in this world. He couldn’t be expected to understand how these people act. They either fear you or command you. And right now, this guy thought he was the boss. Louie didn’t have to know about any of this. I would show this fucker who the boss really was.

“Stop grinding your teeth!” Louie called out, without opening his eyes.

“Right, right,” I said. “Sorry.”

This person was dominating the arrow market in the whole state and cutting down the competition before they became too big to hurt him. I tried searching for his name online, through the DEM tablet, but I couldn’t find much more than testimonials about how great he was at deliveries and that his arrows were always top-notch. The closest I got to learning anything more about him was from an old thread in a trading forum where he was described as the new infernal king of arrows in New York. I wasn’t sure what to make of this information so I decided to focus on how I could make the wooden arrow recipe work for me instead. Maybe I could still get my revenge that way? I took down the purchase order I’d placed, brought up the wooden arrow recipe in the free crafting menu, and tapped on it to expand it.

Recipe Name : Wooden Arrow (Birch) x 20

Level : 1

Type : Weapon

Subtype : Arrow

Rarity : E Grade

Success Rate : 100%

MP Cost : 30

Durability : 10/10

Weight : 120st.

Materials : 4x Wooden Stem (Birch)

2x Iron Ore

At the moment, these wooden arrows were selling at almost the same price as the bone arrows, and cost about the same amount to produce. There were only a few people were selling them in the market and all of them were only in small quantities, meaning there was no big dealer to try and stamp me out of business. On the other hand, wooden arrows were heavier and less durable, and they therefore weren’t most people’s preferred option. However, if the price difference was significant, perhaps some of them wouldn’t mind those facts and would simply opt for the cheaper solution. After all, it wasn’t like one of them caused more damage than the other if the user fired them with an E-grade bow. They just weren’t fit for D-grade bows.

Since the wooden stems were their common denominator, it meant that the only thing I had to think about now was the iron ores. That’s when it hit me. The amount of iron needed per batch of arrows was small enough that it would pose no problem if I sourced it myself. There was enough cheap iron available for purchase in the real world… Or rather, in the Cosmos. But then, of course, there were the rules imposed by the DEM free crafting program. In order to use the free crafting services, all materials needed to be purchased through the marketplace and the crafted product needed to be sold in the marketplace. So sourcing materials to craft level 1 and 2 recipes for free was out of the question.

What about higher-level recipes though?

There were no recipes higher than level 2 available through the program but a quick search in the marketplace revealed a plethora of higher-level recipes and to my surprise, the ingredients were listed whenever I tapped to preview them.

A more thorough look into it confirmed my suspicions. It wasn’t enough to know the ingredients for a recipe, or to have an understanding of how to craft arrows. The crafter had to own the recipe. One quick look at the recipe and a bit of technical knowledge would be completely useless. This seemed like one of the weirdest requirements set by the Dark Energy but in a world filled with rules, I didn’t think much of it. This was a different world with different laws. Knowing this, I focused on the recipe that held the most potential to damage our dear competitor.

Recipe Name : Steel Arrow x 20

Level : 3

Type : Weapon

Subtype : Arrow

Rarity : C Grade

Success Rate : 100%

MP Cost : 100

Durability : 120/120

Weight : 60st.

Materials : 4x Wooden Stem (Birch)

1x Steel Ore

Stems were too common a material for him to be able to monopolize so I would have no problem there. As for steel, the prices were very reasonable and there was so much on offer that I would never run out of it. And that was just from hardware shops in the city. When I looked into steel manufacturers themselves, the larger the quantity I purchased, the lower the price would be.

And these steel arrows were even lighter than the bone arrows. They were also extremely durable, meaning they might have a higher chance of being retrievable once they were fired, and they could be used for C-grade bows too. Everything pointed toward the fact that I had found a great alternative to the D-grade bone arrows I had been selling so far, one that would also get a piece of the C-grade arrow market. Perhaps I was blinded by how much I wanted to get my revenge on that asshole, but I really didn’t think a different market altogether would be any better. Of all the consumables, arrows were moving faster than anything else and had great margins.

But I had learned my lesson. I opened the marketplace listings and checked to see if there was anyone who was holding the monopoly in C-grade arrows. Luckily, there were only a few dozen listings and most of those were in low quantities, meaning there didn’t seem to be an organized supplier of steel arrows either.

The more I thought about it, the more having so few available listings actually made a lot of sense. First off, these arrows weren’t covered by the free crafting program, so a lot of people looking for a quick buck, myself included, were out of the game. Second, as these were C-grade items, it meant that they were used by higher-level people, who probably