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

highest to lowest. I was curious to see what the highest levels were but I didn’t get a definitive answer. The highest of them held the 43+ value, with their maximum recipe level showing 5+, meaning there were recipes of levels higher than 5. The realms and areas in which these individuals lived were even more of a shock to me. I didn’t recognize the vast majority. Even the names I had heard of were places I knew from mythology, games, or books.

By quickly scrolling through the listings, I saw that most of the level 43+ crafters resided in one of four realms: Domhain, Nidavellir, Svartalfheim, and Gar-il Drunn. I recognized a couple of those names as the realms where dwarfs lived in Norse mythology. A sudden rush of excitement swept over me as I realized that this probably meant that my favorite fantasy race wasn’t actually a fantasy at all, and was also true to its legendary crafting skills.

There were so many things in the Apocosmos that would normally have led me into a research spiral out of pure fascination, but I wasn’t here to have fun. I had a job to do, and the sooner I did it, the sooner Louie and I would be able to retire in a small villa by the sea. Out of curiosity, I tapped on one of the top-level crafters to read more details about them.

Name : Goiln Stonesplitter

Level : 43+

Max Rec. Level : 5+

Realm : Domhain

Area : Stonesplitter Hall

Available Rec. : Click to expand [+]

Rating : 4.97/5.00 (965k)

This guy had a near-perfect rating from almost a million reviews. The deeper I delved into the Apocosmos and its economy, the more I realized how large this world really was. I tapped the Available Recipes entry and a new list of recipes appeared. I quickly scrolled down to the level 3 recipes and found the one I was looking for. I didn’t know what I expected in terms of pricing, but I was definitely surprised to see that he was asking for three hundred dollars per crafted batch of arrows. With prices like that, I doubted I would ever be able to make this work for me, but I did start to wonder whether the work of a superior crafter like him would mean that the arrows would somehow be stronger.

Yet again, I switched to the browser and searched for an answer to the new question that had arisen, inadvertently derailing my train of thought. All the information pointed toward the fact that crafting was a binary skill. One could either succeed or fail in crafting a specific recipe. With that in mind, I assumed that pricing low-level recipes so highly was probably a way of dissuading users from wasting the crafter’s time with such recipes, without actually reducing the number of available recipes in their portfolio.

Not wanting to waste any more time, I returned to the list of crafters and filtered the results so that only those who had the Steel Arrow recipe available would appear. I set the maximum amount I’d be willing to pay per batch to five dollars. The list shrank considerably and with it, so did the rating of most of the crafters left. There were no available crafters with a rating higher than four out of five in that price range. Their levels too were considerably lower, going as far down as 28, which I guessed was the level they gained the ability to craft level 3 recipes.

I sorted the results by the lowest price for crafting and saw there were a few entries that would take the job for as low as twenty cents per batch. There were two problems though. The minimum order quantity was ten thousand batches and their ratings were very close to, or even below, two stars.

I tapped on one of them at random and read a few reviews, trying to ascertain the reason why their rating was so low. The majority of people who’d purchased their services were saying that they’d been tricked out of their money, never received their order, or that they’d received used arrows instead of new ones. Not wanting to take any chances, I put on another filter so that only those with a rating higher than 3.8 would appear. The list became even shorter but this time the prices looked inconspicuously fair. Again, I didn’t recognize the realms in which each of them resided, apart from the few that had seeped into our mythology, like Tír na nÓg, Elysium Fields, and Takamagahara.

Looking at all of these realms made me realize something that might possibly render this whole search useless. The price of steel sourced in the Cosmos was relative to the amount I would purchase each time: bigger quantities meant that the price per pound would be lower. But the shipping costs would rise, and I was pretty sure that sending steel to another realm wouldn’t come cheap. Neither was it likely that the crafter would send the arrows back to me for free.

Not wanting to trouble myself any further with shipping calculations, I tapped on the Realms selector and typed “Cosmos” before I began feeling too overwhelmed by the thousands of other available realms on the drop-down list. The number of crafters that met my criteria was now less than a hundred and they were spread out all over the planet. Knowing the price of shipping things to other countries or states, I further narrowed down my search to only include results from the USA and New York State in particular. I was so anxious to see the potential crafters whose services I’d employ, that I didn’t realize this was the first time the tablet didn’t render the results immediately. After a few seconds, I tried tapping on the search icon again and only then did I spot the short message at the bottom of the screen.

No results were found. Please try widening your search or removing some of your filters.

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