"And you call this a boutique? Look at the quality of the equipment coming out of your shop!"
"I bought this leather armor less than three months ago, and I've barely even gone to Thin Mist Forest a few times, yet it's already torn up like this."
"You have to give me an explanation today!"
Xia Nan was walking down the street with a newly bought bottle of Rock Heart Stout in hand and had not yet had time to enter the shop.
Then he heard a string of scolding coming from inside Rock Hammer.
Judging from what the voice was saying, it seemed there had been a problem with the Blacksmith Shop's quality control, causing some adventurer to buy shoddy equipment. Now he had come to demand an explanation.
Xia Nan felt strangely puzzled.
He had stayed in River Valley Town for some time now, and he was a regular customer of Rock Hammer himself. Almost all the equipment on him had been bought here.
Naturally, he knew the quality of this shop.
Just as the drunks in the tavern said:
"Rock Hammer's only problem is that it's expensive."
After so many years, under the painstaking management of the shop's owner, Barn, Rock Hammer had become the publicly acknowledged boutique Blacksmith Shop in River Valley Town.
It had even made it into the Adventurer's Manual. Its reputation was excellent, and it rarely received bad reviews.
Even when someone occasionally complained in the tavern, it was never about "quality."
And from what Xia Nan knew of Barn, the man was absolutely not the sort of unscrupulous merchant who would throw his conscience away for profit. He could not possibly sell flawed goods on purpose to fool customers.
Even now, the Beheading Longsword on Xia Nan's back was made from Gray