This Traveling Merchant mainly sold hand-polished ornaments and other glittering trinkets in the countryside, carrying the goods in his pack and baskets. Shade naturally did not expect to find any treasure among them, and indeed, the items were utterly ordinary.
He could tell with a single glance that there were no Elemental Reactions. But while casually rummaging through them, his fingers touched a round metal coin the size of a fingernail, and he unexpectedly sensed a faint elemental fluctuation.
"What is this?"
The coin was so tiny that he worried it might fall to the ground even while pinching it. Both sides were engraved with the number 1, with no other designs.
Seeing that Shade was interested, the Merchant found all the identical coins. There were eight in total, all with similarly faint elemental fluctuations, and they could only be sensed through direct contact.
The Merchant himself could not remember where he had acquired them. He gave them all to Shade, who planned to take them back and have Old John examine them. Perhaps he had really stumbled upon some good luck.
After bidding farewell to the enthusiastic Traveling Merchant, he happily carried his cards and little coins, intending to return with Professor Brownell and the other two to the camp near Crossroads Village to find Captain Rades. But when they returned to the west side of the tavern where they had eaten earlier, they found that people had gathered together at some point, apparently watching an argument. From the voices, one of them was clearly Professor Brownell.
Shade hurriedly squeezed through the crowd and indeed saw the professor and his two students confronting two men in short shirts who looked like dock sailors. The noisy crowd had already made the cause of the matter clear. The two sailors had