The most valuable things in Basia City were worthless to Hill.
He could not even bring himself to buy them just to exchange for money.
First, there were Basia City's most popular treasures from the sea... pearls and coral. Hill would never buy those.
No matter how loudly the shopkeeper boasted to Hill about how rare his treasures were, they looked much like the ones Old Sea Turtle had once used to pad a box.
If Hill wanted any, he could simply fish them out of the stream in his pendant.
The pearls had originally been kept in storage, but while Aglaia was staying there, she had objected to Hill keeping that kind of rubbish in his storeroom.
Aglaia had replaced every one of them with pearls of her own... the little pearls she removed went into the stream as a source of purification, and then, for appearance's sake, she seemed to have added some more.
So Hill really could not bring himself to buy any. It felt like a betrayal of his own Aglaia.
Basia's other specialty was Oaisis's modern alchemical goods... to Hill, buying them would be like paying gold for a pile of glassware, and the crudest, least collectible kind at that.
His gold might have been made from mud, but it had at least cost him some mana. He could not bear to waste it like that.
The alchemical products he actually wanted were the transportation and kitchen tools sold in places like carriage shops and magical home-goods stores... besides carriages, cooking stoves and refrigerators were everyday appliances in this world.
Even the poorest person could buy a simple alloy stove and cook with it by inserting a transparent crystal card.
The hard part for the poor was paying for that card... an ordinary household replaced