Volume 3 - CH 4.13

However, there is one major downside to the process of making such Rabbit Fur Coats. In order to make just a single coat from Rabbit’s Fur, you are going to need quite a large number of them.

「Hmmm? I see, I see.」

(Who would have guessed that such an underwhelming item can be used for something s useful?)

I thought to myself while dangling the newly-obtained piece of Rabbit’s Fur before my eyes.

「I hope it goes without saying, but having a seamstress create such a coat is not a small and cheap undertaking either. Since the seamstresses have to sew together many pieces of Rabbit Fur, some of them pretty small and some of them the exact opposite, the process itself is always taking an exceptionally large amount of time and effort from them, so they always charge a lot of money for it and that eats away most of the profit they are making from them, and that is also why they are not commonly seen on the streets, even in places such as the Imperial City.」

「And the shops compete with one another to see which one will be able to create the best coats in line with the current fashion trends?」

「Trends?」

「No, it’s nothing.」

Putting the matter of the fashion trends of this world aside, there is no way in hell that various clothing stores would not compete with one another to see which one can deliver a better product that will net them the most money possible. It does not matter whether it’s my old world or this new, game-like one, because of there is one thing that always remains unchanged, it is how fierce the competition in the women’s fashion department can get without any rhyme or reason to it whatsoever. To that end, I wonder if this world has its own equivalent of that one organization form earth that would try to protect the Slow Rabbits from being hunted for their fur? I can totally see that happening, but… no, on second thought, let’s not go there.

「Do you want a Rabbit Fur Coat, Roxanne?」

「No, not really.」

Fuck. There goes my dream of seeing Roxanne is a soft, fluffy coat. Ad she ruthlessly denied it without a second of hesitation.

「All of the members of my race, the Wolfkin, have a naturally high resistance to the cold, so there is no need for me to be wearing a coat to keep myself warm.」

「So you are saying that your kind is strong against the cold, huh?」

「Yes, that is the quality that all of the members of the Wolfkin race are born with.」

So, this must be that specific race’s special racial ability. In other words, even if it will be cold outside, Roxanne should be fine as long as she will have some light clothing on her. Also, now that I actually gave it some thought, it would definitely look odd and out of place if she who is my slave were to wore something that is almost exclusively reserved for high-class ladies.

Imagining it right now, light clothing might be what really suits her. I think that the ones that would look especially good on her would be the ones that would expose a lot of skin and properly showed off how curvaceous her chest is.

「Well, in that case, I have a proposition for you, Roxanne.」

「Of course, master. What is it?」

「Since you are so resistant to cold, then how about I hug you to keep myself warm at night from now on?」

「Ah… yes, most certainly. If I can be of use to you that way, master, then I will be more than happy to do it.」

She sounded a little bashful, but one glance at her wagging tail was enough to tell me what were her true feeling about this.

「Great, it’s decided. Now then, since we are already here, why don’t we go hunt the Slow Rabbits and try to get as many Rabbit Furs as we possibly can? This time, feel free to guide us to the place that has as many of them as possible, okay?」

Since Roxanne already told me that there seems to be not as many people as usual here, I made sure to properly use that occasion to hunt the Slow Rabbits on the seventh floor of Quratar’s Labyrinth until late in the morning. Since I took a map of this floor with me we do not have to worry about exploring this floor and we can divert all of our attention into hunting monsters by asking Roxanne to take me to the place where there was a lot of them and there was not many people nearby. Admittedly, despite its undeniable repetitiveness, it was an activity that I have enjoyed more than I was expecting to be. Maybe it was because now that I knew that there is nothing rushing me to go to the next floor I could simply turn off my thinking and focus entirely on swinging my sword and shooting magic around. Hunt Slow rabbits and collect their fur, go to the next place where they are present, and then rinse & repeat, that was a pattern that we were currently following. Thanks to that, we have managed to aquire more than an entire Item Box section’s worth of Rabbit Furs and my levels have also risen accordingly, so I guess this particular Labyrinth bout was a success through and through.

Having completed all of the objectives we have set for ourselves for now we returned home and made breakfest, after which we made our way to the Imperial City.

Just a short walk away from the Imperial City’s Adventurer’s Guild we happened upon a clothing store that looked promising. It was a solemn-looking one with large, expensive-looking double doors located at the first floor of a magnificently-decorated building. The door itself were constructed in such a way that they could be both pushed forward and pulled backwards, and from what I was able to see when people were going in and out of there, the inside of the store itself was also quite large, because the ceiling looked like it was close to three meters, and the polished stone floor made the entire establishment look more bright and welcoming than your typical shop with “normal” floors. No matter how you look at it, this is a store that sells only luxury goods, and it is exactly because of that that I hesitated go inside. So far we didn’t have any incidents where we were kicked from the store or denied entry based on our looks alone, but this is not Veil or Quratar, this is the Imperial City we are talking about here.

「Master, there seems to be a poster placed here. It says that this shop is buying the goods that people are willing to sell.」

As we stopped some distance away from the entrance, Roxanne found a poster placed on one of the walls. If this is really about buying things that people want to sell, then depending on how much they would be willing to pay for our Rabbit Furs, it might very well turn out that we have already hit the jackpot.

「Really? What exactly is written there?」

「Uhm, let’s see… “All the customers wanting to sell Rabbit Furs, lease enter the shop through the side entrance. Do be advised that the shop will only buy the furs in batches of one hundred units”. That is what it says.」

Well I’ll be damned, talk about uping the scales here! To me it looks like they only want to do business with serious traders, because that quantity barrier will instantly shoot down any small-time buyers (read: people like us) who only want to sell a few of the Rabbit Furs for some quick money. *Sigh* but you know, a part of me kinda expected something like that, except a little less blatant and upfront like that. Just a moment ago I remarked that this is a store that looks like it sells luxury goods, right? So maybe that is why the owner of this store or whoever was responsible for putting that poster up assumed that no run-of-the-mill Explorer or Adventurer would even think of coming here? And also: seriously, you only accept one hundred units of fur and more? That is way more than we have on us at the current moment, so there is no point in even walking into that store now. Even if we filled the entire Item Box with just Rabbit Furs and nothing more, we would still have to carry an number of them in our backpacks, denying ourselves the possibility of getting any other items, and that would be too counterproductive.