Chapter 798 798 Open Markets
It was five in the morning when a sense of danger pulled Wolfe awake, and he instinctively brought up a basic armour spell, half a second before a pair of fingers grabbed his ear and tugged.
“I’m up. Did you rest well enough? Surely, another hour or two wouldn’t hurt.” He asked while Cassie glared at him.
“Yes it would. We’ve got to get all this currency moved out before the shops open for the morning. The breakfast stalls will be preparing to open in under an hour, and they will need money to do business.” Cassie informed him.
“Alright, I’m up. Let’s go see the bunnies.” Wolfe agreed.
“Why do you assume we’re going to see the bunnies?” Ella asked sleepily.
“Who else is up at the crack of dawn and cheerful enough to work retail without murdering someone? Of course, the bunnies are on morning shift. Even in the dining room, most of the breakfast servers are bunnies or witches who worked the overnight shift and just want the morning rush out of the way before they go home.” Wolfe replied.
It was fairly obvious, at least to him, but it looked like neither of them had actually noticed the preponderance of the two groups among the morning crowd.
The stores had been notified yesterday to meet here first thing this morning, so it wasn’t just the morning shift workers, it was also a lot of the managers who normally worked afternoons and were very bedraggled as they came to convert the store funds to the new coins before they started the day.
Not much of it would actually go to coins, as it was easier to have Wolfe extract the mana from the crystals and directly transfer it to the cards. Some coins would still be passed out, but the general atmosphere was eager to try out the new payment method.
The stores had come up with a foolproof method for making payments. They had asked for one extra card to keep at the register. Then they would use it for transactions, so it would only show the amount paid, which they would transfer to the store card afterwards.
It was brilliant, and Wolfe briefly wondered if he had made enough cards after all. There should have been spares, but he couldn’t really recall how many.
“Good morning everyone. Line up, and I will get through everyone as fast as possible so you can all either get to work or go back to bed. Please let me know what you need. You can give me a set number or a percentage split and I will figure it out for you.” Wolfe announced, using wind magic to make sure his voice carried over the din of the crowd.
“I will take all charge on the card. We will come back later in the day if we don’t get enough coins to cover the customers who want them.” The first man in line, a male bunny, requested.
He handed over a bag full of crystals, which Wolfe assessed, then split the money between the two cards that he handed over.
The shopkeeper stepped aside and Wolfe moved down the line, quickly stocking the cards while Cassie and Ella counted coins from a pair of large chests.
For that reason alone, most of the merchants were loading most of their wealth on the cards and waiting for the customers to bring them coins that they would split into partial credits and transfer to the customers’ card.
There were four more booths set up around town, for the citizens and visitors to get their money converted, but most of them would be smaller transactions, and the ones with more to convert were sent to Wolfe.
For example, the Bog Witch, a Fae creature that lived in the forest not far from town. She had amassed a rather sizeable amount of mana crystals selling potions to travellers and the villages, but she never actually spent anything. She had an entire wheelbarrow full of mana crystals, most of them filled by Wolfe or one of his witches and sent to the villages as a relief shipment.
Using it to purchase needed potions was perfectly valid, and Wolfe could verify that she wasn’t cheating anyone when he was the one that filled many of those crystals, he could sense his own aura on the mana.
“Would you like a cube instead? It’s not too large, and you can have everyone transfer the money for your potions straight to it. Then you can pull out what you need if you run short while making potions.” Wolfe suggested when he saw the wheelbarrow.
The Bog Witch considered it for a moment, then nodded.
“But I need this bag full of coins. They’re pretty.” She explained.
She likely still had all the empty crystals at her house somewhere, decorating the walls and embedded into charms and talismans.
Cassie smiled as she dipped the bag into the one unit coins and then handed it back to Wolfe.
“Two hundred and five units in coins, and the rest is on the cube.” Wolfe announced as he made a fresh cube for her.
“Are cubes not money?” She asked, not really familiar with civilization or any of its trappings.
“No, it just stores money. The mana with my aura signature is the money, and when the mana is taken out of the coins, they become worthless. But you can bring them back to me and I will make sure that the crystal of the coins isn’t wasted.”
The Fae creature nodded happily, but Wolfe got the feeling that there would be no empty coins coming back from her. Whether they came to her empty or full, she wanted the crystal as a decoration.
It was actually quite shocking to see her here in town at all. The Bog Witches were normally feral Dark Fae, and very difficult to deal with unless you had something they wanted.
She took two steps, then seemed to melt into the grass before vanishing.
“Alright, next.” Wolfe called, keeping the line moving.