Chương 62: Chapter 63: The Midnight Harvest

The heavy mountain darkness had completely swallowed the peaks of the upper Midbar, leaving the interior of the limestone cave freezing. Ethan sat in absolute silence by the shallow pit carved into the bedrock, his unblinking eyes tracking the final, dull-orange glow of the wood charcoal as it faded into white ash. He didn't speak to the sleeping priest in the corner.

He pulled a length of un-dyed, coarse northern wool from his pack, wrapping the rough fabric tightly around his chest and shoulders to alter his muscular silhouette. Next, he took a wide strip of clean, bleached white linen, winding it rhythmically around his jaw, mouth, and neck until only his sharp eyes were visible beneath a heavy, down-slouched head-cloth. Finally, he took a coarse burlap sack he had scavenged near the wadi edges, fashioning it into a crude, rough-cut potter's apron.

He intentionally smeared the front with a layer of common, dull grey wilderness mud, and then grabbed a heavy handful of the dry white limestone dust from the cave wall, rubbing the chalky powder deep into the coarse fibers of his tunic. The visual inversion was absolute. The pitch-black scrapper had vanished under a layer of blinding white masonry dust. To any merchant observer at the gates, he would look like a low-tier, independent lime-hauler from the mountain quarries.

When he looked down into a small puddle of drainage water near the cave back, he was completely unrecognisable. In his place stood The Northern Migrant Potter. The plan is simple, Ethan calculated, his inner clock synchronising the month-long countdown until the Harvest Festival with cold, mathematical precision. Merlion requires elite composite luxury offerings—they won't look twice at a naked clay pot.

If I want them to pay a six-thousand-shekel markup, these vessels must be fitted with authentic metal handles and reinforced base rims. The city's bronze foundries are completely locked down, but the wadis are filled with un-looted war scrap. I'll harvest the metal handles tonight, and use the next three weeks to farm money with regular pottery as well as these premium ones.

Leaving Hilkiah resting by the stone ledge to recover his health metrics, Ethan stepped out of the cave mouth and melted directly into the pitch-black mountain passes entirely alone. The descent was a grueling exercise in tactical pathing. Using his high 78 points of Perception, Ethan mapped the shifting shadows of the limestone crags, tracking the low, rhythmic clinking of metal armour from afar.

Greedy player bounty hunters and low-tier mercenary NPCs were actively patrolling the high ridges, their torches casting long, sweeping amber lines across the shale cliffs as they hunted for the soot-faced mason near open resource nodes. They didn't even glance toward the narrow, un-rendered wadi cracks where Ethan was silently sliding through the loose gravel. He reached the low floor of the wadi ditch within an hour. The site was completely deserted, smelling faintly of old copper and wild beast musk.

The remaining F2P players who had tried to sprint back to the city gates with their vibrating weapons hadn't made it to the threshold. The wave of elite level 35 dune-backs had ripped them apart mid-transit, forcing them into a mandatory death-loop respawn back at the city squares. Ethan dropped to one knee, his calloused fingers moving with lightning-fast mechanical speed. He focused entirely on heavy metal scrap.

He tracked the bloody flight corridors where the players had dropped their gear, using his bronze trowel to pry the polished bronze hilt guards and copper mounting pins off the broken handles. He scanned the dry gravel further down the wash, his sharp vision picking out older, forgotten battlefield debris half-buried in the silt—a shattered bronze spear-head from an old garrison skirmish, a bent copper chariot-wheel linchpin, and a heavily tarnished bronze belt buckle trampled into the mud.

He manually shore the components away, bagging the raw metal elements until he had accumulated just enough premium scrap to forge the composite handles and reinforced base rims for his planned twenty luxury vessels. He slung the heavy sack over his modified wool mantle, turned his back on the open valley, and began the steep, agonizing climb back up the hidden mountain goat tracks toward his limestone sanctuary.