Chương 64: Chapter 65: The Luxury Berit

The transition back into the link was an instantaneous wash of cold mountain air. Ethan stood in the center of the limestone cave. Across the dim chamber, Hilkiah lay deep within a quiet, restorative sleep cycle against the stone ledge, his weak health metrics slowly creeping upward under the cave's isolated wilderness parameters. Ethan didn't wake him. He didn't spend a single word on comfort.

Moving with the quiet efficiency of a survivalist, he placed a clean skin of fresh mountain water and a portion of coarse barley rations beside the old man's tattered mat. He checked the priest's vitals on the interface line, ensured the charcoal pit was burning at a safe, smokeless low-heat, and turned away. He walked to the furthest, un-illuminated recess of the subterranean pool chamber. Using his 78 points of Perception, his fingers traced a narrow, natural geological split running through the limestone floor.

It was a steep vertical fissure, dropping three meters down into an un-rendered, dead-end rock pocket completely muffled by the heavy stone ceiling above. It was the perfect hidden workshop node. Ethan dropped into the pit alone. The air down here was thick with the scent of wet alluvial earth. He struck his bronze trowel into the floor, uncovering a massive, clean vein of common, baseline grey silt-clay. It was just regular mud. Time to rebuild. Ethan mused.

He spent his first three hours manually kneading the grey mud, moulding three fresh automated worker units. The three grey clay golems rose from the dirt. Ethan started them onto a new command loop: mass-produce low-tier, standard grey household utility mugs, cooking pots, and common roof tiles. With his new workshop renewed, Ethan slipped out of the cave mouth. He bypassed the main ridges, sliding through the wadi cracks back toward the caved-in ruins of his old workshop node.

He dug into the red fissure, harvesting a controlled, dense batch of the high-iron crimson mud. Ethan held the blood-clay in his hands. The material was dense, cold, and heavy. Working entirely by hand, Ethan worked on the first luxury Serpent Vase. He pulled a scavenged bronze hilt guard and a copper mounting pin off his inventory grid, and isolated the tri-consonantal root א-ד-מ inside his mind, channeling his Radical Extraction syntax into the material.

He then meticulously forged the metal directly onto the wet clay as a metallic handle and a reinforced base rim. The item emerged looking staggeringly opulent. He loaded it onto a crude timber hand-cart he had scavenged from the wadi washes, wrapped his jaw in clean white linen, and descended the mountain tracks under his Northern Migrant Potter disguise. He entered the fortified gates of Beth Shean, bypassing the common street markets to approach Merlion Holdings' high-tier procurement booth directly.

He wheeled his cart to the counter and placed the single, magnificent composite vase onto the polished cedar wood. The effect was instantaneous. Merlion's procurement scribes stared at the vessel. With the server's pottery guilds currently paralyzed by the extreme resource shortage, the scribes froze, their eyes widening as they stared from the exquisite crimson vase up to the mud-streaked burlap apron of the nameless, linen-wrapped peasant standing before them.

"Where did you source this?" the lead scribe demanded, his tone losing its corporate posture.

"State your wholesale price per unit."

"I don't sell piece by piece," Ethan rasped, his voice muffled but entirely flat.

"This is a single sample of a twenty-piece Sacrificial Suite—ten Serpent Vases and ten heavy Krater Bowls. If you want the remaining nineteen vessels delivered three days before the Harvest festival, you sign a binding Berit (בְּרִית) contract now. The rate is six thousand silver shekels." The scribe let out a sharp, incredulous laugh.

"Six thousand shekels? That is the lifetime revenue of a frontier trading station, potter. Our office cap doesn't authorize upfront transactions of that magnitude. We only pay liquid silver upon the physical receipt and validation of the entire completed inventory at this desk."

"Payment upon delivery is fine," Ethan said, his unblinking eyes remaining dead level through his head-cloth.

"I don't need your advance silver. But the Berit is non-negotiable. The treaty locks your guild into purchasing the entire twenty-piece suite as an unbroken, complete set—you pay for all of it, or you get none of it. And the covenant parameters include an absolute non-aggression shield. If any Merlion player or guild enforcer attempts to ambush, track, or kill me while this delivery cycle is active, your entire guild faces an automatic system forfeiture penalty for breaching a covenant."

The scribe gritted his teeth, looking out toward the public plaza boards where their own logistics agents had been frantically pinning empty contracts for festival pottery for days. The time crunch was a vise. With zero alternative luxury suppliers left on the server, they had no choice. The lead clerk stabbed his fingers onto the terminal, escalating the request to the senior directors before authorising the lock. The server system flashed a deep, resonance-heavy gold chime, binding the alliance.

Ethan quietly reclaimed his sample vase, loaded it back into his cart, and turned back toward the gate. He hadn't extracted a single shekel of silver yet, but the contract was signed.