abcnovels
Volume 3 - Ch 2.05
Volume 3 - Ch 2.05
Emerging back in the main hall of the Adventurers Guild building, I promptly left it and made my way towards the rotary in the citys center. The Labyrinth and its surroundings seemed like they were as busy as they were yesterday. I wonder if it is always like this or maybe its only like that now because something happened? I think the time is around noon right now, but the queue in front of the Knights guardhouse did not seem to be getting any smaller, so it would seem that this place is always crowded, no matter the time of day. The air was filled with the sound of the exchanges they were having with the Knights responsible for handling the admission fees, and they were all going more or less like that:
Admission for six people please!
That will be six silver coins.
Admission for five people please!
That will be five silver coins.
Aside from them, there were also Knights who were selling maps of the Quratars Labyrinth while marketing their products in a rather aggressive fashion:
Over here! How about a copy of the map of Quratars Labyrinth?!
So not only do they handle the Labyrinth admission fees, but they also sell the maps of the Labyrinths floors? Who would have thought that the Knightly orders can run so many businesses aside from keeping the peace in the cities? Out of sheer curiosity I decided to give one of those maps a look, so I leaned closer to where the Knight who was advertising them was standing, and all in all I have to say that they were rather nicely done.
The table in front of the Knight who was advertising the maps of the Labyrinth was lined up with a multitude of brown pieces of paper that had a drawing of a simple map of the floors and the arrows showing the way drawn on them. It it really was a simple map. Like, really simple.
Quratars Labyrinths map sold over here! Come an get yourself a copy while you can! The price is 20 Nars for the map of each floor, with a 1000 Nars discount if you decide to buy them all in a single booklet! 20000 Nars for the bound book version drawn on a high-quality parchment!
Wow, talk about having a lot of different options to choose from. If I wanted to buy something like that for myself then the obvious choice would be the bound book version on a high-quality parchment, but for the time being 20000 Nars for something like that is just way too expensive, especially now that I have told myself that I need to limit the amount of needless spending as much as possible if I want to stabilize my financial situation. The obvious cheaper option would be to be buying them floor by floor, but that way I wont know how many I would need, so the booklet seems like the best cost-efficient option, but it naturally comes with a drawback: since the booklet is nothing more than the cheap parchment maps combined, the question is if they are going to get more tattered and used up with time, because if there is something I definitely wont be needing, it would be a map booklet made from cheap paper that would get destroyed one day simply because it has been used one too many times. So looking at it from that particular angle, even the booklet might be useless in the long haul. Then again, judging how fast I tend to grow up and get levels with my 20x EXP Earned and 1/20thEXP Required to Level Up, buying a booklet might not be too much of a waste, or at least not as much as it would be if I settled for the maps of each individual floor.
Okay, so buying a booklet it is then.
Admission for one person and this booklet here, please.
Lets see that will be eleven silver coins.
Here you go.
I got the necessary amount of money and handed it to the Knight at one of the stands. Obviously, since he was not a merchant, then my 30% discount didnt work, meaning that I had little choice but to pay that price in full.
Now that I have gotten my hands on the booklet with the maps of the floors of this Labyrinth, I might as well do some exploring while Im still here, since it would probably look very suspicious if I ended up buying both the maps and paying the admission fee without even setting a foot inside of the Labyrinth proper. Thankfully, since I have my Warp that I can use to teleport myself to the Labyrinth from our house, I wont have to pay the admission fee each and every time Roxanne and I would like to come here. For me, its pay once and then dont pay at all. Talk about a cheat that works to my advantage! The only thing I have to worry about right now is to make sure that I use the map booklet in such a way that will guarantee that it wont get immediately destroyed or ruined any more then it actually has to.
When the Knight received the coins from me, he began to count it one by one with shaky hands and worried expression. He looked pretty old for a Knight, and yet he had to handle the purchases and the counting of the money, which must be pretty difficult for someone who does not possess the Calculate Skill. The entire procedure took a few minutes, but when the guy was finally done I was handed my map booklet, along with another piece of worn-out paper with something written on it. Im guessing that this is supposed to be an admission ticket? I simply placed them both in my backpack and then I made way towards the entrance to the Labyrinth.
At the entrance some distance ahead of me, there were two Knights and an Explorer. My guess was that he must be the guide hired by the other two to show them around. Not gonna lie, this looks pretty strange to me that the Explorers would be offering their guiding services here , especially since the Guilds building is literally around the corner. After a few more steps, they stopped in front of another pair of Knights, who then asked them something that I couldnt hear very clearly, but since they showed them the brown pieces of parchment, then I guess this must be the checkpoint where you have to show your admission ticket so that you could be allowed into the Labyrinth proper. Armed with that new piece of knowledge, I did the same thing that they did when I approached the Knights, and after they allowed me to go through without any major issues, I proceeded to go inside the Labyrinth through a short corridor filled with complete darkness.
When I finally emerged on the other side in the entrance room, the Party that was ahead of me was nowhere to be seen. Could they have gone on ahead so fast? No, they probably went straight to a different floor. As for the entrance room itself, and the Labyrinth as a whole in general, then it would seem that the general layout is more or less the same as the one in Veils Labyrinth, but there were some differences that could be seen from the get go, like the design of the decorations painted on the walls. Other than that, the entrance hall looked pretty much the same.
Perhaps the most important difference between Quratars Labyrinth and Veils Labyrinth is that Quratars Labyrinth has much more people inside of it, whereas the one in Veil looked like it was practically deserted most of the time, because we have never stumbled on other Parties while we were exploring inside of it. And here? Everywhere I went, I saw groups of people. There is so much of the that I began to wonder if it is really possible to hunt monsters effectively under such circumstances? I tried going a little bit deeper to see if the traffic situation was going to be any better, but unfortunately, it was just the same as near the entrance: a fuckton of people around literally every corner, in every last corridor.
Okay, for now I should not worry about this too much, since I didnt come here today for that. Right now, I should focus on finding myself a nice, secluded location that is going to be outside of the view of as many people as possible so I could set up a Warp portal. Going around a number of corridors, I think I found myself a one that was far enough from the main route of the first floor to not be worried about any Parties coming here, but the one that was close enough to it that Roxanne and I should not get lost when we start coming here regularly. Okay, its now or never.