Interspecies Trader

“What’s going on?”

“You’ll get an explanation once you go inside.”

Elsy pointed at a large tent close to the northern exit and headed that way. We landed on the ground in front of it and she signaled me to follow her.

“My work will be done after that. Your carriage and my subordinates will arrive a bit later.”

“Thank you, Elsy. It was a pleasant ride.”

“I’m just doing my job. Let’s go in now.”

She turned around and shouted in front of the tent entrance.

“Miss! I’ve brought Tila Urtek!”

A woman’s voice answered from inside.

“Come in!”

We went through the cloth entrance and arrived at a relatively large space. A lot of information entered my mind at the same time. The interior was quite bare, with a minimum of decorations, but seemed to be cozy enough. On one side was a desk where the woman who answered Elsy was sitting. In the center of the room was a large table without any chairs. Finally, in a corner opposite the desk was a sofa, where another woman looking like the first one was lazily lying while reading a book.

“Good job, Elsy. You can leave now.”

“Yes, miss.”

Elsy nodded my way one last time and exited the tent. It was my first time encountering Geola’s rulers. I had been told they were feline women already so that wasn’t a surprise. I focused my attention on the one sitting at the desk first.

Object: jaguar woman.

Wealth level: wearing a modest comfortable shirt and skirt made of high-quality materials. Probably rich. Wealth is impossible to quantify but probably at the top end.

Power level: amount of sel in her body: between 3000 and 3200, recently promoted rank 3, wind affinity. Muscle power: maybe 20. Estimated to be a wind sorceress. Adding muscles multiplier for being a sorcerer: +200 to power level score. Adding a two-factor multiplier to account for hidden moves and trump cards. Estimated maximum power level at 6800: fledging thinks they got power. Harmful potential: medium.

With black-dotted orange fur, short round ears, and golden eyes, she looked similar to the many jaguars I encountered during my trip to Makji. Physically, she seemed to be equivalent to a rank 0 in her late twenties, meaning she could be anywhere between 25 and 60 years old. There was a rapier at her waist, a type of weapon of choice for wind sorcerers.

She was someone important but the person lying down on the sofa, who looked like her slightly older sister, also armed with a rapier, was on a completely different level.

Object: jaguar woman.

Wealth level: wearing a modest comfortable dress made of high-quality materials. Probably rich. Wealth is impossible to quantify but probably at the top end.

Power level: amount of sel in her body: impossible to quantity exactly since she is hiding it. Crossed the rank 7 wall but not the rank 11 one. Wind affinity. Muscle power: maybe 20. Estimated to be a wind sorceress. Adding muscles multiplier for being a sorcerer: +200 to power level score. Adding a two-factor multiplier to account for hidden moves and trump cards. Estimated maximum power level at 22 398: flee or die, but probably die anyway. Harmful potential: immediate escape recommended.

She was by far the strongest person I had the opportunity to meet since coming to this world. The most interesting element was probably the fact that she was hiding her rank, just like I was doing. This explained why so many people weren’t sure about her exact rank. Yet, her way of doing it was crude, as if self-taught, and she didn’t manage to completely hide it. She was posing as a rank 2 wind sorceress, which was still praiseworthy considering she might not have received systematic education like I did.

However, that wasn’t all I learned about her. Her current attitude told me a lot about the current state of her life. I had the displeasure of meeting a lot of high-ranked and transcendent people in the past, and, because they lived for so long, their lives were generally divided into two main periods. There was life before a century of age and the one after a century of age.

This was something important to understand. A lot of studies had been carried out back in my world and it became common sense that humans, or highly intelligent sentient beings, weren’t made to live for so long. The mental fatigue of getting less and less stimuli from outside and the exhaustion of having tried it all put a heavy burden on the spirit. As such, people “protected” themselves by dividing their lives into two, with the first part lasting for around 100 years. It was to the point that their personalities could make a full 180, with a ferocious fighter becoming a benevolent volunteer or a calm person becoming obsessed with a sudden passion.

This woman in front of me, Angil Vejas, was very clearly in the second phase of her life. To be precise, she was in “vacation” mode. It was something that happened when a person’s first century was too intense, too full of events, and the mind cried for rest. I saw a lot of them back in the Trading Union. It wasn’t true laziness but, from the point of view of someone who didn’t know any better, it could only be seen as such. Folks in that condition were quite hard to move.@@novelbin@@

Yet, it was important to know that it didn’t make her less of a threat. Considering the difference in ranks between us, I wasn’t completely sure I could teleport before she reached me with an attack if she wanted to do so. If she was an enemy, I would already be far away from her but since she had zero animosity toward me, there was no need to act panicked.

Just like I was observing them, the two women were looking at me too. The daughter, Crali, only had a mild interest, checking me like I was barely something unusual. The mother, on the other hand, seemed much more curious about me, keeping her eyes on me and monitoring each of my movements.

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