In his rented room, Luke held a calculator, staring at the mini-mountain of Gold Dragons piled on the table, feeling his head spin.
Each Gold Dragon weighed about eight grams.
Assuming an average gold purity of sixty percent and a gold price of around nine hundred and fifty yuan per gram…
a single coin was worth about four thousand five hundred yuan!
And in his hands, he had a whopping three hundred and seventeen Gold Dragons.
That meant—nearly 1.4 million yuan!
The figure made his breath catch in his throat.
He really had stumbled into a goldmine.
But a bucket of cold water quickly doused his excitement.
Gold was not paper money; it couldn’t be deposited directly into a bank account or scanned for mobile payments.
Financial authorities worldwide monitored large-scale gold transactions, especially gold ingots of unknown origin.
If an unemployed youth like him suddenly produced hundreds of strangely shaped, varying-purity “gold nuggets,” he’d be dragged in for questioning in a heartbeat.
Legitimate gold shops had strict transaction limits, while black-market channels carried immense risks and heavily slashed prices.
“Cashing this out legally…
is a real art form,” Luke muttered, scratching his head.
He found the situation tricky.
Turning these hundreds of Gold Dragons safely into numbers in a bank account in the short term was nearly impossible.
He needed channels, methods, and perhaps even a laundering process.
Still, this worry was soon eclipsed by an even more burning thought.
So what if cashing out took time?
He was in no rush to spend massive amounts of money on Blue Star right now anyway.
The key was that the gold mine over in Westeros had only just seen its very first scoop!
And…
his previous pricing had probably been far too conservative.
Over the next two days, Luke worked like a wound-up spring.
Dressed in his more respectable black noble attire—which lacked a house crest, but whose fabric and cut were enough to command respect—he returned to the Street of Silk.
This time, he didn’t set up a street stall.
Instead, he selectively approached the wealthiest, most curious targets—those most likely to throw away fortunes just to show off: young nobles riding in extravagant carriages surrounded by servants; wealthy merchants sporting massive gem rings who spoke casually of trade across the Narrow Sea; and shrewd stewards procuring luxury goods for high-end brothels or major nobility.
His remaining stock was slim: fifteen jars of salt, fifteen jars of sugar, seven bottles of Florida Water, ten bottles of Essential Balm, and seven bottles of glass-cased perfume he had specially chosen for their exquisite designs—complete with modern press-nozzle sprayers.
The sales process blew far beyond Luke’s expectations and control.
When he presented the snow-like white sugar to a Dornish spice merchant, the merchant’s ecstatic reaction after tasting it caught the attention of a noble from the Stormlands nearby.
When Luke asked for “thirty Gold Dragons,” the spice merchant hesitated, but the noble cut straight in: “Forty, and I’ll take it all.” The spice merchant immediately panicked: “Forty-five!
I’ll pay forty-five!” The source of this chapter is g.com.
In the end, that jar of white sugar sold for fifty-five Gold Dragons.
And that was just the beginning.
The price of salt was pushed up to ten Gold Dragons a jar.
Essential Balm, branded as a “miracle remedy from the East” with its instant refreshing effect, was snatched up by an old earl plagued by migraines, who bought three bottles at ten Gold Dragons each.
Florida Water, with its unique insect-repelling fragrance and elegant bottles, ignited a bidding war among noble ladies and high-class courtesans, its price soaring past one hundred Gold Dragons.
But the craziest demand was reserved for the perfume.
When Luke demonstrated the delicate spray nozzle—a light press producing a fine mist of lingering, enchanting fragrance—everyone present was utterly captivated.
It was no longer a mere scent; it was a magical indulgence and a symbol of status.
Several nobles from The Reach, renowned for their wealth and hedonism, entered a frenzied bidding war against a representative from a Braavosi banker.
“One hundred and fifty Gold Dragons!”
“Two hundred!”
“Two hundred and twenty!
Sir, please yield to me—House Tyrell requires it as a gift!”
“Two hundred and fifty!
The Iron Bank of Braavos appreciates unique treasures!”
The final bottle—the most gorgeously designed and complexly scented—was won on the spot by a Lysene merchant for a staggering price of five hundred Gold Dragons.
The merchant even offered to pay part of it in bearer drafts from Braavos, but Luke cautiously accepted only Gold Dragons.
Meanwhile, the last bottle of Florida Water fetched five hundred Gold Dragons after intense competition among several wealthy merchants.
By the time Luke strode out of sight of his last buyer with his empty backpack (his dimensional storage emptied as well) and turned into a deserted alley, his legs were trembling slightly.
Not from exhaustion, but from sheer shock and exhilaration.
He had thought ten Gold Dragons for Florida Water and two hundred for perfume were astronomical prices, never imagining that the market’s frenzy and the purchasing power of the upper crust would far exceed his wildest dreams.
They weren’t buying goods; they were buying unmatched novelty, overwhelming superiority, and leverage in social circles.
“I got robbed…
I underpriced them so badly before!”
Luke beat his chest in mock regret, yet couldn’t help laughing.
His earlier sales had been practically dirt cheap!
Still, he understood that without those initial probes, without the lower-priced goods circulating to build word-of-mouth and curiosity, prices would never have been hyped to these astronomical heights.
Now, inside his dimensional space, the total number of Gold Dragons had reached a dizzying figure: three thousand and seventeen coins!
Based on his earlier rough calculation, back on Blue Star this was worth…
over thirteen million yuan!
And that was just calculated from the baseline price of gold, without even factoring in the value of the Silver Moons and Silver Stags.
Filthy, stinking rich.
In just a few short days, he had gone from an unemployed youth who could barely afford rent to an interdimensional merchant sitting on millions. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
That night, he didn’t return to Blue Star right away.
Carrying a fortune, he needed to hear just how big of a splash he had made.
He walked back into a mid-tier tavern on the Street of Silk, ordered the cheapest ale, sat in the most inconspicuous corner, put on his earphones, and let the translation device under the table quietly do its work.
Soon, scattered fragments of conversation were captured, translated, and fed into his ears:
“…Have you heard?
A few unbelievable novelties popped up on the Street of Silk over the last couple of days…”
“Heard?
My brother-in-law’s friend’s steward gritted his teeth and spent a hundred Gold Dragons yesterday on a tiny jar of something called ‘frost sugar’ to present to his lord.
The lord was so thrilled he rewarded him with a Gold Dragon!”
“That’s nothing!
I heard a lord near the Great Sept of Baelor spent five hundred Gold Dragons on a bottle of water that sprays fragrant mist, just to gift it to his mistress!”
“His Majesty the King apparently received a bottle of that insect-repelling liquid and loves it…
The Queen even dispatched House Lannister men to hunt down the source of that long-lasting perfume…”
“The Lord Hand seems very interested in those tiny refreshing remedy bottles too…”
“A bunch of clever fellows made a killing flipping them!
They bought them from that strange-accented fellow for tens or a hundred Gold Dragons, turned around and sold them to nobles with money to burn for several times the price!”
“Now everyone is looking for that seller!
Supposedly a young guy in black or gray clothing who talks funny—might be from across the Narrow Sea, or even farther…”
“Whoever finds him will strike it rich!
Either partner up with him, or…”
The remaining voices sank lower, mixed with ambiguous chuckles and the clinking of tankards.
Luke silently sipped his barely touched ale, cold sweat seeping from his back.
The news had spread faster and farther than he had imagined.
It had already alerted top-tier figures like the King, the Queen, and the Lord Hand.
Not to mention countless opportunistic merchants and factions looking to locate him, take a piece of the pie—or outright rob him of everything he had.
He was like a giant stone dropped into a quiet pond; the ripples he created were expanding rapidly and would soon attract lurking sharks.
He couldn’t do business in public like this anymore.
The fortune in his hands had to be hidden safely.
He needed a base of operations, and he needed bodyguards.
At the same time, he needed to lay low for a while to let this craze simmer down and throw off anyone searching for him.
Quietly slipping out of the tavern, he vanished into the dense darkness of King’s Landing.
The Gold Dragons in his dimensional storage weighed heavily on him—a sweet treasure, but lethal poison just the same.