[You have obtained <Exceptional Dexterity (C)>.]
[Exceptional Dexterity]
Type: Passive.
Grade: C
Things you make and handle with your hands become markedly more precise, and the chance of failure decreases.
Has a slight effect on combat.
The moment he read the trait description, Geon-mu drew it without a shred of hesitation.
'This is exactly the trait I need.'
The reason he was that certain lay in his past lives.
Geon-mu had been reincarnated in other worlds three times over, but not once had he been told that he was good with his hands.
-When you are carving up orcs you rampage about like an executioner on market day, so how can you be this useless with your hands?
-Mister Geon-mu, that isn't how you do it...... Ah, I'll just do it myself!
-Geon-mu! Stay still! I'll take care of all of it myself!
Failure, they said, was the mother of success.
Geon-mu thought about that.
I have no mother, so why do I keep failing?
All he had done was stir the cauldron, and he turned its contents into soot, so they called him the Alchemist of Failure.
But he was capable enough in battle that his companions all handled the cleaning up for him without being asked.
Convenient, in a way, but for Geon-mu it was a hardship of its own.
'I want to make something well, too.'
It was different from the satisfaction that came from martial arts or battle alone.
Cooking, weapons, anything to do with crafting; being able to turn his hand to all of it had long been Geon-mu's wish.
Besides, he had nothing to complain about where combat traits were concerned, so he had not given those a thought and had picked something that would raise the overall quality of his life.
"Shall I test it out?"
Geon-mu picked up the ballpoint pen lying on the desk.
He took it apart at speed.
From that moment on, Geon-mu began to marvel.
"Wow, it's coming apart!"
An exclamation that would have baffled anyone who heard it.
But there was a reason Geon-mu was making such a fuss.
The Geon-mu of before Exceptional Dexterity would always break or lose some piece whenever he took a ballpoint pen apart.
"Then can I assemble it too?"
He naturally grasped that assembly was disassembly in reverse, and returned it to a whole, working pen.
He had merely produced one ballpoint pen, but for Geon-mu it felt as clearing and open as the moment he mastered a martial art.
Delighted, he went on taking things apart and putting them back together again and again.
RING-RING-RING-♪
A ringtone sounded from the smartphone.
Seeing the name Kang Ho-seok on the screen, he took the call.
"Yes, Brother!"
-Oh, you sound like you're in a good mood?
"Nothing much. I pulled something good, so I am in high spirits. Why did you call?"
-I want to give you the settlement money for the goblins you killed. Do you have time?
He had something to ask in any case, so Geon-mu agreed readily.
"Of course. Where shall we meet?"
-Oh, oh. You're free? Then let's meet right now!
"That is why I am asking where."
-Ah, right, sorry! I'll send the place by message. Come there.
Kang Ho-seok's call ended, and a message with the location arrived.
Geon-mu got ready to head out again.
***
A café of a well-known chain in front of the station.
Kang Ho-seok and Geon-mu took a seat in a corner.
Kang Ho-seok, who had brought over something reasonable to drink, glanced around for a while before pulling out an envelope of cash and handing it to Geon-mu.
"This is the settled amount for the eighty you killed."
"How many fifty-thousand-won notes is this?"
Geon-mu counted the money in the envelope that had been handed to him.
"Seven million five hundred and forty thousand won. It was a large amount. Should I have given it to you as a cheque?"
"It's fine. A cheque has no feel to it."
Geon-mu grinned and patted his own face with the envelope, slap, slap.
"You said the better the condition, the better the price? The goblins I killed shouldn't have been in very good condition, though."
"They said the insides were completely wrung out. But the only material worth taking from a goblin is the hide. The hide was intact, so we could get more than the going rate."
"I see."
Very few of the hides had been damaged in the fighting with the goblins.
Even where there was damage, it was from being slammed into a corner and torn, or pierced by a broken branch.
Then again, thinking of it as a four-hundred-and-sixty-thousand-won mistake left a bitter taste.
'What's he looking so disappointed about?'
Kang Ho-seok could not understand Geon-mu's expression.
Even when a high-level, high-ranking hunter came and beat goblins down, it was rare to be paid as much as Geon-mu had been.
-I don't know what sort of man he is, but in all my life I've never seen anyone kill this cleanly. Tell him to deal with me directly.
Kang Ho-seok recalled the conversation he had had with the head of the dismantling yard when he went to collect the settlement.
The man usually threw out nothing but blunt remarks about being handed rags, and now he was heaping on praise, so even Kang Ho-seok had been thrown.
'Cha Geon-mu....... This one is the real thing.'
A VIP he must never let slip.
Unless a guild forced its way into some shithole and set out to ruin itself, he had the potential to raise even a small guild into a mid-sized one.
The urge to grab him and shake him right now was overwhelming, but doing so was more than he dared.
'The more urgent it is, the longer the way around. The more urgent it is.......'
Keeping himself calm that way, Kang Ho-seok faced Geon-mu.
"When we talked last time, you said you had no Patron Star, right?"
"That's right. I don't."
"And no guild either?"
"Correct."
Having confirmed those two points, Kang Ho-seok straightened in his seat and asked him.
"Then how about joining our Cheonho Guild?"
"A guild?"
"A signing bonus of two billion won, and dungeon clear payouts at eight to two. Your side gets the eight."
"Eight to two means your side takes twenty percent? Twenty whole percent?"
"That's right. As you know, not our guild and not any guild aboveground could put forward terms this exceptional."
"Is that so?"
As you know, he had said.
Geon-mu had no interest in guilds and was hearing this for the first time.
Kang Ho-seok was recruiting a newcomer, so his words were not wrong.
Even for a promising prospect, pushing the share past seventy percent was close to impossible.
Offering a signing bonus on top of an eight-to-two split to recruit Cha Geon-mu was an unprecedented, exceptional proposal.
Kang Ho-seok studied Geon-mu's expression.
'Looks like he knows how much two billion is.'
He could see Geon-mu comparing it with the envelope holding seven million five hundred and forty thousand won.
Inwardly, Kang Ho-seok had thought him half won over.
"I'll decline."
But the answer was a refusal.
"Did you not listen to me properly?"
"I listened."
"Like I said, terms like this are genuinely without precedent."
"Exceptional or not, what use is it if I feel no value in it? Is that not so? I have no need of a guild right now."
"You punk, don't you know what kind of world this country is? Without a blood alliance thicker than blood, it's hard to survive anywhere. The reason small and mid-sized guilds always struggle to survive is exactly this kind of monopoly."
"I see."
Kang Ho-seok spent ten minutes making his case for why a guild was necessary.
But Geon-mu's reactions stayed lukewarm, and in the end he gave up on recruiting him.
"Haa...... So what are you going to do from here?"
"There is no need for me to tell you that, Brother."
"That's true, but I'm saying it because if you're going around dungeons and the like, there are quite a few restrictions."
"You covered that thoroughly just now, when you were telling me how important guilds are."
So he had been listening after all.
Kang Ho-seok did not press Cheonho Guild membership on Geon-mu any further.
It stung, but what could he do?
Poking at a big fish you could not even strike would only breed bad results.
"All right, understood."
"Your business is done? Then I will get going."
Geon-mu gathered up the stack of cash and rose from his seat.
Kang Ho-seok got up belatedly, paid the bill, and put a cigarette in his mouth.
'Cha Geon-mu. What in the world is this bastard?'
Kang Ho-seok still had not worked out what kind of human Geon-mu was.
He had even run a background check with Cheonho Guild's support, but before he was Cha Geon-mu, the man might as well not have existed.
'He isn't someone smuggled in from China or Japan either.'
His school records were solid, and there were people who vaguely remembered a person named Kim Jin-hyeok.
He had been a high school student only two years ago, so among alumni of the same school there were some who recognized him from a photograph alone.
'And even so, those two are not the same person.'
Kang Ho-seok was firmly convinced of it.
A man who had been quiet and without presence since elementary school did not change so suddenly without some trigger behind it.
Kang Ho-seok recalled Geon-mu's face as he left.
He had been brimming with confidence, like a man with solid backing behind him.
By his existence alone, Cha Geon-mu had made even Cheonho Guild look shabby.
'Who on earth are you?'
Kang Ho-seok was beginning to feel a little afraid.
The thought came to him that he might be crossing a line he should not know about, one that a man of his standing should not step over.
***
Back home, Geon-mu looked through a primer for the Awakened and turned up something useful.
"Exchange System."
[Activating the Exchange.]
When he spoke the activation word as he did with the status window, a window expanded in front of him.
Geon-mu looked down at the coin shape in the lower right.
[Coins Held: 0]
He had done no activity at all before the Trial of the Goblin King, so having no coins was only natural.
"This is where I use these coins, was it?"
What Geon-mu held up was a coin stamped with the portrait of a goblin.
[Goblin Coin]
Type: Consumable Item
Grade: None
A coin exchangeable in the Exchange System.
Upon exchange, you obtain 100 coins.
The Goblin Coins Geon-mu had obtained came to three hundred in total, which meant thirty thousand coins would come into his hands.
Geon-mu used every coin without hesitation.
[You have used 300 Goblin Coins.]
[You have obtained 30,000 coins.]
With his coins topped up, Geon-mu began to look over the marketplace.
The goods were varied.
Consumables, equipment, weapons, and even slaves were on sale.
Prices were set, but you could haggle or put things up for auction; it was like a country market with no rules at all.
Geon-mu ran his eyes over the goods on the first page.
[Frost of the Fifth and Sixth Moons (A) Price: 150,000 coins]
[Swift Wind (A) Price: 200,000 coins]
[Sword Acknowledged by the Dimensional Blacksmith (B) Price: 62,500 coins]
Prices varied wildly according to grade.
There were many things that sounded remarkable from the name alone, but he had not opened the Exchange simply to window-shop.
'Would those be here too?'
On the off chance, he entered the names exactly as they were into the search field.
['Heaven-Breaking Dragon-Slaying Sword' is not an existing item.]
['Heaven-Breaking Sword' is not an existing item.]
['Shadow Whisper' is not an existing item.]
He entered the names of the things he had once wielded, but every one came back as not existing.
"Either someone is holding them, or they have been lost......."
Geon-mu would rather it were the latter.
He was not the sort of man who liked others using his things.
"Given what those things are, they would not vanish easily, though."
If they were somewhere in this world, he had to get them back.
He chose that as his first objective.
"Hmm......."
Geon-mu thought for a moment.
What was the thing he needed most right now?
Something that was neither excessive nor lacking within a budget of thirty thousand coins.
Was there nothing of that sort somewhere?
After thinking it over, he typed in a name of three characters.
[Great Azure Pill (A) Price: 30,000]
It was there.
The price fit exactly, so Geon-mu bought it at once without further thought.
[You have purchased the Great Azure Pill.]
When the purchase was complete, a sphere made of blue, the Great Azure Pill, floated in the air before Geon-mu.
Only once Geon-mu closed his hand around it did he begin to feel its weight.
[Great Azure Pill]
Type: Consumable Item
Grade: A
For one hour, Magic Power rises by 10.
If Magic Power is lower than 20, Magic Power permanently increases by 3.
Below the threshold it was an elixir that raised the Magic Power stat, and above it, an item that provided a boost.
Taken at Geon-mu's current specifications, it would increase his Magic Power by 3.
'Judging by what's written alone, it's thoroughly middling.'
The reward inside the Golden Box was thirty thousand coins.
It seemed more likely to be used for raising a stat than as a boost item, but a mage capable of killing goblins would already have Magic Power above 20.
That was why it could be bought for around thirty thousand coins.
Expensive for a beginner to buy, and awkward for a master to buy.
Thanks to that, Geon-mu could come out ahead.
'Thirty thousand coins is getting it cheap.'
Measured against the prospect of growing stronger, it was an endlessly light price for Geon-mu.
The Great Azure Pill was something he needed, but he had no intention of swallowing it as it was.
He meant to make use of what he had learned when he fell into the martial world.
'The incidental items I can get at a herbal medicine shop.'
Everything else he needed was traditional medicinal ingredients, so it was enough to search them out and buy them.
With that, everything he needed for his training was in hand.