"Congratulations! Here is your Adventurer's License," the lady at the counter said.

  "And you didn't think I could do it," I said.

  "You're right," she said. "I stand corrected."

  "I'm going to need a lot more crafting supplies," I said. "Let's say double what I got last time. Including supplies for blacksmithing."

  "Ok," she said. "You heard him!"

  The girl came out from the back carrying two big bags. She could barely lift them. I helped her with them, as my strength was probably rated higher than hers.

  "Thank you," she said.

  "No problem," I said. "Oh, that reminds me, you don't sell silver by the ingot, do you?"

  I put the bags and the silver in my biggest infinity bag and paid the lady.

  We dropped my load off at the shop. I opened the shop that day. With Valda running the shop, I began work on my new project. Making rare quality health, mana, and stamina potions. And selling them.

  I needed to start making money again. I considered the lady's offer to pay me 500 gold to make infinity bags, but I realized in the end it wasn't worth it. Not to be a jerk, but the one advantage of my class was that I could make things no one, or at least very few people, could make.

  If I started handing out my inventions, I'd lose all advantage and collecting materials and loot would become that much harder. With an infinity bag, a reasonably skilled and motivated adventurer could clear out most of the dungeon of materials before I got a chance to get any.

  It was selfish, but practical. How would I be of good use to anyone if I couldn't gather materials? And so, with that in mind, I made adventuring gear to sell in the shop.

  I could sell higher-quality versions of things that already existed, but selling new inventions was probably a bad idea. I guess I could've made poor quality infinity bags that broke down over time, forcing people to keep buying more, but that would be incredibly messed up. Sure, I ran a business, but I didn't have to be a bad person because of it.

  I started to brew the rare health potions. I used a combination of the herbs from the Adventurer's Guild, and materials from the dungeon. After that started up, but before I moved on to blacksmithing our silver weapons to fight the undead, I twirled a vial of wraith essence in my hand.

  Even with an expert level proficiency in alchemy, I didn't know any potions or elixirs that utilized wraith essence. Either it was hiding at master level proficiency or a recipe didn't exist yet. I might have to invent one.

  This is where my design and test abilities would come in handy. I could design any combination of ingredients in any arrangement of brewing steps, and then I could test to see if it would work.

  "I'm going to make silver weapons for us to fight the undead," I said. "What do you want me to make you?"

  "Same thing as I currently have," she said. "A mace."

  "You don't want anything fancy?" I asked. "Like a morning star?"

  "Nope," she said. She turned her head back to look at the shop floor.

  "Huh, ok," I said.

  For Valda, I made a silver mace with a silver shaft, that I wrapped in a leather cord for grip. For myself, I made silver crossbow bolts. Was it wasteful? Sure. Would I lose them and forget to pick them up? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely.

  I got called out of the back by a customer who wanted to know about the Delphian steel swords I'd refurbished.

  "Are these refurbished?" he asked.

  "Yes, they are," I said.

  "Don't you think 50 gold is a little high?" he said. "Can you drop it down to 30?"

  I paused, like I was thinking. "I could do 40 for one, or 30 each if you buy the lot of them."

  "Hmm," he said.

  He was probably thinking about how much he could resell them for. Which could be anywhere from 35 to 60 depending on how good of a salesman he was, and how much he lied. I didn't care, though. I wasn't trying to sell my merchandise at the best possible price. I was trying to move product. The faster the better.

  As long as I made a profit from a transaction, it didn't matter if it was a huge profit or a small one. Merchandising and retail stores operated at low margins generally. Not as low as grocery markets, but low.

  The object was to sell as much product as you could before it gets too old, too out of date, or too worn by the sun and the elements to sell. And that's what I intended to do. And then when you knew a product was never going to sell at full price, you dropped the price and sold it at a discount.

  "I'll give you 25 for each," he said.

  "30 or no sale," I said. "You and I both know those are worth 50. If you sell them at 40, you're making money and your customer is saving money. It's a win-win."

  "Why are you selling them so cheap?" he asked. "Is there something wrong with them?"

  "No," I said. "It's just, I got them in the dungeon and I refurbished them all in the span of a couple hours. My costs to get them were monetarily low. The risk to my life, though, is worth 30 a piece. I won't go any lower."

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  "29?" he said.

  "Sorry," I said.

  "You really don't budge when you're set on something, do you?" he asked. "That's a good thing. Did your father teach you that?"

  I smiled. "My father taught me a lot of things," I said. "How about this? I won't drop the price of the swords, but if you buy the whole lot, I'll throw in 5 gold to pay for a night of drinking for you and your friends."

  "You'd do that?" he said.

  "Sure," I said. "Generosity is in my nature. You can use the social lubricant to increase your odds of selling the swords, too."

  "You have a deal, my friend," he said. "Let me get the gold. I don't walk around with that kind of money, if you know what I mean."

  "Sure," I said.

  I went back to the smithing and I finished Valda's mace. Time kind of just flew by. Then I realized the guy hadn't come back yet. It was taking him a long time. I hadn't given him the merchandise, so he wasn't stealing from me.

  He was just taking a long time to pay. Just as I was thinking that, he arrived, breathing heavily. He was holding the gold, but he looked anxious.

  "What's wrong?" I asked.

  "Nothing," he said. "Barton Traxby's men have been patrolling the streets lately. I had to take the long way around. I didn't want to get robbed."

  "No lie," I said. "Not with that kind of money."

  "You ain't kidding," he said. He handed me the money. "Here you go."

  "Thanks," I said. "Hold on one second. I didn't know if you were going to come back, so I didn't finish prepping them."

  I put the large bag of money behind the counter and got out a bundle of sheathes and some leather cord. I sheathed all the swords in brand new sheathes, and I wrapped the big bundle of 20 swords in leather cord so they wouldn't separate. Then I handed him the 5 gold coins I promised him.

  "Be careful," I said. "Make it home safe."

  "Thanks again," he said. "Maybe I'll buy you a beer one day off my profits." He was about to leave when he put out his hand. "Name's Sam."

  "Nice to meet you, Sam," I said. "I'm Gwen. And yes, I know it's a girl's name, but my mother gave it to me, and she was an amazing woman."

  "Nice to meet you, Gwen," he said. "Hope I see you around."

  "Me too," I said.

  He disappeared down an alleyway, probably to avoid Traxby's men. Well, my business was no longer on the verge of failing. So that was nice. Maybe when I finally made a true infinity bag, I'd loot the entire dungeon of weapons. It would fill my stock, and then some.

  Speaking of stock, I was due for a shipment soon. The guy should have been here a couple days ago. At first I was happy to not have to deal with my father's death and unloading a shipment, but I was starting to get worried something had happened. Especially with Sam's mention of Traxby's men patrolling the streets.

  "He seemed nice," Valda said.

  "Yeah, he did," I said. "Despite trying to lowball the crap out of me, but that's the game we're in."

  I went back to making my silver bolts. I finished the health potions while I was still smithing and started on mana potions. I was just about done with the bolts when the mana potions were done. So I started on stamina potions.

  I finished making 120 silver bolts for my crossbows. I smithed out some more magazines, waiting for the stamina potions to finish. I got a dozen finished by the time the stamina potions were ready.

  That may seem like a lot of bolts, but they weren't that big. Each brick of silver made around 40 of them and I had got several bricks of silver. I actually spent all the money I had left on them, but with the recent influx of 600 gold, I was back in the black.

  I still had a couple of silver bricks left, but I set them aside for another time. It was better to have back up material than to use it all up. We still had 18 dark sight potions left, so I didn't have to make more yet.

  I had still been grabbing midnight beetle carapaces though for when I did need to make more. I still had a couple hours before closing time, when I had to feed my siblings, and then could go to the dungeon with Valda.

  I spent one of the last two hours designing and testing potion and elixir concoctions utilizing wraith essence, but nothing I tried worked. The mixture would start to stabilize, and then it fell apart. I was missing something, but I didn't know what.

  Until it hit me. The soul crystal I had picked up on our first trip to the dungeon. I added powdered soul crystal to the concoction, and after beginning to stabilize, the soul crystal bound it together.

  I ended up with an ethereal grey and white potion. Now that I knew how to make it, I spent the next hour pushing through it. I finished just in time and poured it into 30 test tubes.

  I had no idea what it would do. That must have been a different ability I would get at a higher level. I didn't want to try it before knowing its effects. So I stored the test tubes in one my infinity bags.

  I had been considering nesting bags inside each other, but I didn't know what would happen. Erring on the side of caution, I chose not to try it. For all I knew, the bags could interact with each other to create negative mass and turn into a black hole. I'd rather not have that happen, so I decided to wait until I had a higher enchantment proficiency to try to make better bags.

  Valda and I closed up shop. We made our way back to the house. When we got there, I started on dinner and Valda played with my brother and sister. She was really good with them.

  After dinner, I got them ready for bed, and Valda and I set off for the dungeon. We still went down the far right tunnel every time we got to the initial junction.

  As we made our way through again, I took out anything living with my normal crossbow bolts dipped in poison, and Valda handled the skeletons. After half an hour, we were back to the level 4 draugr.

  I wanted to see what the Molotov cocktails and the silver bolts would do, so I chucked a cocktail at one of them and shot another. The draugr panicked when it caught on fire. After some struggling, it fell to the floor, drained of its hp.

  That was something I had to get used to. Things didn't necessarily die immediately from seemingly fatal wounds if they still had hp in their health bar. And conversely, if you had done enough incremental damage to an enemy that its hp drained to zero, it would die, even if the actual wounds were just flesh wounds.

  That was probably the most game like aspect of this world. For the most part, things were pretty realistic. At least as realistic as a world can be and still have necromancers and undead.

  The silver bolt hit the draugr I fired at and a huge hole burned in its chest. The silver seemed to cause a severe burning effect that immediately turned their flesh to embers and ashes.

  With her new silver mace, Valda was annihilating them. Her mace shredded through them like they were made of charcoal and ash. We made short work of that first wave, but I saw another one coming and these ones had "level 5" above their heads. We kept our weapons raised, ready for the fight to come.

  Name: Gwen

  Class: Maker

  Level: 4

  Stats:

  Strength: 5

  Dexterity: 4

  Constitution: 3

  Wisdom: 4

  Intelligence: 9

  Charisma: 2

  Resources:

  HP: 75 hit points

  MP: 160 mana points

  Stamina: 75 stamina points

  Proficiencies:

  Bartering: Apprentice (3)

  Appraisal: Apprentice (3)

  Repair: Apprentice (3)

  Alchemy: Expert (5)

  Blacksmithing: Journeyman (4)

  Enchanting: Apprentice (3)

  Tinkering: Apprentice (3)

  Artifice: Apprentice (3)

  (And More)(Far too many to fully list)(Will come up in the story as they become relevant)

  Abilities/Spells:

  Analyze: Ability to analyse people, objects, and creatures, and learn information about them, such as identification, classification, level, abilities, health, etc.

  Design: Create 3 and 2 dimensional designs, plans, and schematics in your mind and holographically in front of your eyes. Can only be seen by the user.

  Test: Ability to test designs, schematics, and plans to see if they function.

  Assemble: Ability to automatically put together crafting products if all the individual parts are already made.