Swiss Arms 49 (Patreon)

Insomnia strikes again. I want to sleep more than 8 hours over the course of 3 days, damn it!

-VB-

Swiss Arms

Chapter 49

-VB-

Leon held his breath and then swung his pickaxe down just like how Lord Fluelaberg showed him and chipped into the rock. He let his breath out and felt for a hold with the tip of his pick. Finding none, he pulled the pickaxe back out and struck again.

He let out a breath of hot air that misted momentarily before whiffing away to the steadily flowing cold air coming from outside of the cave.

With the onset of winter, work slowed down everywhere else. The heavy snowfall also made sure that even trade slowed down. Hell, there should be at least half a dozen merchants in town even during winter, but there was no one this time around. From what Leon heard, Fluela Pass itself was currently impassable, which meant that any other high-elevation passes like it would be as well elsewhere.

As for the town itself, people just enjoyed the warmth of their hearths and the oddities the lord seemed to get involved in all of the time.

Like insisting that an ice bath was good for the body.

Or exercising outdoors with only a shirt and pants, even if he was next to the blacksmithing furnace.

The lord was crazy and unusual, but then a normal lord would never have made life up here in the mountains better for the people.

Especially for a former dung farmer like him.

He winced before his eyes widened when he caught a glimpse of something.

With a grin, he pushed down on the pickaxe where it was stuck in the wall. He huffed and puffed as he weighed himself down again and again until that part of the wall broke.

When a slab of rock as big as his head tumbled down, he looked at what he saw … and then groaned.

It was a phantom quartz. “Why is this shit here?” he grumbled even as he carefully picked it out and then dropped the thumb-sized gemstone into his leather pouch attached to his waist. It was worth only a bit more than regular quartz, but regular quartz didn’t sell for much to Alvia and even less to any passing merchants.

Tightening the pouch strings, he pulled his pickaxe back up and went at it again.

Of course, the fall in trade and overall activities also meant that people spent less. Some of the folks went to the lord’s castle to take his “classes,” which he taught without receiving payment. There were a lot of things that didn’t quite make sense to Leon, so he only attended one class: accounting. There were other classes, though many of them he felt were too “liberal.” That was a new word he learned, by the way.

Studying the mind was … the idea felt too iffy. Studying politics? He was a dung farmer turned miner.

Alchemy sounded like a lot of fun and the demonstration with “sodium” that the lord did excite him… until he had to look at the list of knowledge he needed to know like the back of his hand before he would be allowed to even get close to “chemical” ingredients that the lord so painstakingly collected.

He huffed and grunted as he chipped away at the rock wall and then smiled. This time, he found something yellow. At the very least, that was worth mining!

See, miners had their own little color code for the stuff they could find.

White was either really useless or really good.

Blue was usually good.

Gray was probably not good.

Colorless was good.

Red was always good.

Green was decent.

Purple was good.

Orange was a coin toss.

Brown was mostly useless unless it had a really good shine.

Yellow was half decent or really fucking good.

And as Leon pulled away another thin slab of rock, he found himself … disappointed.

“Ah, more pyrite,” he mumbled. Leon kept some way back at the start, but the thing rusted away fairly quickly. He didn’t keep any after that. It was still good to sell, but he wanted a payday like what Jeremiah got last week; gold was always good, even if he didn’t sell it to passing merchants or Alvia. Pyrite, on the other hand, was useless to anyone but the lord. He probably used it for his alchemy or something, because he never saw or heard the lord talking about what had to be more than a ton of pyrite.

Pyrite was pretty common, so it was cheap. He needed half a handful of it to get a meal, but then again, he already got two handfuls. Phantom quartz was only going to get him two coppers, barely enough for a cup of cheap ale. He didn’t have anything else.

Well, what did he expect? He’s only been in here for a short time. Time to get back to work.

-VB-

Romano sighed for the umpteenth time as he nursed his warm water.

He was stupid. He knew that winter up in these mountains was extreme compared to where he was from in Napoli, but he had thought that he would be in and out quickly.

Unfortunately for him, the winter blizzard settled at the moment he stepped into the town, and he’s been stuck here for the past week. While he stayed here, his money started draining away because he had run out of goods to sell and had to pay for all of the housing and food.

Being stuck at Fluelaberg wasn’t so bad. Sure, there weren’t any brothels (the closest brothel was on the other side of the mountain in Chur) and there was only one bar, but there were just … a lot of things to look at.

Hell, he even went and bought a few stuff that rich people elsewhere were sure to be happy to read.

Treatise on Economics and Trade and On the Natural Laws by Lord Hans von Fluelaberg was sure to be popular with the Venetian merchants.

-VB-

“Hmm? Arnold, why are some books missing?”

“I thought you wanted me to sell the books you weren’t going to use in class.”

“I mean, I did say that, but I didn’t think they’d actually sell up here.”

I scratched my head and shrugged before heading back into one of my many workshops within my fort. This room, which was well-ventilated and lit, held one device that I loathed to show anyone for a long time to come.

I looked at the metal blocks, wooden frames, and ink splatters, and then took a deep breath of the winter morning and the smell of ink and paper.

“Alright. Let’s get to work.”