Chapter 233: 1.5-14

Bypassing the nearby furniture, Xinya ambled over to the silver jewelry box that caught his attention. Carefully picking it up, he used the light from his Glow fruit to thoroughly examine it.

The jewelry box had a very ornate design with a shiny and antiqued silver finish from what he could see. It was also adorned with sparkling green gems, what type they were he had no clue.

Although, just by looking at them, he had a hunch that they might be precious stones. Xinya decided to take the box to the auction house to sell, hoping that he might get lucky and get an ample amount of coin from it.

Even though he understood that players wouldn't be interested in the box, he was very confident that NPCs would be.

There were tons of aristocrats in the world of Haven Online that would buy these types of useless knick-knacks for large amounts of silver coins, and if an object was valuable enough, they would even fork out gold ones.

He still remembered the story he read on the forums about how a player found a gem-studded chess set. The player was going to keep it at first since he knew no other player would want to waste their coins buying such a thing.

But one day out of the blue, the player decided that he wanted to know how much the chess set was worth if he sold it straight to an NPC. So he took it to an auction house so that the auctioneer could appraise it for him. Only to learn that his chess set was worth more than he thought.

After signing up for one of the special auctions, the player walked away with over one hundred gold coins. This story went viral all over the forums, and because of that one lucky incident, players started to appraise their seemingly useless items before throwing them away.

And this is precisely what Xinya would do after he opens the jewelry box to check its contents. He really wants to know if there was something else inside he could sell.

Xinya acknowledges that he appears very money-hungry, but he also knows that he will need a lot of coins if he wants to fix up the farm. To do that, he required coins and lots of them.

Even so, he had a good feeling that he would find something useful in this locked box. Because everyone knows that people only ever lock up expensive or important items.

So the jewelry box must hold either one or the other, and he was so hoping that it was the expensive other.

But first, he needed to get the box open, which was a problem since he didn't know where the key was. He understood that he could just break the lock, but that would run the risk of damaging the jewelry box, and he didn't want that to happen.

'What to do,' Xinya pondered while glancing around the room, wishing that the key would just magically appear. 'Maybe it would be somewhere inside of the desk.'

Although he doubted that the key would be there since no sane person would leave a key to an expensive or essential item inside a desk.But he was hoping that the NPC who owned this place before was stupid enough to do that.

With the jewelry box in hand, Xinya walked over to the writing desk.And after placing it down on the desktop, he began to rummage through the table's drawers.

~

Melting Snow had been looking at the book titles for a while now, but there had been none that dealt with farming. About 90% of them were on how to make the best wine, while the other 10% were on how to make quality fertilizer.

Sighing to himself, Melting Snow grabbed one of the books on fertilizer off the shelf. Although it wasn't about farming, it was close enough.

Plus, learning how to make fertilizer would be useful for him since he would be in charge of taking care of all the animals his friend will buy. This way, he could find out which animals produce the best waste to make into fertilizer.

Rejuvenated by that thought, he opened the hefty blue tome only to be given a shock. The inside of the book had been hollowed out, and at the bottom of the empty ledger laid a small silver key.

The key intrigued him, and his former thoughts of a hidden treasure had once again resurfaced.

"Drifting Cloud, look at what I found!" Melting Snow exclaimed, dropping the book to the ground in his haste to locate his friend. "There might be a treasure here, after all!"

~

After scouring through all of the drawers on the desk, Xinya realized that his first assumption was correct only an idiot would leave and an important key in a writing table for anyone to find. And it seemed that the original owner wasn't one.

'It was times like these that I wish I had the lock picking skill.' The only thing he could do was keep looking, and if he still wasn't able to find the key, he would just have to spend a couple of bronze coins to get a new one made.

'Now, If I was a rich wine-making farmer NPC, where would I hide a key?'

That thought had just barely crossed his mind when he heard Melting Snow calling out to him.

"Drifting Cloud, look! I found something amazing!" Melting Snow announced excitedly, waving a small silver key encrusted with gems right in front of the man's face.

At first, Xinya couldn't understand what the boy was trying to show him since he was waving the item back and forth so fast that the only thing he could see was a blur.But when he heard the word key, he couldn't help but grab the boy's hand and stare at it.

Xinya couldn't believe that the boy had found the exact key that he had been looking for. For these last few hours, it felt like Melting Snow was his own special four-leaf clover.

"Melting Snow, I could kiss you! I have been looking for this," Xinya smiled while taking the key from the boy's hand.

"Please don't, I'm not a baby!" Melting Snow exclaimed before his eyes brightened once he realized what Xinya had said. "Why have you been looking for it? Did you find the treasure chest that it goes to?!"

Chuckling, Xinya, walked back over to where he left the jewelry box and picked it up, showing it to the boy. "It doesn't go to a treasure chest, but it does go to a jewelry box."

"Well, that's better than nothing," Melting Snow says with a grin. "Open it and see what's inside."

Giving the boy a swift nod of agreement, Xinya inserted the key into the lock, and with one quick turn, it was opened.