Chapter 36: Black Market

Evening, after sunset.Keith wore casual clothes, which were basically just a lose cotton shirt and a pair of trousers. After checking himself out in the mirror, he stuffed his revolver halfway under his pants and covered it with his long shirt to make it hard to see.

The handle was up and outside the pants with the barrel pointing downwards. He practised drawing it a few times before he loaded the weapon with 4 bullets while leaving the last one empty.

For a second layer of safety, he took out a 1 brak coin and pulled back the hammer of the revolver before placing the coin in between. The hammer kept the coin in place and whenever he pulled the trigger, the coin would slip out and fall while the hammer hit the empty chamber.

Keith simply rotated the cylinder and did this a few more times to make sure that it worked all the time. Once he was done, he grabbed a handful of bullets and put them in his pocket before leaving the house.

He went straight to the area where the black market was said to be and found a theatre that had a lavish look to it. He silently walked into an alleyway and put on the white clay mask that he had tied to his waist using a thread.

It did take him some time as he had to pull up his shirt to get the mask lose from the thread. He then waited for a while until he saw another masked person walk in and followed the guy.

The moment he entered the building, he found himself in a decent sized empty hall. There were three doors, one on the left, middle and right each. Keith simply watched the masked person enter the right door and followed him until he was in an extremely small room that had another door on the opposite side.

He was then stopped by a thin dude who was standing in front of this door.

"Are you here to buy or sell?" the guy asked and Keith took out three of his 10 Zen notes before replying, "Buy."

The guy nodded and stepped aside to let Keith in.

Keith walked inside, not really caring about the lack of security as the guy hadn't checked him for weapons. S~eaʀᴄh the ηovёlFire .net website on Google to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

'I guess I'll just have to be more careful here.' he thought to himself and walked forward, passing by the stalls that had random things on display. Most of these items looked like theatre props and Keith's gaze paused on one such item.

It was a trench coat similar to his own uniform, but this was was light brown in color while his uniform was black. He walked to the stall and pointed at one of the larger trench coats that were hung up and asked for the price.

"Two Zen."

Keith nodded and stared at the trench coat as he recalled the market prices. Usually a brand new trench coat was 4 Zen and this was only the average as the high end ones could go up to Chrons. 2 Zen was relatively cheap so he decided to buy it.

The stall owner saw him take out a 10 Zen note and rubbed his hands together before immediately bringing out the change.

"Here you go, sir." he said amicably as he gave Keith the trench coat and 8 zen before taking the 10 zen note from him.

Keith simply nodded and left the stall to look for other things. As he walked, he put on the trench coat and saw the stalls slowly change when it came to their themes.

At first, he only saw items that were theatre based but now, he could tell that the things at the stalls were stolen goods that had damage marks on them. There were chipped bladed weapons, damaged leather armor, weird looking medicines and many more.

Keith took his sweet time asking about the things he had interest in, but didn't buy anything. That was until he moved even further and the theme changed again.

There were animal carcasses hung up on thick steel hooks, a stall that openly advertised poisons, multiple stalls that sold drugs and there were two stalls that had frozen human bodies for sale too. And among all of these, Keith saw a few people selling pornographic novels and his only reaction to this was a chuckle.

'There's always demand for stuff like this isn't there?' he thought and shifted his gaze from the porno stall to the guy who was selling gun powder.

He simply ignored him as he didn't require gun powder at the moment. He continued to walk forward and was quite surprised to see live wild animals chained up and there were also humans in wooden cages.

'Hm, isn't slave trading illegal?' he thought as he recalled the Empire's laws that had connection to slaves. The only ones who could be sold as slaves would be war prisoners, but Keith knew that it had been more than a decade since the Empire got into a war with their neighbors.

But that was when he realised that he was at the black market. Selling random people was illegal.

'No need to get myself into trouble. If I try to be a messiah without strength to protect or save myself, then I'll be the one in those cages.'

It took him a few more minutes to scour though the entire place before he back tracked and bought two knives that he could easily hide in his trench coat. Then he walked over to the stall that promised assassinations and placed a 1 Zen note on the small table.

"Priestess Aria from the Church of the Money God, Mammon."

The old man sitting on the chair looked up at Keith as he quietly slid the note towards himself, "What's the bounty?"

"Four Zen, I want her alive. You can threaten her or beat her up a bit, but if I find out that anything else happened...." he whispered, but it was still loud enough for the old man to hear. As he whispered, he put his hand on the guy's shoulder and increased his sensitivity to the limit before applying all the force that he could.

"Aughhh!"

Keith looked down at the old man who was was close to tearing up and brought his sensitivity back to normal, "Do you understand what I mean?"

"Yes sir.. ugh, I'll give them strict orders."