Chapter 24: Volume I - 23: Acquired Cheat

Chapter 24: Volume I - Chapter 23: Acquired Cheat

The employee opened the door and revealed the dark room behind it.

I was a bit scared, but then again, the black market was a safe place for such things. So I was pretty sure they wouldn't do anything to me and I went in, leaving the employee outside without changing my expression at all.

The moment I stepped inside, the door behind us closed noisily and the room suddenly lit up.

It was actually not a very big room. I was in a place that was about five meters long and about five meters wide, but even if the room was small, it was certainly luxurious.

The paintings on the walls, the jewelry on the light fixtures, and the security guards on the sides gave the room an air that seemed to shout 'This is an important place'.

With a sigh, I turned to the covered table in the center of the room, only to find a woman sitting on the other side of the table, wearing a necklace to avoid being recognized, just like everyone else here.

Without saying anything, I approached the table, sat down across from her, and then spoke indifferently without changing my demeanor.

"I thought the black market didn't question its customers?"

Even though I couldn't see her face, I'm sure she had a sly smile on her face after what I said.

"We're not going to do anything to you, we just want to know if you know anything about the stone. After all, no matter what we did, we couldn't get any reaction from it."

"I see..."

So... what should I do now? Should I say I know something about the stone or should I hide?

Hmm...

"Honestly, there's a method I'd like to try, but I'm not sure."

And that's what I ended up saying. I was wondering what else she was going to ask me, so I gave an open-ended answer.

"With your permission, I would like to hear about the method you want to try."

"I'm sorry but I can't say. It's not very 'pleasant' after all."

I spoke nonchalantly and told a little lie because I didn't want her to get the impression that I was a good person.

I am in the black market. There is no concept of 'good' here. So instead of trying to be good, showing that I am someone who will not hesitate to do 'unpleasant' things would cement my place here. At least they won't see me as an innocent person.

The woman chuckled lightly. Thanks to the necklace, I still felt awkward because her expression didn't show, but I tried to ignore it as much as possible.

"I see, then I won't dig too deep."

The woman pulled the tablecloth off the table and threw it aside, revealing the mysterious stone I had bought.

For a brief moment, I felt as if I had been hypnotized. The stone was drawing me in with the mysticism of the mana it radiated around it. Still, I somehow pulled myself together and turned back to the woman with a sigh.

"Can you give me a private account that cannot be traced? It would also be nice if my watch could be adjusted accordingly."

If I continue to use the watch that the academy gave me with its own hands and my own bank account in this way, nothing good will happen to me. I need to get a completely private, untraceable bank account and there is no better place to do that than the black market.

At first, the woman was silent for a few seconds in response to my question, but then she nodded without saying anything.

"This is going to cost you a bit."

"No problem, I just need a special account that the kingdom can't trace."

The woman nodded as if to acknowledge me, then made a quick call to someone on her wristwatch and told me to wait a few minutes.

Exactly eight minutes later, someone else walked in.

"Please give him your watch, he will make the adjustments you need in about five minutes."

The man was relatively thin and thanks to the necklace, apart from the suit he wore, none of the details were visible.

Actually, to an outsider, they looked rather suspicious. But the black market was usually honest with its potential 'rich' customers. So I handed him my watch without hesitation and then began to list my requests.

"The watch is connected to the CDA."

I don't really need to hide the fact that I'm an academy student, they don't know my face and they're not going to question my identity.

"So as long as I'm on the academy grounds, all my movements on the watch can be monitored and I don't want that. My bank account is also traceable to the kingdom or the academy, which is also undesirable. It would be good if these were organized in such a way that no one would notice and no one would be suspicious. Also, nineteen million wels from my main account should be transferred to this account without a trace, as if it never existed."

The man nodded along with everything I said, opened the back of my watch, connected to it via a tiny cable, and fiddled with what looked like coding on his watch for about five minutes. After a short while, he disconnected the cable and put the back cover back on the watch as it was.

"There is a second account in the bank app. The wels received or sent from this account cannot be traced in any way and you can change the username and password at any time. I transferred nineteen million wels to this account, and I set the location tracking system, which the academy also uses for its own borders, to be programmable. You can control such things by telling the watch's artificial intelligence. The cost of this service is one hundred thousand wels."

Not only did he do what I said, but also he did more. Sure... it was really expensive to change a watch specifically set by the kingdom and create an untraceable account. But as long as I paid for it, it was fine.

That's why I love the black market.

"Great."

I took the watch from his hand and put it back on my wrist. I logged into my bank account and accessed the 'second' account. n0velusb.c0m

I went to the holographic screen, pressed transfer, and entered the total amount I had to pay on the screen in front of me. After that, I pushed the holographic window in front of the woman.

She entered her own bank account into the system and then sent the window back to me. I pressed my finger on the screen so that the holographic screen verified my identity with my fingerprint, and then my account was debited with four hundred thousand wels at once.

"Thank you for your purchase!"

The woman took out what looked like a jacket button from inside her jacket. She then placed it on the mysterious stone, gently transferred mana into it and her hand glowed.

The button-like thing became distorted, the mystical mana emitted by the mysterious stone slowly disappeared, and then the stone faded and vanished. And so, the woman handed the button to me.

The thing about this little thing that looked like a jacket button was that it could store a one-time item inside it. You could put an item into it by channeling mana, and whenever the item was removed, no matter when, the 'button' would turn to dust.

Unlike dimensional inventory items, the one-time use seemed to be a disadvantage, but the fact that it was easy to produce, easy to access, and not overly expensive neutralized this disadvantage considerably. It was also a perfect item for storing auction items and the like, so its use was widespread.

I pocketed the button and stood up. I was done here after all, and I didn't want to deal with the woman too much.

I took one last look at the woman across the room before turning around and heading for the exit. When I realized she was just staring at a holographic screen in front of her, I sighed and walked out of the room, ignoring her.

The first person to greet me in the hallway was an employee. He escorted me to a room with a long staircase leading upward. At the end of these stairs was a karaoke room belonging to Riala Bar.

When I entered the karaoke room and closed the door, which was the only connection between the staircase and the room, I realized that it could not be opened from the outside and seemed to be completely integrated into the wall.

I ran my hand along the edges of the door, but the wall was perfectly smooth. Even when I knocked on it, it made a sound no different from a normal wall.

It's truly a good design...

With a slight grin that I couldn't keep off my face, I first removed the necklace from around my neck, so that the thin layer of mana surrounding my body slowly dissipated into the air and my appearance was restored.

Holding the necklace in my hand, I headed outside, where I handed it back to one of the bartenders, as I had been strongly advised to do. Then we smiled and said goodbye to each other.

I was finally able to breathe a sigh of relief when I walked out of Riala Bar.

To be honest, being in the black market made me a bit nervous. That's why I felt uneasy until I was outside, but now I was outside again and the better part was that I was completely in one piece!

I reached into my pocket, squeezed the button with the stone that cost me almost half a million and a smile appeared on my face again.

Finally, in this world of spells, creatures, and levels, I too had a cheat-like thing.