Chapter 9: The snake's mutation
Aurus brought his attention to the poisonous horned serpent. The serpent was completely black in colour and had four sharp fangs that came out of his mouth at all times. Just as Aurus was getting prepared to see the contracted beast drink the poison, a pale blue screen appeared in front of him.
The task icon automatically opened and the previous task about completing a selling with a customer lit up while he received the reward and a new icon appeared in the top left corner of his vision.
Closing the task icon, he gave the point icon a quick look while the customer was preparing to feed the poison to his contracted beast. Opening the icon, he lifted his brow in surprise. There are five categories, the first category is called shop, the second skill, the third world, the fourth cultivation and the fifth, special.
Opening them quickly, the shop category was about possible upgrades in his shop such as increasing the space in the shop for more room or buy new decorations. Under each decoration was an explanation of what were the benefits of buying said decoration. As for the price of buying, it varied greatly but by example, the space increase of the shop was worth 20'000 points and it doubled the shop space.
As for the points he currently only had ten which coincided with the ten crystals he had been paid a few moments earlier. After looking, he confirmed that the crystals didn't disappear. After all, he couldn't be sure about the system. However, he also confirmed that a crystal paid by a customer meant one point.
Looking at the next category, the skill category. He confirmed, just like his expectations that he could buy skills using the system points. However, looking at the price of the basic skills, he didn't have the courage to continue looking. For example, the swordsman skill cost 5000 system points but in Ernia, the skill only cost around a gold coin. Considering the usefulness of the system points, he decided that unless necessary he wouldn't use the skill category of the point icon.
The third category, the world category. He could use points to permanently decrease the time necessary to go to another world but he currently didn't need it. So, pass.
The fourth category, the cultivation category. This was the category that interested him the most. He knew that in this dangerous world, he was extremely weak and couldn't do anything he wanted such as protecting someone. Remembering his goal, to be strong enough to not lose his family again, he almost immediately became obsessed with this category. Furthermore, when he looked at the price, it wasn't too bad.
Aurus was currently a bronze rank stage three and was only needed to kill the monster of the same level to breakthrough. However, the system directly started him back from scratch, forcing him to buy the bronze rank stage 1 cultivation level before continuing. Not understanding why the system wouldn't let him continue from the bronze rank stage three, he looked at the price of 100 points to buy and could only sight in relief thinking that at least this price seemed affordable. He didn't understand why the system wanted him to restart his Hunter cultivation, but in his opinion, even if he restarted, he would still be countless times faster than before so he didn't mind much.
Finally turning to the last category, the special category. This category had an extremely wide range. There were some beast contracts that could work in other worlds just like the one he had received in the task reward. There were monster eggs, human slave contracts which probably could only be used in the other world since there weren't any slaves in the world of Arashina. However, there was one thing that drew his attention completely.
[Healing card: As long as the user takes out the card and select a target, the target will heal to full recovery as long as there is a breath of life within them. Price: 100'000 points.]
This healing card was exactly what he needed to wake up his mother from artificial sleep at the hospital. Don't look at Aurus as a sister lover who only cared for her wellbeing, but he was also thinking about his mother who was still in the hospital. Even if he knew that his mother and sister from Earth were dead, seeing the extreme similarities between his family from Earth and Arashina not only in look but also in comportment and history, he simply couldn't lose them a second time. His drive on becoming stronger was in order to protect them and avoid another tragedy.
While he was thinking about this rapidly, the serpent has just ingested the poison. Closing the system icons, this time he fully concentrated on the serpent. When the contracted beast had seen and smelled the poison previously, it had been apparent that this was a good thing by the excited reaction. The customer could obviously feel it as he didn't hesitate to give the poison of the poisonous toad to the beast.
Around a minute after the serpent took the poison, it finally opened its eyes and one could see that except from the pleasure of drinking the liquid, he was almost begging his master to have another bottle.
The customer was quite surprised since it was the first time he had felt this emotion from his contracted beast. On normal days, it was quite detached and only listened to his orders but this time, it was actually asking for another bottle!
Seemingly resolving himself, he brought his hand in his pocket and the snake's eyes lit up in anticipation but when he brought out a seemingly normal stone, one could easily see its sadness. Dropping off the stone in front of the snake, he transmitted his intention from his mind. No one knew what he actually communicated to the snake but the snake immediately took action and dropped his poison directly on the stone.
Not even a few seconds later, the stone had a circular hole in the middle. Aurus obviously understood that the stone was a way for him to test the snake's strengthened poison. However, thinking about this, he couldn't always let the customer just take out a stone or whatever they used to test the increase in strength of the beasts.
Thinking back to the shop category in the point icon, he remembered seeing a certain decoration which would automatically give the monster a number to illustrate its strength. This would be pretty useful considering the customers would only have to look at the changing number to understand the increase in strength of their contracted beast.
Opening the icon and looking, he confirmed that the price was 2000 points which couldn't be considered extremely expensive but neither was it cheap.
At the same time as he finished looking at the price of the object, the customer turned his head to Aurus. After taking back the rock and getting up carefully, he asked a question.
"Is there any limit on the number of bottles of poison from the poisonous frog the contracted beast can take?" Without noticing, the customer became more respectful after the strengthening of his snake's poison. In the beginning, he was still somewhat hesitating. After all, monster cultivation resources are extremely rare and no one is actually willing to sell them and even less at such a cheap price.
Monster cultivation resources could only be found outside the gates, in the territory of the monsters and more often than not, they had to fight strong beasts only to bring one resource back. Then, because of the difficulty, there were no real shop of monster cultivation resources and even if a resource was sold, the price was in the hundreds if not the thousands of crystals for a resource with an effect weaker than what he had just given his contracted beast.
"There is no real limit but after taking ten bottles, the strengthening effect will greatly reduce. At this point, it might be useful if the mutation in the poison as not yet occurred but except for this situation, the effect will become negligible." Aurus wanted to say the truth instead of lying about the number of poison that could strengthen the beast. After all, in the future, he would bring back better cultivation resources and he obviously wanted his customers' trust since it would bring him greater profits in his opinion.
The customer nodded and finally said: " In that case, I'll buy nine more bottles of poison. By the way, I see that there is a large number of display cases but most of them are empty, will you sell other resources in the future?"
"Thank you for your purchase and indeed, I will be selling other resources in the future. Tomorrow, the shop will have more resources although I don't know if it will of the poison element." As Aurus was answering the question of the man, he went to the display case and once again used the magnetic key to open the display cabinet. Unbeknownst to the man, the cabinet had already been stocked back when he wasn't looking.
Going behind the counter, Aurus handed over the nine bottles of poison to the customer while he handed over ninety crystal. At the same time, ninety more points were added to his points icon. The reason he knew that? A small +90 had appeared in the corner of his vision.
The customer taking the nine bottles of the poison immediately gave it to his poisonous serpent. He had remembered the rules of this shop about not bringing the cultivation resources to the exterior. As such, he didn't bother asking Aurus again. He had his reason for asking such a thing. If he didn't like it, he could just not buy the resources and go somewhere else, if you found somewhere which sold those resources.
There was no need to actually drink the bottles of poison one by one so the customer after confirming with Aurus just opened the bottles and gave them directly to his contracted beast one after another.
After the snake finished drinking the bottles of poison, it closed his eyes and laid his head on the floor. His snake tongue came out from time to time, at least proving that it wasn't dead.
While waiting, the customer continued to talk with Aurus and at some point, he asked a critical question for himself. "In the next week, do you think you will be able to collect monster cultivation resources of the shadow, illusion, fire and air? Our Hunters team just came back in the city and we will be heading out once again in the wild next week. If you can gather some resources of these elements, it would greatly enhance our survival chance. We were lucky that we killed enough beasts during the last expedition this way, we should be able to buy a lot of resources for our contracted beasts."
Hearing the customer talking, Aurus immediately understood why he had so many crystals with him. Most of the Hunters either worked in the expedition team or they became protectors of a city. The protectors of a city were self-explanatory as they would kill the monsters who came too close to the walls or attacked the city. The expedition team on the other hand were people who brought back beasts to the city for food or simply to reduce the number of beasts in a certain location to help humans take a little more territory. As such, Hunters who worked in the expedition teams were mostly rich since they encountered a lot of monsters during their expedition and often brought back monster bodies. Each part of a monster's body was useful and they would easily make a few dozen crystals for the body of the beasts. Thanks to this, the customer team wouldn't have any problems buying his cultivation resources.
"For the resources of those elements I'll see what I can do but I can't guarantee anything." Aurus nodded, showing that he would pay certain attention. At the same time, the snake woke up and started hissing. Seeing the change on top of the snake's head, Aurus told the customer that the snake had managed to get the mutation, the confusion effect and that at this point, buying any more resources wouldn't be very effective.
After nodding to Aurus, the customer took back his contracted beast and said goodbye. "I'll mention your shop to my colleagues, we should be coming back before the end of the week."
Seeing the customer leave, Aurus finally sat back down on his chair and saw that only ten minutes had passed, he looked through his system.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
xxAsura
xxAsura Maybe it took him ten minutes, but it took me close to four hours haha.
Lastly, guys and girls, I would like to ask for a few minutes of your time. I'd love if you were willing to leave a review or a comment on my novel.
Ps: Even tough I ask that, I actually did a review like three times in three years on this app, so if you don't want to that's totally cool haha.
Anyway, I hope you have a great day.
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