Slave Harem in the Labyrinth of the Other World (LN)

The cat-eared old fart said while taking out yet another necklace. Just how many of these does he have stored in here? This time, it was a necklace with just one big chunk of amber in it, but the string was constructed in such a way that its length could have been freely adjusted according to ones needs and tastes.

A necklace with adjustable string length? I see.

And here I this box are all the rough amber chunks that I currently possess.

The merchant pushed the necklace against Roxanne and Sherry and addressed me this time. Inside of the box that he just took out were some reddish stones. Is that also amber? Because it surely does not look like that. Noticing the question mark floating above my head in mass quantities, the merchant took one of said reddish stones out and handed them to me for inspection.

This is how a rough amber gemstone looks like.

Thisis a rough amber gemstone? It looks different from what I have expected.

That is because rough amber chunks look different from the ones that have already been polished and worked around with. On the other hand, what you see right here are the fragments of the larger lumps of natural amber that was formed on the seafloor and then washed ashore. See those scrapes right here? These markings are the signs that it has not been that long since they have been formed and harvested and they are the sign that these pieces of rough amber are of the highest quality possible.

I see.

These chunks of amber certainly look as if they have been scraped in many places.

Mr. Customer, do you know what kind of amber you would like to do business in when you go to Palmasque? Or rather, do you know what kind of amber is the best to trade?

No, unfortunately I do not know.

Yes, I do not know that, because there was no way for me to know about any of those things before. Back when I was still living on earth, there was no need for me to be interested in amber, its price, properties and all of those other things related to it, and even if I knew about it, there is always a chance that the amber of this world might be different from the one from my old world, meaning that all of the knowledge that I could have possessed about it would have been no good and could be thrown out the window.

Basically, the general consensus is that the raw gemstones are better for the purpose of trading, especially the ones with high transparency and reddish color. Roughing is used to separate the shades from one another to some extent, but that method is not always an absolutely effective method.

Oh really? Why is that?

Whenever you polish the raw amber chunks, there is always a possibility that there might still be traces of the foreign substances left in it. According to one of the legends, amber was actually created by one of the Goddesses through magic as a means to deal with the plague of insects that were ravaging the lands, and that is why the corpses of insects can be found contained within pieces of amber. The ones that contain a whole intact insect, like an ant or a mosquito are the most beautiful, very valuable, and they also have a great value for the collectors of such peculiarities of nature, but unfortunately, whether or not a piece of amber with the remains of insects in them is going to be of high value or not cannot be determined at the rough cutting stage.

Huh? But I thought that amber was a perfectly natural mineral made from hardened sap of the trees such as pine and the like that is turned into its gemstone form after it fossilizes after much time passes! Now I definitely think that I am going to have to ask Sherry to give me a crash course on amber of this world, its history and the myths that surround it, because at this point in time there is just too many things that I seem to not know about it, even though I am supposed to be passing for a resident of this world just like anyone else around me.

So amber came to be because of a Goddesss magic? That is the first time I am ever hearing such a thing. Back where I came from, we have a completely different explanation for its origin.

At least that is what the story says. Some of the Dwarven scholars even wondered if amber can actually act as medium and the catalyst for the purpose of utilizing the magic power of that Goddess in the process of fusing weapons and equipment, but so far I have not heard about anyone who would actually be able to make that happen, and the general consensus on the matter seems to be that amber cannot be used as a weapon and armor strengthening material because it is something that came to exist naturally and not because a monster dropped it.

So, just like with most of the experiments conducted by these Dwarven, scholars, it ended up in spectacular failure, huh?

Really?

Yes. But supposedly, one of the great scholars of the past and few others who came after him claimed that they have managed to extract the Goddesss power from the amber in form of lightning by rubbing two pieces of amber together.

If it really was exactly like Sherry has described and they managed to extract lightningfrom the amber by rubbing two pieces of it together, then what the encountered was probably not the magic of the Goddess, but static electricity, to which amber seems to be prone to, as was discovered by the people of the ancient Greece, mainly Thales of Miletus, who observed that when amber was being rubbed with a piece of cloth that has been made form wool or a material that is similar to it, it gained the ability to attract small pieces of leaves or dust to itself, which was due to it generating static electricity because of the friction.

I turned to the merchant and returned the rough amber gemstone to him.

It would seem that it is pretty difficult to assess the quality of an unrefined amber gemstone, at least the way I see it.

Yes, it is impossible if you do not have experience of at least several years in this field of work, and even then the proper assessment of ambers quality might be pretty hit or miss depending on the exact condition of each individual piece and a number of external circumstances and factors that we oftentimes cannot foresee or predict, but you can rest assured that my shop is always going to strive to bestow the products of the highest quality possible to our clients.

At first I was wondering why he was talking about all of this, but maybe that was his way of communicating the anti-complaint measure that this shop is employing to ensure that none of the potential clients would be storming the shop at a later date while demanding a refund of the money that they have spent here if they ever found the product to be lacking or not up to their standards?

I understand.

When it comes to the raw amber gemstones, all of the ones that are currently left in stock are about the same size as this one right here, and they all cost eight hundred Nars per piece, and since the processing of the raw gemstones is actually done in a separate place form here, it means that not all of the raw stones that we possess will be immediately available, but right now, I could accommodate you with up to ten pieces of them.

Ten pieces of raw amber, eight hundred Nars each. It might not seem like much, but you have to understand that this is a price for a raw, unrefined stones, and the cost of refined amber can jump up to sever thousand Nars per one piece. Well, considering all of the hassle that the craftsmen have to go through in order to obtain, refine and then polish each and every stone they manage to get their hands on, I guess it can be said to be pretty understandable

Oh well, since the Duke recommended you and went through the trouble of giving me a letter or introduction, then I guess I will take all that you have to offer.

I do not know how much would it cost at the shops in Palmasque and how much gemstones I would be able to buy from them.