The Insider System

Chapter 335: Bright And Shiny

The Sun had slowly set as Lake waited and he felt it was now dark enough for him to move so using Mana Vision he started to look around down below him to find which window he should target to get an empty room. As far as he knew there were at least seven windows to choose from so there was bound to be at least one that no one would be in.

As he was trying to make sense of what he could see below him with Mana Vision he eventually noticed that there seemed to be someone slowly climbing the stairs up to where he was. They were moving at a snail's pace so Lake still had time but this placed a time limit on how much longer he could stay here.

He had no idea why the person would be coming up here or if they would mind that there was a random guard but he really didn't want to take his chances in seeing who they were even if this might be a great place to get himself a new identity.

Going back to looking at the rooms below he made up his mind on which he should enter and making sure Mute was still active he started to climb out of the spire and down the side towards the window below. When he was half way he heard the person that had been climbing through the wall and knew there was still over a minute until they reached the top at their speed.

It was funny to think he was faster at climbing down a brick wall than they were at walking up stairs and wondered who they could be. An old person was his best guess and this made him almost positive that they weren't just a guard and he wished he could have gotten a brief look at them before he had to start his climb down.

He didn't have time for that though because it was too much of a risk in his opinion just to satisfy his curiosity. As he made it down to the window he had chosen he quickly got to work trying to open it only to find it was unable to slide in any kind of way. This was unexpected but he was fine with breaking a window since he had Mute.

He also didn't have to shatter it and went to work taking the wood between the pieces of glass out so he could slip though. It was more time than he had wanted to spend out here on a window where anyone could look up at any time but a pieces of falling glass was sure to make people look even if they didn't hear the sound of it breaking or hitting the ground.

Once half the window was gone he slid into the room and got to work covering his tracks. He was unable to fully rebuild it since he had broken the wood in some places but there was enough left that the glass stayed in place and no one would notice unless the wind blew and knocked it all over.

With that done he turned his attention to what was going on outside of the empty room he was in. There were items he wanted to look at in here with him but he wanted to make sure no one was going to walk in while he was doing it first. Once he was sure no one was coming this way he went to looking around the room.

He couldn't tell right away what kind of room this was since it had a mixture of furniture in it but there were nice things on the shelves that seemed to be decorations. As he got close to touch the first of the items Lake put together that this was most likely where the mayor met with guests and drank tea and these things were here to show off a bit or start conversations.

That was the only thing that made sense to him because he couldn't see someone sitting in here if this was where they lived when their rooms probably had a better place to have things like tea. After thinking this he decided that if these items were good enough to show off they probably had some value and they were definitely worth looking through.

Opening the fist case he saw what he thought were gems at first but quickly realized that they were cores. He wasn't sure what made these ones special and he wasn't going to inspect them all one by one but this case was worth summoning later once he ran away.

Going on to the next thing he opened the case and found another type of treasure but was unable to tell what it was just by looking at it because he had never seen anything like it before. It was like a giant black orb but there wasn't anything else he could get from looking at it so he used inspect to see what information came up.

Giant Black Pearl

Lake stopped reading after he saw the name because all he cared about was how expensive this item was and the name told him everything he needed to know. If the description included the word giant this thing must be worth something. Its color was also very nice so he knew he would have no problems selling it once he found the Thieves guild in this town.

Moving to the next case he looked through the top of it because this one had a glass top and wasn't able to be opened. This made him think this next thing was something you wouldn't want to touch or was possibly fragile. He was also unable to identify this item so he went ahead and used Inspect while wondering if it would work through glass.

The glass didn't seem to get in the way and he was able to get the name of the thing in the case and found it was some type of wood from the Life Domain. After reading a bit more of the information he was able to figure out that it was in the case to keep anyone from touching it because this action would ruin it.

Apparently this would work similarly to a health potion and could heal people from the brink of death as long as they touched it. He wasn't sure how this worked but he was sure it would sell so he planned to take it like the other items he had seen so far. He was about to look at the next item when he decided he needed to take a few seconds to have another look around because it had been like a minute since he had looked last.

After deciding he was ok to continue with what he was doing, Lake was about to start again when a sudden noise and flash of light stopped him in his tracks. "Vooom!" Looking at the door he realized no one had come into the room and he had to look around a few times before he realized all the light was coming from the window.

He had no idea what could be lighting the whole room like this so he moved over to the window to see what it could be. When he got a good look he realized it wasn't just this room that was lit but the whole city and after figuring out the source was above him he realized the spire was being used almost like a lighthouse to light the streets below just enough that people would be able to see.

Normally one large lightsource would fail at this since things like buildings would get in the way but the room he was in was having no problems being lit and he couldn't even see the spire so this light was special and was keeping the level of light in the city at an even level somehow.

He had no idea what kind of magic this was but he was just happy he had made it down here before the person climbing the spire had activated this light because he was sure it would have made everyone in the city turn and see him on the side of the spire. That would have been the end of this and he would have had to run away before getting his hands on even a single item.

Figuring he could just ignore this light now that he knew where it was coming from, Lake went back to the shelf to continue touching things for later collection. He was almost done in this room with only three more things he had yet to look at so soon he would have to find a way to get to another room.

The next three things were all just shiny things that would probably sell for a lot but weren't exactly what he would call useful and he put them all back exactly how they had been and started to use mana vision to see if there was someone close by that he could use to get to the other rooms.