Lord of the Truth

Chapter 2457 Funerary coins

"The jinn? Do you mean ghosts?"

Caesar asked the question without showing much interest, his tone carrying little more than casual curiosity. He had encountered those things frequently enough on ancient battlefields that their existence had long since stopped being unusual to him, and now, after entering the Necrofortress Galaxy, he saw hundreds of them every single day, wandering aimlessly from house to house and drifting from one street to another without any clear destination. After seeing so many of them everywhere he went, they had practically become no different from mosquitoes in his eyes!

With his steps gradually quickening as his attention shifted toward what lay ahead, Caesar finally reached the market he had been searching for.

If one of the Burton Family's veteran merchants, someone who had spent years dealing with strange markets and countless valuable commodities, had somehow arrived at this particular market and witnessed what was being casually displayed around him, he probably would have wet himself in terror...

The market itself consisted of an extraordinarily wide street with all kinds of things sitting along both sides of the road, each one placing a tattered sheet made of human skin directly in front of itself and spreading several items across its surface for sale... and the sheer number and variety of those items made even that enormous street, a street that had only become so wide after several adjacent streets were destroyed and merged together, appear extremely cramped and crowded.

Far away, near the very end of that long street, an undead herder could be seen sitting motionlessly with his back resting against a wall, treating the entire market as though it were simply another part of his own herd and protecting it from the interference of low-level undead that might otherwise wander inside and cause trouble, all in exchange for receiving a share of the profits from the sales every few centuries...

As for those strange things sitting on both sides of the street and conducting business within the market, they consisted of practically every available classification of undead that could be found here.

Directly in front of Caesar at that moment was a skeleton that somehow still retained several patches of scalp clinging stubbornly to its skull, and judging from its completely unmoving seated posture and the thick layer of dust that had accumulated across its body, it was impossible for anyone looking at it to even guess how long it had remained sitting in exactly the same position. Several scattered bones had been placed across the sheet in front of it as merchandise... At first glance, the sight appeared perfectly ordinary for this place and even somewhat ridiculous, at least until someone bothered to examine those seemingly unremarkable bones more carefully.

A fragment of a Solar Dragon's tailbone, the bones of someone who had possessed the strength of a Dominator, the bones of an Emperor Earth Lion... Every single one of those bones could be used as an extremely high-grade stabilizer during physical training, making each of them valuable enough to be sold for tens of millions of pearls if it were placed in virtually any outside market.

But here, within this strange market in the Necrofortress Galaxy... the currency used for everything was unified, and that currency itself was exceedingly rare.

Sitting beside the skeleton was a Crosser, someone who had still not completed his transformation into an undead, and tethered behind him was a spacecraft slightly larger than the small vessel Caesar himself had arrived in. It was clearly newer than Caesar's vessel as well, and even from a simple glance at it, it was obvious that it was considerably faster!

"....." Caesar stopped in front of the Crosser for several moments and looked at what was tethered behind him before casually pointing toward it. "How much are you selling it for?"

"Hmm..." The Crosser slowly raised his head toward Caesar, and the moment his gaze settled on him, he was immediately surprised by Caesar's extraordinarily vibrant and unmistakably living appearance, something that stood out far too clearly in a place like this. However, once he sensed the dense death energy enveloping Caesar's body, that initial surprise quickly gave way to seriousness as he began treating the person standing before him with considerably more attention. "...Seven."

"Seven Funerary Coins?!" Caesar immediately raised his voice upon hearing that number, staring at the Crosser as though he'd just heard something completely unreasonable. "Are you trying to rob me?!"

Within the naturally enormous Necrofortress Galaxy, despite its immense size and everything that could be found scattered throughout it, almost nothing possessed any meaningful value when compared to the one thing recognized everywhere as true currency: Funerary Coins.

Funerary Coins were the name given to items that had become saturated with the power of death and were then properly refined, turning them into something whose accumulated power could be utilized directly and absorbed quickly, and naturally, the more heavily saturated an item was with that power of death, the greater the value assigned to it became.

Examples of such items included the remains of an undead herder, a fragment broken from a planetary weapon belonging to the Path of Death, a crystallized drop of heart blood taken from a deceased Nexus State, the corpse of a malformed fetus, the burial shroud of a virgin, a fistful of blood in which every individual drop had come from a different child... and so on~

Those items, along with many other objects of the same nature, all contained a certain distinctive aura within them, a tangible power of death flowing through their substance, and this easily absorbed power could be measured and evaluated according to a unified standard known as units of death.

Those units were absorbed directly by undead herders and Generals capable of handling the concentrated power of death, then carefully infused once again into bone coins specifically made to be easy to carry, trade, and evaluate according to a unified standard. Each Funerary Coin contained exactly one complete unit of death, and that unit could be absorbed far more easily and directly than when the same amount of power had still been scattered throughout or contained within the original funerary item... and naturally, the undead General responsible for carrying out the conversion received a percentage from the process.

Funerary items had once been extremely plentiful throughout the enormous Necrofortress Galaxy, especially after Mortex took control of the galaxy and transformed it into what it had become today, but after all the countless years that had passed since then, most of those accumulated funerary items had gradually been exhausted and consumed. There were no longer any living beings remaining throughout the galaxy to continuously produce more of them, and without a new supply to replace everything being consumed, Funerary Coins had naturally become increasingly scarce and valuable with the passage of time.

A single Funerary Coin, containing no more and no less than one unit of death, was valuable enough to purchase an entire third-grade planetary artifact here.

And indeed, all around Caesar, large quantities of planetary artifacts that would have attracted considerable attention elsewhere were simply lying around in every direction like piles of worthless scrap. Here, whenever Crossers arrived to undergo their transformation into undead, they brought every treasure they could possibly carry with them in hopes of exchanging those possessions for Funerary Coins and using the death power within them to accelerate the transformation process. After all, the faster and easier that transformation proceeded, the greater the portion of a person's memories and intelligence they could retain afterward, giving them a chance to become a herd herder or perhaps even a General rather than ending up as nothing more than a stupid skeleton wandering around without purpose or a mindless ghost drifting aimlessly through the streets.

Of course, this strategy rarely bore any meaningful fruit, because no sane person who understood the value of the currency here would willingly exchange a Funerary Coin unless they were purchasing a funerary item in return, just as no one possessing a valuable funerary item would normally exchange it for anything except Funerary Coins. Nevertheless, the strategy occasionally succeeded; every once in a while, a Crosser would encounter another foolish Crosser who still retained enough desire for worldly possessions to covet some treasure from his former life and willingly make such an exchange.

And today... the Crosser sitting before Caesar was clearly hoping that Caesar would turn out to be exactly that kind of fool.

"...My vessel is the best one I've seen anywhere in the entire Necrofortress Galaxy, and there's nothing comparable to it anywhere in the outer half, as you may have already noticed for yourself... If you really want to find something better than this, you'll have no choice but to search among the Generals deep within the inner half of the galaxy... but personally, I wouldn't recommend doing something like that... Heh heh~"

"Tsk." Caesar clicked his tongue and turned his attention back toward the spacecraft behind the Crosser, carefully examining its visible properties and judging what he could about its performance.

With Caesar's extensive experience as a military commander who had personally fought through numerous battles in space and had seen countless different vessels in action, he could already estimate its speed with considerable accuracy simply from what he could observe... and according to that estimate, the vessel was roughly five times faster than the piece of junk he'd arrived in.

"Fine, seven it is." Caesar finally sighed, accepting the price without continuing to argue.

14:18

"....!!!" The Crosser abruptly raised his head and stared at Caesar in extreme surprise, hardly expecting the negotiation to end so quickly when he'd already been mentally prepared to lower the price again and again until it reached only two coins if necessary. "You'll pay... now?"

Seven entire units of death would undoubtedly be enough to make him a herd herder, and even after the market leader took the share owed to him from the transaction, whatever remained afterward would still be enough!!

"Of course." Caesar replied with visible annoyance at the fact that the Crosser had even doubted his ability to pay, then began turning his head and looking around until his gaze finally landed on the neighboring skeleton sitting nearby. "Wait here."

He quickly took two steps toward the skeleton without wasting any time, then Pak reached out and ripped one of the bones straight from its rib cage with a swift movement, all without the skeleton itself displaying the slightest reaction to having one of its ribs suddenly torn away...

Then Caesar immediately returned to the waiting Crosser and held out the rib bone he'd been gripping tightly in his hand, presenting it to him as though there were nothing strange whatsoever about what he'd just done. "Here, seven units."

"...?" The Crosser's face immediately twisted into something terrifying when he looked at the ordinary rib bone being offered to him, and he grabbed one of the weapons displayed in front of him for sale as his anger surged. "Did you come here... to mock me?!" He then stretched out his other hand toward the bone in Caesar's grasp, intending to snatch the ridiculous thing away and throw it aside before attacking, but the instant his fingers made contact with it, Huuum.

"....?" The Crosser suddenly froze completely where he was, his hand still touching the rib bone as his entire reaction changed in an instant. "Ah... Ah....."

The moment he touched the rib bone, he felt an astonishing and almost terrifying power of death flowing within it... Yet what terrified him wasn't the sheer quantity of that power, because after sensing it properly, he could tell that it amounted to exactly seven units, precisely the amount Caesar had claimed. What was truly terrifying was its extraordinary fluidity and just how unbelievably easy and clear it was to sense compared to the death power he knew... He had never experienced anything remotely like this before!!

The Crosser immediately ignored Caesar as though the person standing directly in front of him had ceased to exist, turning his attention toward the neighboring skeleton and staring at it with naked greed!!

"I think this belongs to me now..." Caesar chuckled when he noticed the sudden change in the Crosser's expression and where his greedy gaze had gone, then Whoosh pulled the four-person spacecraft directly into his enormous spatial ring... and continued moving toward the next seller.