Since he won’t be able to fight any seller who cheat him, he needs to be wary of being cheated and careful more than he is careful with Tommy.
When he was checking the listings, he checked for the mass, density, and purity of the Living Metal that was being offered. He did this to make sure that he wasn’t going to be ripped off.
He eliminated listings that didn’t share specific information about the Living Metal. Any listing that was vague about what they were selling seemed dubious to him, so he decided not to go near them with a ten-foot stick.
After he found one that he was satisfied with, he paid for it. Each kilogram of it was sold at the rate of 800,000 energy stones, and he bought 5 kilograms, so he paid 4 million in total.
The 4 million was removed from his account immediately after he made the transaction. Then he received a notification that the goods would arrive in 5 to 7 days.
With that done, he grinned with anticipation and said, "Now, let’s see what we can do about raising my talent."
He quickly inserted what he wanted into the trading platform. In response, the listings changed immediately when his interest changed. The room that used to be filled with fake and real Living Metal offers quickly became full of fake and real talent-raising products.
What he noticed immediately was that there were far more listings for talent-raising products than for Living Metal. This surprised him a bit because he expected the product for raising one’s talent to be rarer than the Living Metal.
But then he thought of the earlier warning, so he chuckled and said, "I bet most of these are fake. It is just like cultivators to work harder to prey on others by using the problem that most people have."
"Reminds me of the penis enlargement ads of my past life. It is all fake."
As he chuckled to himself, he continued to scan the listings. From what he saw, he was able to learn that there are different grades of talent-raising items.
He saw that the grades of items for raising talent are based on how effective they are. So some items could only raise talent between the range of 10 and 20, while others could raise talent between the range of 10 and 50, and even more expensive ones were effective up to 90 points of potential.
Another thing that stood out to him was that there were no items for raising talent beyond 90 points. This reminded him of what Muni had said about 90 being the limit of humans.
So he said, "Most of these are fake, but at least they are reasonable enough not to offer fake stuff that can raise talent beyond 90 points. It will be too obvious that it’s fake if they do."
These sellers obviously know what they are doing. They didn’t make obvious mistakes that even a rookie like him would be able to spot.
This, combined with the fact that he isn’t familiar with talent-raising items the way he is familiar with forging materials, makes it much more difficult to judge which item was real and which was fake. He didn’t even know how to begin to tell them apart.
This made him rub his forehead and say, "I need some help. Maybe I should ask Muni. But how can I be sure that what he tells me will be the truth? Do I have to make a contract with him?"
Ever since he saw Slav use contracts to slowly enslave people and then proceed to use another kind of contract to defeat someone else, he has been hesitant to use contracts.
The information he has learned about the Money Pathway since then has only reinforced his prejudice against contracts. This is one of the reasons why he didn’t try to get a contract with Tommy when he was buying the exoskeleton armor, even though he knew that Tommy was going to cheat him without a contract.
So now that he wants information from Muni about authentic talent-raising items, he either has to risk getting a contract that Muni can use against him or hope that Muni won’t lie to him.
Both of these options were bad, so he said, "Let me check if I can see the reputation of the sellers first. If I can’t, then I will go to Muni."
He wanted to see if there was a review system that he could use to determine which sellers were selling authentic items before going to make a deal with Muni.
Unfortunately, there was no review system. But there was a transaction history for each seller.
Each seller has a small page that he can inspect. Everything the seller was selling on the platform was listed on this small page. Beside each item was how many times it had been purchased by people.
Loki used this system to filter the products by looking for sellers who had various items and who had been patronized many times. His reason for doing this was that he believed that popular sellers were either reputable sellers that many people trust or were conmen that were very good at the job of deceiving people.
As he thought of this, he said, "Either way, it is a good thing for me. Either I get what I want or get cheated by someone really good at what they do. At least, I won’t be a fool easily deceived."
"It can be worse than going to Muni anyway. At most, I’ll lose some money here, but with Muni, I might lose my life by signing a contract."
With his mind made up, he quickly found a highly prolific seller who was selling high-grade items for raising talent between 70 and 80. This item in question is a worm called the rank 4 Crystal Worm.
The Crystal Worm is a consumable Metac like the Cloudy Date Metac. It is supposed to be a rank 4 Metac, but it costs more than most rank 5 Metacs at a hefty price tag of 1.1 million energy stones.