Chapter 88

Chapter 88: A Genuine Piece.

The old gentleman walked into the antique shop and looked around with curiosity. The worn display window, the cheap iron shelves, and the almost randomly placed “antiques” all showed the shop’s true nature almost perfectly:

Aside from the money it took in, nothing in the whole place was real.

Even so, this elderly gentleman, whose clothes and bearing looked nothing like an ordinary citizen of the Lower City, still examined the items in the shop with great interest. Only when Duncan’s voice came from the counter did he finally turn his gaze.

“An interesting way to put it,” the old gentleman said with a laugh. “Taking away what fate has linked to you… Leaving the items aside, that sentence by itself is quite beautiful.”

“Fate alone is not enough. You also need money,” Duncan replied with a smile. “Luckily everything here is cheap. Is there anything you like?”

“Uh… I didn’t come here to buy anything,” the old gentleman started. “Actually…”

Before he could finish, Duncan went on warmly: “Even if you don’t buy, it’s still good to have a look. Maybe something will catch your eye, right?”

The old gentleman could not help showing a helpless look. “But… all your things are fake.”

“That’s right,” Duncan said as if it were only natural. “Would real goods sit here? I don’t even have a security door on this place. I rely on making sure thieves can’t make back their costs.”

The old gentleman’s face clearly twitched. He had not expected the owner of a fake-antique shop to be this frank about it. He choked for several seconds before managing: “…Then…”

“For those who are good at convincing themselves, they can treat my place as an antique shop and enjoy a bit of self-satisfaction. The realists can treat it as a general store and go for cheap and practical things. As for those who both see reality clearly and still want to fool themselves, I can only congratulate them on finding a gold brick in a trash heap. There is only one genuine piece in the whole shop, and they just happened to grab it. That is a very fated encounter.

“Anyway, spending thirty or fifty is mainly about having fun. Even if you suffer the worst scam in here, it will not cost you more than a hundred, and you will still get a fine product of modern industry. When you think about it, that’s quite a bargain, isn’t it?”

The old gentleman listened, stunned, to Duncan’s stream of crooked logic. He clearly had little experience with this kind of talk and could not react for a moment. Then his gaze suddenly fell on a corner near the counter, and his expression changed slightly.

Duncan had been happily immersed in the joy of doing business. When he noticed the shift in the old gentleman’s gaze, his heart gave a small jolt, and something came to mind. Before Duncan could speak, the old gentleman reached toward that corner and said: “This thing…”

Among a pile of junk, he had found a dagger. Its style was very old, but its condition was excellent.

He took the dagger out.

It was exactly the old item Duncan had hidden in the junk earlier, something he had brought back from the Vanished – one of only two genuine pieces in the entire antique shop.

The other lay deeper in the pile: a cast-iron cannonball.

At first Duncan tried to divert the old gentleman’s attention. But then he noticed the change in the man’s expression and the professional air with which he examined the patterns on the dagger’s sheath. Duncan realized at once:

This old gentleman might be a professional.

Duncan frowned slightly and let his gaze run over the dagger.

It was not actually a big problem. The thing was not an supernatural item. It did not carry the curse, corruption, or any other “specialty of the sea”. Even though it was taken from the Vanished, in essence it was no different from an ordinary relic.

It was a plain, unremarkable object. If Duncan reacted too strongly, that would look more suspicious.

“This thing…” the old gentleman said again. He looked up at Duncan with some surprise and asked: “Is it also one of the shop’s ‘goods’?”

He spoke very gently, but the meaning under his words was clear: how had a real item ended up mixed in with this pile of fakes? Was it some kind of mistake?

From the other man’s reaction, Duncan guessed at once that he knew his stuff. Pretending not to recognize the item would not be right. It was better to admit it just enough. He reined in his smile and put on a slightly mysterious look: “You see? You have just met something tied to you by fate.”

Then he cleared his throat and said seriously: “Most of the goods in this shop are discounted. A few are exceptions, like the one in your hand.”

The old gentleman immediately looked back at the shelves. His eyes swept over those “modern handicrafts” whose price tags listed tens of thousands, crossed out and marked down to a few dozen. Who knew what he was imagining. Suddenly this shabby, bluffing antique shop seemed mysterious and interesting in his eyes.

He carefully set the dagger on the counter, as if he was about to ask the price, but just then a bell rang at the door and cut him off.

Duncan looked toward the door and saw Nina’s figure.

“Uncle Duncan, I’m back!” Nina called toward the counter the moment she stepped through the door, without even lifting her head. “Has Mr. Morris arrived yet?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Duncan said, glancing around the shop. “I’m just serving…”

Before he finished, the old gentleman in front of him coughed twice and pointed to himself: “My name is Morris.”

Duncan: “…?”

“Mr. Morris!” Nina now saw the old gentleman at the counter and cried out in surprise. Then, like any student who ran into a teacher after school, she visibly tensed up. She snapped to attention, standing straight. “Good afternoon!”

Duncan looked at Nina, then at the old man, his gaze going back and forth twice. The air finally turned properly awkward.

“I wanted to introduce myself at the start,” the old gentleman said, spreading his hands helplessly. “But before I could speak, you cut me off, and then you began showing me the goods in your shop…”

Nina now understood what had happened. Then she noticed the dull-looking dagger on the counter and hurried two steps forward: “Teacher, don’t buy that! Everything in my family’s shop is fake!”

Duncan gave the young lady a strange look. He thought to himself that this child was far too honest. In front of her teacher it had taken her less than a second to sell out her own family’s secrets. Though, given the level of the shop’s goods and Morris’s eye as a history expert, whether she sold them out or not did not really matter…

On the other side, after hearing Nina’s words, the old gentleman Morris shook his head and pointed to the dagger on the counter: “This one is real.”

Nina froze: “…Huh?”

“This dagger should date back about one century. It was one of the utility daggers favored by seafarers from central city-states such as Pland and Lunsa at the time. But because the forges that made them went bankrupt, and because items taken to sea are easily damaged by wind and waves, very few survive today, and most are in terrible condition…”

As he spoke, Morris carefully picked up the dagger from the counter. He drew the blade out a little and went on in an amazed tone: “I… I have never seen one in such good condition. It is as if it was still in normal use not long ago. The blade is sharp enough to slide through paper. There is not a single flaw on it…”

“It even still has its original sheath,” Duncan added from the side. “If you look closely, you will see even the clasp on the back of the sheath is original.”

Hearing this, Morris hurried to examine the sheath and its fittings again. The surprise in his eyes grew even stronger. “This… I really did not notice before… My heavens! This thing is like it was just taken out of the pocket of a sailor from a century ago! If I did not have enough confidence in my own eye, I would suspect it was an amazing forgery… But even the patterns where the blade joins the hilt, and that special flaw at the end of the hilt, they all…”

Here he suddenly grew uncertain. He looked up at Duncan, then at Nina. The history expert actually lost his confidence: “It really isn’t a forgery?”

When Nina heard this, she quickly waved her hands: “My uncle could never fake something this real…”

Duncan’s eyelid twitched. He looked at his niece: “Go upstairs and do your homework!”

Nina blinked. “I don’t have any homework today…”

“Then go read a book!”

Nina stuck out her tongue and tiptoed toward the stairs. After a few steps she looked back at her history teacher: “Mr. Morris, don’t forget you’re here for a home visit…”

“Of course. I have many things to talk about with Mr. Duncan,” Morris replied with a broad smile. The old gentleman looked full of energy. “Go upstairs and read for now. Don’t worry, I won’t complain about my own student behind her back.”

Nina looked doubtfully at Uncle Duncan and at her teacher. She clearly had not expected the “home visit” to begin like this.

But the next moment, for some reason, she suddenly smiled.

The girl ran lightly up the stairs.