Chapter 198 Level of Wealth?
When he came upon the inside of the Irwin family's vault, Vicente couldn't help but stare open-mouthed for a split second when he saw how stuffed the vault was.
There were three shelves on the sides of this area of about 10 square meters, with a central table in the middle of the area, under which there were also shelves.
But each space was filled with magical items, resources, coins, and precious treasures.
On the left wall, the shelves were filled with coins. There were five shelves in total, with the two lowest shelves containing only gold coins and the two highest shelves containing silver and bronze coins.
Even though silver and bronze weren't very valuable, they were the coins used daily to pay for small services in the city.
But the gold coins were the ones most used for business, the focus of this family. As such, there was a considerable amount of gold coins there.
In the middle of the shelf was a level with 15 magic stones, at an ideal height for one to easily reach them without difficulty.
On the wall opposite this coin-laden shelf was another shelf divided into five levels, just as full as the one on the opposite wall.
On the top level were 22 books that looked very old, probably records of the family's operations, but also contract books.
Below that, there were various jewels and magical combat items, but also things that could be useful for various activities, such as the analysis of precious items and appraisal artifacts.
Not every magician could pick up something valuable and tell you how much it was worth or what it could be used for.
Ordinary people would typically have to find an appraiser to determine the origin of strange objects that they get their hands on and tell them their value and usefulness. But rich people like nobles wouldn't need someone like that unless they were getting something of a very high standard, far beyond their means. For something within their financial means, they could buy artifacts made by engineers and enchanters who could do the same job.
Seeing one of these appraisal items, something that wasn't cheap, Vicente couldn't help but be interested. 'With something like this, I can try to identify the necklace Professor Julian gave me...' He thought, feeling the object around his neck.
But in addition to this shelf, the wall facing the vault door also had a shelf a few levels higher with various magical resources on it.
There were some small ores, bottles of potions and pills, some fruits, and plant roots rich in mana, which even someone with no knowledge of alchemy like Vice could sense was valuable.
'The wealth of this family is incomparable to that of the Peters family and the Defiant Tyranny!' Vicente laughed to himself in front of such wealth.
But that was the difference between a noble family and small groups that had only existed for a short time and had access to few resources.
A noble family, even a small one, could make a profit of a few hundred gold coins a month.
Often, the head of the family would accumulate wealth by thinking not only of future problems that might force him to flee but also of business opportunities, such as the auction Lukas had talked to Vice about a few days ago.
Not everyone had promising talents or the time to focus on training to become stronger, creating powerful spells, and the like. Many needed external resources if they wanted to progress in terms of mana density. If they wanted powerful skills, they needed to be able to hire good mercenaries to help them get good pentagrams. If they wanted good spells, they needed good resources to buy them. And so on.
Talent was important in this world. But one's coins could change one's destiny much more than the talent inherited from one's lineage.
A rich person with average talent could definitely go much further in this world than a poor person with high talent!
So even a Baron's family could collect something as valuable as what was in that vault!
With this in mind, Vice paid attention to the traps still in his way and moved in the only way he could.
By activating his magic ability, he made all the coins in there fly toward his spatial storage device, quickly collecting about 20,000 coins.
Of those 20,000 coins, just over half were silver and bronze coins, and the other, over 8,000, were gold coins.
This was a considerable amount for Vicente!
Not only that, but the coins in that vault alone filled his spatial ring by more than 50%.
'That really is a lot.' He laughed as he encountered this problem that everyone would like to experience.
After collecting the coins, the most difficult item to track, he used some of the metal in his body to collect each of the vials of pills and potions, as well as the roots and fruits.
This was the hardest part of his work because he had to balance each of these items on the metals under his influence, and he couldn't move them freely as he had done with the coins.
But 60 seconds after he opened the vault, Vicente managed to foil the traps and collected all the items from the second shelf he had stolen.
'I'll leave these books. As valuable as they are to me, I can't carry everything here.' He lamented his poverty.
Spatial storage items were expensive. A single 1st-grade ring could cost more than 30 gold coins because the materials needed to make such a thing were expensive.
Not only that but items that required the work of more than one professional were naturally expensive.
With a ring that didn't have much room, he left the books and some artifacts that he didn't think would be of much use to him.
But Vicente didn't hesitate to take the jewels from the third shelf and put them around his body.
'I won't be able to sell these jewels in the province, but they could be worth a lot to me in the future.' He smiled as he finished cleaning out the place, leaving behind the books and some lesser magical items such as clothes, shoes, and other tailoring products.
With magic, anything could be altered to make it special and useful to magicians in many situations. Sometimes, you wouldn't even need to wear armor to protect yourself. A suit made by a good tailor could be an excellent defensive item.
But Vicente didn't have much use for it, so he left some of these items behind before placing some explosives in this place along with the unconscious body of the unconscious man next to him.
After that, he closed the vault door and left!
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