Chapter 153 – To the Den of Thieves.

‘They sure picked an odd spot for this…’

Roland found himself looking down an old well. He had put on his runic glasses so he could see all the way down and it was quite a large drop. After leaning back he looked to the side and could spot people moving back and forth by the road.

This well that he was standing at had once been used by the old Albrook farmers. It had long dried up and was left close to the road that led to the Albrook Dungeon. Roland had the letter that the guild master had given him in his pocket.

That day when he had a conversation with him he was given some instructions. The letter was supposedly an introduction to the people that run the underground businesses in this city, the Thieves Guild.

How the guild master of the adventurer’s guild knew the thieves’ guild was a bit perplexing. But after further consideration, he realized that the two guilds didn’t really have anything at odds with each other. Not like they had conflicting interests, they were actually quite similar.

While the adventures from the guild were more like mercenaries and hired soldiers, the guild members from the thieves’ guild were more like hired assassins and information gatherers. If a task was too difficult for any adventurer it wasn’t wrong to go to the underground and hire someone that was more prone to taking risks.

The adventurer guild was a proper business and this limited their scope of actions. They had rules that kept their adventurer’s from getting into too much danger. They had ratings for each one of them and the missions they were expected to take. Thus they limited the loss of lives through a vetting process.

The thieves on the other hand didn’t care about things like that. They somewhat had an internal rating between each other but nothing of the sort as the adventurers did. They would not keep their members from accepting difficult jobs that could cost them their life.

Their masters didn’t care and most of the time the jobs pay was proportional to the guild member you got. This somewhat made it more difficult for the one hiring to get a good deal but that was one of the reasons why these types of people were called criminals.

‘There it goes…’

Roland threw the letter into the well while somewhat looking in all directions. To others, it would look as if he was throwing trash into this well and that was mostly what people did here.

How this message would reach the thieves’ guild was unknown to him but magic was probably involved. It made sense that if a person wished to get involved with them needed to know a person that was already was a thieves’ guild member.

It was somewhat of an exclusive club that was difficult to get into but even more difficult to get out of. This was something the guild master had warned him about but not like Roland wanted to become a member of the thieves’ guild. His purpose was to get access to the black market merchants.

At first, Roland was concerned about this letter. Anyone could see him throwing something into the well if they wanted to look. Then after thinking it over it was clear that the thieves were just trying to be smart about it.

Who would think that they were actually using easily accessible places for contacting each other? This was also apparently not the only contact point, the guild master informed him that it changed every couple of weeks. While it was a well now, it could change to a tree stump in the forest or even a loose brick in one of the houses in the city.

This was also why he needed to do it within a short time frame. If he didn’t do it now, he would have no way of knowing what the next contact point would be changed to.

‘From what he said, I need to wait a few days for a reply…’

Which Roland did, while his letter of introduction was going through he decided to venture into the dungeon for a change. He had managed to reconstruct his old armor but with the lack of funds, he still needed to go with the mana stone variant.

It looked mostly the same but he decided to ditch the characteristic crimson coloring. For now, he went with a more pitch-black variant which also made the runic symbols stick out less if they weren’t being used. If used he would stick out even more as they did glow in various colors of the rainbow.

The golems and tier 2 monsters on the lower levels didn’t really pose much of a threat to him as he was slowly gaining levels. The speed of his progress had slowed down since his last dungeon run but thanks to him getting the tier 3 schematics he was slowly going for that 100th level.

“Not yet huh?”

Roland looked at both his own and Agni’s status screen. Agni was at the level cap of fifty but the Mystical Ruby Wolf variant was still grayed out. He had progressed through the levels by leaching from his master and did it too fast. Even now he was a few levels short with his mana-related skills.

While to most people the 100th level meant their second tier 2 class for him it would take a bit longer. Only when he reached the 125th level would his Runesmith Lord class be maxed out. He still could get a new one when he hit it but there wasn’t really a reason for it.

He was thinking about using a class change crystal when he achieved the hundredth level. It was still possible for a person to look at the classes they could change to without switching to them. He could even go through some of the trials as a test without passing through them on purpose.