A notice from Balaway to stop the public appraisal of ancient relics.

To all vagrants who dig for ancient relics,

Regrettably, I will be stopping my appraisal service at the end of this tax period. The consulting location at the market will also be closed.

In other words, from this day forward, if you stumble over something in the mines, or if your mining team happens upon an ancient weapon, don't think it's a gift from the gods. And don't bother carrying all that junk over to me.

As mentioned above, it's done. I'm done.

I'm sure some of you will be pondering the reason behind my quitting when work is going well. I supposed I should make the effort to give everyone a proper response.

First of all, it's a thankless job.

When I started the business, I wanted to use the Old World manuals I tirelessly collected to help everyone analyze and appraise their ancient relics. That way, everyone would at least have a sense of the items they found, and can have a better sense of value when selling their items.

It's pretty clear for those who know. These days, no one understands how people from the Old World built these machines, much less the knowledge they had in their heads.

Some ancient relics explode when exposed to the air, making it more dangerous than a mine filled with gas. Some were as plain as a metal rod, not unlike the one your wife uses to poke the stove. But push the button somewhere on it, it'll be as scary as one of your wife's temper tantrums.

Let me give you an example. During the last tax period, I received an egg-shaped object. (That's right, the kind of egg sold at Belobog Meat Factory.) Anyway, I went through all the manuscripts, including Old World magazines, and finally concluded that it was some kind of jewelry, known as the “Ramlea Egg.”

Let's start with a question: What is jewelry? After asking old Uther, we learned that jewelry is a type of decoration you can wear. It seems that Old World people really had nothing better to do.

The old man banged the egg a few times on the table, then removed the pin on top, which might have been used to hang something on it. Suddenly, the egg started heating up and glowing. It produced a light stronger than hundreds of mine lamps stacked together (Uther might have exaggerated this). The old man could already barely see anything, and now he definitely can't. You can say that I was lucky. When the incident happened, I was in the other room making tea. My eyes were fine but the old man's son threatened to take out my eyes until I offered him sixty canned goods.