Olana had no choice but to follow his lead, but when he summoned a small, high-velocity scout ship for the journey instead of a grand flagship, her aristocratic composure finally snapped.
"You cannot be serious!" she argued, gesturing wildly at the compact, utilitarian vessel. "You don't expect —a daughter of my house—to travel across the universe in such a low-standard, weak little ship! This is an insult to my status!"
Hye didn't even look at her as he boarded. He simply waited for her to realise she wasn't being given a choice. Soon enough, his decision proved its worth.
Olana's original travel estimates had been calculated based on the lumbering warp speeds of massive capital ships. The small, over-tuned scout ship cut through the cosmic currents with a fraction of the resistance.
Hye was surprised to find they had crossed the entire primary distance in less than half a day. They completed the entire circuit—visiting and anchoring all three portal hubs—in just under twenty-four hours. For Hye, it was a triumph of efficiency; for Olana, it was a gruelling, cramped nightmare.
"If you ever have the misfortune of eting my family," Olana muttered as Hye brought the ship to a halt at the third and final portal hub, "never, under any circumstances, ntion that I travelled the stars in a glorified tin can. My reputation would never recover."
"Why don't we change ships now, then?" Hye suggested, looking around the empty, star-strewn coordinates.
He checked the common communication channels for the sector, looking for any ntion of local waystations, hotels, or artificial planets designed to welco long-distance travellers. He found nothing but a vacuum and distant military pings.
The only solution for a comfortable night's rest was to summon one of his large flagships from his inventory to serve as a temporary mobile residence.
As the massive ship materialised in the void, providing them with the luxury Olana craved, she remained silent for several hours. She was clearly pissed off, taking the initial use of the scout ship as a personal slight against her dignity.
Yet, despite her anger, she couldn't deny the logic. Using the small ship had saved them more than a full day of travel ti, giving them a massive head start on the competition. What truly puzzled her, however, was Hye's behaviour at each hub.
She had watched him step out into the observation deck, pull out a weirdly designed staff, and wave it a few tis in the air with a look of intense concentration before storing it away and moving to the next location.
She saw him do this three tis with rhythmic precision, and she couldn't help but wonder if that staff was so sort of legendary treasure or a key to a power she didn't understand.
"I got the word on the suits you wanted," she said suddenly, her voice cutting through the silence of the flagship's lounge after several hours of brooding. She had been monitoring her family's secure channels. "The deal is moving forward. They've agreed to the volu, but they are being specific about the paynt. They want that bone ..."
The central hololith of the flagship flickered to life, projecting a crisp, rotating image of a single bone. It was a dark gold specin, its surface etched with deep, natural striations that humd with a latent, terrestrial energy.
"Just one bone?" Hye asked, his voice echoing with genuine surprise.
In the vast economy of his inventory, he considered the dark gold normal bone to be of relatively low value.
To him, the primary function of such items was fuel—either burned in the furnace of his crystal heart or fed into the massive gem he had planted back at his territory to power the planetary defences.
Aside from their utility as an energy source, he had largely written off normal bones as a depreciated currency.
Yet, here was a seller willing to exchange a staggering one trillion atmospheric combat suits for a single dark gold grade bone. The disparity seed almost nonsensical.
"He insists that its value is high enough to cover the entirety of the manufacturing and shipping costs for the suits," Olana explained, her expression mirroring Hye's confusion. She leaned in closer to the projection, her eyes scanning the unique density of the marrow.
"I recognise this bone, Hye. It was one of the earliest high-grade materials you traded with the Toranks twenty years ago. But if you think about it from the perspective of the wider market... it seems you've traded very few of these over the decades."
"Oh, I see. The market is hungry for this specific tier," Hye said, his eyes shining with a sudden, sharp clarity.
He realised now exactly what he had missed in his assessnt of his own wealth. He had assud that twenty years of constant trade had saturated the market with his normal bones, driving the price into the dirt.
But he had been thinking in broad strokes. While the common grades—the whites, greens, and blues—might be ubiquitous to the point of worthlessness, he had been much more selective with the higher tiers.
He couldn't recall the exact numbers, but he knew he hadn't flooded the markets with the dark gold grade.
"The Toranks must have kept the higher grades as a strategic reserve," Hye slowly muttered, a smirk touching his lips. "I traded enough with them to crash the value if they had released it all at once. The only explanation is that they've been hoarding these in their central treasury, artificially maintaining the scarcity. To the rest of the universe, a dark gold normal bone is still a legendary relic."
"It makes sense," Olana agreed. "To a dium-sized kingdom or a private manufacturer, possessing even one of these would be a massive boon for their research or energy sectors."
"Fine. If they want to overpay, I won't stop them. Finish the deal and have the suits transferred to my secondary inventory imdiately," Hye said. He flicked the dark gold bone toward Olana, who captured it in a containnt field and processed the transaction.
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