Chapter 156 – Phoenix Feather

It was dark when I woke up.

Jace glanced at his pocket watch, but it was just after 7:00 p.m. It just got dark earlier in the old country than it did in the south.

Seeing the crack in the pocket watch, he remembered that he had also promised Amy Marin that he would buy her some sort of souvenir to take back.

Might as well go outside and see what’s out there that’s suitably good, this trip isn’t exactly unforgiving time though, and Jace doesn’t have nothing to do but lie around the house wasting time.

Go out and pick and choose, even if you don’t buy, you have an idea of what gifts are available.

Upon rising, Jace felt much fresher in his consciousness than he had at noon, and felt so comfortable that even the burns on his arms didn’t feel as noticeable.

He wiped up the bandage slightly and looked at it, well, it still didn’t look good.

Walking down the stairs, Dushan was eating dinner, a musty odor of rotting cheese wafting through the house, and he twitched his nose, finally targeting the food in Dushan’s hand.

Jace inexplicably had the illusion that he’d been sitting here eating all afternoon.

Did the medicine kick in?”

Jace rubbed his temples and the headache was gone. “Seems pretty good.”

“Great.” Dushan held up a green piece of cheese in his hand and said, “Want to come along and have some?”

Jace took one look at the piece and always felt that eating it would lead to unforeseen disaster, which was even more intimidating than the blue cheese in Storm City.

“My stomach seems pretty full, teacher, thanks. I’d like to go out and get some air, go shopping or something.”

“Where are you planning to go?” Dushan said, “It’s not easy to come to Dalaran, we must have a good look around, there’s a very lively shopping street on the east side, and now that it’s about to be the Winter Curtain Festival, there’s already quite a lot of activities going on, don’t you want to go and have some fun?”

“There’s a Winterfest in Dalaran too?”

Jace was kinda surprised, even though the inhabitants of the Stormwind Kingdom had already embraced the concept of Winterfest a long time ago due to their frequent exchanges with Carmageddon and the fact that there were a lot of dwarves living in the city itself.

But on the continent of Lordaeron, at least outside of the Eagle’s Nest Mountains, the concept of Winterfest hadn’t been fully rolled out. The Brute Hammer is much more closed off than the Copperbeard, and is less inclined to share itself with the world outside of Cintron.

Of course, the sharing of such holiday traditions has deepened rapidly with the cooperation between Dwarves and Humans during the Orc Wars, but at least in the royal city of Lordaeron, there have been no celebrations on the scale of those in Stormwind.

“Some gnomes and goblins are over there setting up the festival grounds, you can check it out.” Dushan said.

That’s true, there are quite a lot of gnomes in Dalaran, gnomes are deeply influenced by dwarves, and goblins can always come up with some way to make money, it’s normal to rub it in or something.

When I came outside and went east as Dushan had said, I was sure that a lot of the premises and stores were hung with ribbons, snow decorations, etc.

The streets were crowded, a number of teenage children in Dalaran robes chasing and playing with candy canes of various colors, and every time a little blonde girl scurried past, it drew Jace to stare intently for a moment.

Not because he was some kind of perverted lolicon or anything like that, but he actually wanted to see if he could identify Gianna Prodmore in this group of kids.

She would be in her early teens now, about the same age as the little kids running around all over the place here.

Gianna’s father, the leader of Kul Tiras, Admiral Daelin Prodmore, sent his daughter to Dalaran to learn magic when she was twelve years old, and Gianna seldom left Dalaran after that until she finished her studies here.

Of course, he had no idea what the Gianna of this world looked like, let alone her appearance as a child, and looking back and forth like this was just a boredom-inducing pastime while wandering the streets.

Or maybe she hadn’t gotten here yet, and Jace had gotten here that much earlier.

Path walking with group after group of kids, Jess came to a small ice cream caravan.

These kids were excitedly taking money to buy away one by one cones, and he had been watching around this car to see if there was an ice mage or something hiding underneath it.

I didn’t have much of a clue what to do with the squat, so I had to buy one for myself.

A silver coin for a cone, and all he could do was marvel at the jaggedness of the world; the children of Dalaran were truly rich.

This cart is so profitable, Jace is also too lazy to explore what he has to do to make ice, spend money to hire two mages, one to make ice and one to rely on teleportation magic to send it to the cart, it might be feasible.

The weather was quite cool, not quite right for such frozen treats, but the cones melted slower that way, and Jace licked his ice cream as he glanced at the little store down the road.

It did have a few knick-knack stores selling things that could be used as gifts, including a toy store that I’d never even seen in Storm City, making the whole street look like Disneyland.

But Amy was almost thirty, and wasn’t it a mockery of her intelligence to buy a child’s toy back for herself?

So what’s the right thing to give?

Book?

If he couldn’t get the collection of books in Dalaran’s library, I’m afraid that Amy, as a trainee mage, wouldn’t even be able to read them, and she might even have read them all.

A wand or a staff?

The Marlins felt pretty rich, and Amy shouldn’t be able to look at a wand that Jace could afford.

In the end, it still comes down to a question of money, when Amy casually said to bring some souvenirs back, it feels quite simple, but the result is really to Dalaran left and right, but I don’t know what to get.

While he was confused, he was seeing a book and text carving store on the corner of the street in front of him.

How about buying a quill and sending it back? Something like a griffin feather, which was rarely seen in the Stormwind Kingdom, wasn’t too expensive over here, so it should be a good choice.

With that thought in mind, Jace walked right in, and the aroma of ink and paper immediately surrounded him.

“Greetings, Mage of Stormwind, welcome, we have not seen many guests from the Sorcerer’s Temple here.”

There were no customers in the store, and the owner was a gnome, and a proper gnome at that, not the kind where humans get sick.

With his gibberish tone, it was hard for Jace to tell if he was shading something or if he was actually welcoming.

The gnome sat in a chair taller than himself facing out over the counter, and Jace looked at the whole rows and rows of tall cargo containers behind him, wondering how this guy was going to get to them if he picked up anything.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“How much is regular copy paper here?”

“Two silver and forty-four bronze, sir.”

“How many?”

“Twelve sheets to a serving.”

“Why is it so expensive.”

“Sir, we import all our paper from Stormwind, maybe the wagon you were riding in when you came here had our goods na!”

Jace froze and looked at Kanru for two seconds before saying, “Well, I’d like to see the pen.”

“We have the usual turkey feather pens here, but of course we also have duck feathers, eagle feathers, owl iron feathers, vulture feathers, land bird feathers, griffin feathers, jaybeast feathers, wind snake feathers ……”

Jace listened to the gnome as skillfully as he had named the dishes, not even realizing that there could be so many kinds of feathers that could be made into pens.

If it weren’t for the fact that these people couldn’t get to Kalimdor across the Endless Sea to stock up, they would probably be able to make feather quills out of all the hairs plucked off the Hawkman’s body.

“Finally, there’s the Phoenix Feather, which one to look for?”

Wait, Phoenix Feather?