Chapter 48 Orcish Language Classes

Jace didn’t dare to go back to the already slaughtered lamb, after all, if you messed with someone’s leader, you weren’t asking for trouble?

He spent every afternoon in the library teaching himself the Orcish language, and also spent 5 silver coins to ask the blacksmith in the Dwarf District to beat up a sword that weighed about the same as that Stormgarde Straight Sword, so that he could use it to practice his skills with Griddles with the real sword, and level up a little better when the time came.

These days the days cooled quickly, in Azeroth, humans, dwarves use a calendar similar to Earth’s Gregorian calendar, the year is still divided into 12 months, just that the language of each race will use different names for different months.

For example, the dwarves would call April the month of Sullen, and there was a difference between Lordaeron and the Storm Kingdom, in short it was hard to tell. Perhaps because of this, the habit of just calling numbers became more and more common after countries and races became more and more intertwined.

The first day of October was a Tuesday, which was Jace’s first orcish class.

That afternoon, after looking around the Wizard’s Sanctuary several times at the address Marin had given him, he found the classroom a little late, even though he had arrived half an hour early.

Upon entering, the teacher seemed to be absent, and a group of students sat around the already small classroom, looking over in unison.

What surprised Jace a bit was that there were about 20 people here, none of whom seemed to be younger than him, and quite a few middle-aged people, and even a couple of older people who looked like a couple, with graying hair, likely going on 70 years old and up.

“Jess Sesso, right?” At that moment a middle-aged man waved and said, “I’m Carlo Duchamp, I think Master Marin has already introduced me to you.”

“Ah …… Master Duchamp.” Jace nodded slightly, he hadn’t expected this teacher to be sitting around with his students, plus the fact that these people were of all ages from young to old, it was completely impossible to tell which one might be the teacher.

Duchamp wore a pair of small glasses, had a shaved head, looked thin and tall, and always kept a smile at the edge of his burr-browed bearded mouth.

Seeing that Jess was a bit overwhelmed, he said, “Come on, you’re the youngest in this classroom, we’ll look after you.”

The others smiled and nodded, full of politeness, and Jace, still extremely uncomfortable with a classroom that smelled so grown-up, could only smile awkwardly in response and sit to the side.

“It’s like this.” Dushan said, “What about this class of ours, unlike other language courses that follow the teacher from the beginning to the end, but mainly focuses on communication, everyone takes out their own collection of Orcish language related materials, and tries to translate them based on what we already have …… , and then exchanges opinions with each other. When looking at other people’s materials, please be careful not to be too rough and hold them lightly, as every orcish book or letter is worth a very expensive amount of money, so I would also recommend that each student try to copy a copy of the orcish runes themselves to come to class and not take the original, even though it takes several times the amount of effort. As for the other notes, let’s talk about them a little bit as we proceed through the class.”

In fact, during Duchamp’s presentation of the class rules, Jace had been sizing up the looks and dress of the people around him, and was still a little wary of running into members of the Slaughtered Lamb Basement Warlocks here as he was a little worried before he arrived.

After all, if Marin was right, this classroom had been the only orcish classroom in the Wizard’s Sanctuary, and if the warlocks had taken the spell for orcish, they would have tried to squeeze in.

Luckily, though, there were no people who looked familiar or looked at them with strange eyes, so they shouldn’t be recognizable.

Most importantly, Gagin isn’t in this.

Yet when Dushan spoke – every orcish book, the epigraphic value of which was very expensive – he felt his attention tugged from his mouth for a moment.

How expensive?

How much can you sell a tattered book with nine-tenths of its pages burned? How much for a tome of unintelligible orcish and unknown languages? How much could a scroll of letters of command written in Talon Bloodmage’s own hand sell for?

That burnt out book with the bilingual canon is certainly not something Jace is likely to sell.

But that Talon-Blood Demon order didn’t seem to have much value anymore; after all, he’d already copied a copy of it, and he had no interest in collecting them.

How much could you get if you found a rich person interested in collecting orc-related artifacts and sold that thing?

Hidden Treasure Bay …… Hidden Treasure Bay ……

Thinking of the story that staff merchant Alan Havergan had told about the staff that sold for 240 gold coins, Jace felt a little brainwashed already.

这封信可是兽人高层里的高层，精英里的精英的亲笔信，不仅有收藏价值，甚至还有一点军事价值。

Maybe this means that there’s a genuine Death Knight walking around on Azeroth today who hasn’t been captured, and he’s been waiting for the order to retreat from Prefect Talon Blood Demon until the Dark Gate is occupied by the Alliance ……

Thinking about all this, can’t this letter be sold for a few gold coins?

“Jace Sesso.” Dushan suddenly called out to himself, and Jace froze for a moment, so it turned out that he had been trying to walk away.

In his first class, and a strange one with a crowd sitting around him, he had gone a few thousand miles south with his thoughts running away in front of so many people.

“Please look at this rune and what you think he means.”

Dushan handed Jace a piece of paper with orcish writing on it.

Jace looked left and right, recalling the orcish runes he’d read from the library over the past two days, feeling as if there was a similarity, but couldn’t conjure up where it was.

After all, he’d only been learning it for three or four days, and while the intensity was pretty high, a completely different alphabet system wouldn’t have been possible to familiarize himself with in such a short period of time, and even if he’d seen it, he wouldn’t have seemed to be able to recognize it.

“This rune reads, Makgora.” Dushan reminded, “It’s a very important ritual in Orc culture.”

Jace had a vague impression of the pronunciation of “Makgorah”, but couldn’t really remember what it meant, but when Dushan said it was a very important ceremony, one thing popped into his head – a duel of honor.

For all he knew of this ceremony of the orcs was the initiation of an unending duel for the position of chief of a tribe.

“Duel of honor.” Jace nodded at the piece of paper and said, “I know this one.”

When he finished he felt the sweat sticking out of his hair.

“Honor duel?” Dushan and the other students around him wore a confused look.

Jess looked back and forth and asked cautiously, “Is it wrong?”

“This one means dueling all right.” A middle-aged student next to him said, “But why is there a layer of honor?”

Jace realized that he was being smart and meaning more than he could say, rather than just saying he didn’t know.

He wanted to open his mouth to explain, but then realized that if he told some cultural content about honor duels, it would make these students and teachers who didn’t know much about orcs even more suspicious of him, so he beat a dead horse and said, “I thought that orc duels might be the same as human aristocrats, in order to compete for an important thing like a lover, like dignity, or something, but not a death match , so dueling each other point blank …… That’s just my own understanding.”

“There is a certain possibility.” Dushan said, “Orcs are a race that loves to fight, and might decide some matters within the tribe by way of a duel.”

“I don’t agree ……,” said another younger woman, “I don’t think orcs have any sense of honor, they burn and loot all the way through without doing anything wrong. If they love to fight, then it would make more sense to fight until they die instead, right?”

Jace knew the woman was right, before the young High Chief Sal ruled the Horde, orc duels had always been to the death, or at the very least, to beat the other person until they were so badly injured that they could no longer fight.

At that point, an old man said, “Maybe they’d be kinder to their own people.”

Another man said, “When the orcs attacked the western wilderness, some of the farms weren’t looted as badly. The towns where the orcs did the most damage were garrisoned, and the ones that resisted the most …… perhaps they did not want to harm their unarmed enemies.”

“There was a village in the swamp that was slaughtered to the hilt, what decent weapons do you think those swamp folk could have against an army of orcs? I see you’re not far from being an orc sympathizer, you’re ignoring all those countless dead peasants and burned out farms from Elwyn to Red Ridge.” A young man retorted.

“Don’t arbitrarily assert someone else’s position, boy.” The man snapped, “Are you going to ignore some objective facts in order to express your own righteousness? Then I would like to see how you interpret the orcs’ motives for not wanting to harm the western ranchers!”

“It’s just slavery in a backward civilization.” An older female student said slowly, “Orcs need to eat and drink too, they need slaves to feed themselves.”

“We are not a course for cultural and political discussions.” Duchamp stopped the argument that was about to disperse to the moon, even a little dangerous, “As for the values of the orcs, the social concepts, leave it to those scholars of history, sociology, and race, we’ll focus on the study of language.”

More than a teacher, Dushan was more like a moderator, keeping the discussion from straying too far from the language itself. After all, in the current alliance, how to treat orcs was a rather dangerous topic.

The next few students shared their material, and Jace really did learn quite a bit of orcish grammar that he hadn’t noticed from the library, as well as some vocabulary usage habits.

At the end of the class, Duchamp gave Jace a stack of paper and said, “This is a summary of some of the work we did some time ago, you can read it well as a remedial textbook, and when you’re almost done with it, give it back because we only made two copies, and it’s really, really hard to copy the orcish runes.”

Jace couldn’t agree more, how long would it take to copy such a thick stack of paper, it would surely help his orcish progress immensely.