Chapter 005: Delivery at Dawn
[Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.]
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{LUCIAN GILFORD}
The lamps were already lit when I reached the Hearthlight Rest. Their amber glow pooled across the cobblestones, soft and uneven, the kind of light that made the cracks in the walls look almost deliberate. The air smelled faintly of bread, woodsmoke, and whatever stew the innkeeper had put on to simmer for the evening crowd.
Inside, the warmth hit me like a blanket. The same older woman stood behind the counter, arms folded, expression caught somewhere between recognition and suspicion.
"You again," she said.
"Me again," I answered, pulling the small coin pouch from my pocket. "This time, I can actually pay."
That earned me a raised eyebrow.
"I'll take two nights," I added before she could ask. "Room and board. Simple's fine."
She tapped the counter, doing the math aloud in that slow rhythm locals used for money. "Fifteen hundred Valis. Breakfast and supper included. You eat what's served, no complaints, no second helpings until everyone else's had theirs."
"Understood." I counted the coins carefully—fifteen of the bronze 100Ʌ̶ pieces—and slid them across. The sound of each coin striking wood was strangely satisfying.
She swept them into a drawer with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd been cheated too many times to romanticize payment. "Room's the same one you slept in front of last night," she said, grabbing a key from the pegboard. "Try not to die in it. I hate paperwork."
"I'll do my best."
"Dinner's in an hour. Bread, stew, and if you're lucky, actual meat."
I thanked her and took the key upstairs. The narrow hallway creaked with every step, and the door to my room stuck slightly before giving way. Inside was small but mercifully clean—a narrow bed with a faded quilt, a washbasin, and a single shuttered window overlooking the street. It wasn't luxury, but after two nights of benches and warehouses, it looked like paradise.
I set my pouch on the nightstand and poured out the remaining 1 000Ʌ̶—ten coins exactly. Enough for food emergencies or a bribe, whichever came first. I lined them up in a neat little row on the table, just to see them catch the light, then pocketed them again. The rest of my world—phone, wallet, keys—went on the table beside the washbasin.
Dinner turned out to be exactly as advertised: bread, stew, and a single chunk of questionable meat floating somewhere near the bottom. I ate every bite. Hunger did wonders for appreciation. Around me, the other guests—mostly laborers and lower-rank adventurers—talked in a comfortable jumble of dialects, none of which I fully understood. It didn't matter. The noise was human, steady, warm.
When I went back upstairs, the window caught a sliver of moonlight over the rooftops. My phone read 21:09, the little notification still waiting:
Order in final transit. Estimated arrival — 0700, 4/16/999.
I placed it face-down on the table and lay back. The bed was narrow, the blanket scratchy, but it didn't matter. Tomorrow morning, something from my world would arrive in this one.
And for once, I didn't have to do anything but wait.
The world felt quiet when my alarm went off. A single soft chime, the kind that I'd once snoozed through every morning before work, dragged me out of sleep. I cracked one eye open to the gray-blue light spilling through the shutters. The phone screen glowed faintly on the nightstand beside me—07:15, right on time.
I reached out to silence it, my hand brushing against something cold and smooth instead of the blanket.
I froze.
A second later, my eyes adjusted, and the shape came into focus: a familiar shrink-wrapped rectangle of plastic, the Kirkland logo staring up at me like a punchline. A forty-count case of bottled water sat squarely on the mattress beside me, condensation still beading on the plastic like it had just been pulled from a cooler.
For a long moment, I just stared.
It was absurd, perfectly absurd—neatly placed, no scorch marks, no sound, no glow. Just there. Like someone had crept into my room while I slept and gently deposited a hundred pounds of retail hydration on my bed.
"...You've got to be kidding me," I muttered.
I pushed myself upright, still blinking, and ran my fingers along the packaging. The bottles were cool to the touch, the air inside the plastic slightly chilled. Real and tangible and delivered exactly as promised.
The phone chimed again. A single notification pulsed across the screen:
Order Complete.
Kirkland Signature Purified Water, 40-count.
Delivered 07:00 local time.
Thank you for shopping the Great Warehouse.
The absurd professionalism of it nearly made me laugh. "Right," I said aloud. "Because nothing says divine intervention like Costco logistics."
I looked back at the case. It hadn't crushed the mattress, though the corner was bent slightly where it rested against my leg. Not even a single drop of spilled condensation. Whatever system handled delivery, it did so quietly—and with unnerving precision.
Leaning over, I picked up one bottle and twisted the cap open. The faint pop sounded exactly like it should. I took a sip.
It was cold.
Not room temperature. Not lukewarm. Cold.
I sat there for a while, drinking water from another world, watching the morning light crawl across the floorboards. Somewhere downstairs, I heard the clatter of plates and the muffled murmur of the inn's breakfast crowd. Normal life, unbothered by the fact that an entire case of plastic bottles had just appeared out of thin air.
I sighed and capped the bottle again, the corners of my mouth twitching into something between disbelief and reluctant amusement.
"Well," I said to the empty room. "At least they're punctual."
I sat there staring at the case, the morning light slanting through the shutters and catching on the condensation. It felt too normal for how impossible it was. A moment later, my phone buzzed softly on the nightstand, the sound neat and polite—like a digital throat-clearing.
A notification slid across the screen:
New Membership Benefit Unlocked
Preferred Handling (Lv.1)
Active Perk: Merchandise carried by the member weighs 10% less while in personal possession.
I blinked at it. Then again, slower this time.
"Right," I said aloud. "Because interdimensional Costco also does loyalty rewards."
Still, curiosity beat skepticism. I braced both hands under the edge of the case and lifted. It came up easier than I expected—still heavy, but not forty-bottles-of-water heavy. About a tenth lighter, my arms guessed. Just enough to notice, not enough to make sense.
I set it back down and scrolled through the app. The new perk had a cheerful icon beside it: a tiny shopping cart with wings. Underneath, in smaller print, it read:
"A valued member deserves lighter loads."
I couldn't decide if that was comforting or deeply sarcastic.
"Guess I'm moving up in the world," I muttered, running a hand through my hair.
For a moment, I just stood there, staring at the absurdity of it all—the bed, the sunlight, the bottled water from another dimension sitting where a person should've been—and realized this was my life now: a man with no home, a job at a warehouse, and a membership plan that rewarded punctuality with mild antigravity.
I laughed softly under my breath and reached for the bundle. "Well, let's see how the locals feel about imported water."
The crate came up easier than it should have—heavy, sure, but not back-breaking. The faint slosh of water followed every step as I took the stairs slow, the wood creaking under my boots. By the time I reached the common room, half a dozen heads had turned toward me.
People here had seen plenty of strange things; adventurers dragged monster hides through the door every day. But plastic—apparently—wasn't one of them.
The morning crowd went quiet. A few laborers leaned forward, eyes narrowing at the clear wrapping that caught the light like glass. One man muttered something that sounded like "witch's glass." A woman pointed at the bottles and whispered, "No seams."
The innkeeper's rag froze halfway through wiping the counter. "What in the name of the gods is that?" she asked, her voice flat with suspicion.
"Water," I said. "Just—uh, bottled."
She blinked. "Bottled?"
I set the case on an empty table with a dull thump. "From… a supplier I know."
A few of them gathered closer. One braver soul reached out to touch the plastic, jerking his hand back the moment it flexed under his fingers. "Soft glass?"
"Not glass," I said, twisting the cap off one of the bottles. The little pop of the seal broke the silence. The smell of clean air—sterile, filtered—spilled into a room that usually reeked of smoke and yeast. I took a sip. The water was cold enough to shock my teeth.
Their eyes followed the bottle like it was a holy relic.
The innkeeper frowned. "You said water. But it's… clear."
"As water tends to be," I said before I could stop myself.
Her frown deepened. I sighed and held the bottle out. "Here. Try it."
She hesitated, then took it from me with both hands, careful as though it might bite. She tilted it toward the light, watching the liquid shift. Then she raised it to her lips and drank.
The change was immediate—her brows lifted, her posture straightened, and for a second she looked younger. "It's… cold," she said softly, staring at the bottle as if it might explain itself. "Cold and clean."
Around us, the others murmured. Someone asked how I'd made it; another wanted to know if it was safe. I could only shrug. "Just water," I said. "From home."
The innkeeper took another sip, then passed it back like it was worth gold. "You sell this?"
"I… might," I admitted.
The way she looked at me then wasn't fear. It was calculation—the kind people reserve for something valuable they don't understand.
"Well," she said at last, setting the bottle on the counter like an offering. "If all your water tastes like that, you won't be needing to rent my room much longer."
For a moment I thought I'd misheard them. A hundred Valis per bottle? That was a third of my entire cost for the whole case.
I blinked at the small knot of locals forming around the table. One man already had his coin pouch half-open, his eyes locked on the condensation rolling down the plastic. Another woman whispered to the innkeeper that she'd pay two hundred if he didn't.
Internally, my brain was running math faster than any accountant ever could. The case had cost me just under three hundred Valis total—and that was with delivery fees practically gift-wrapped. Forty bottles. At their offer, I'd make four thousand back.
Even I wasn't greedy enough to start that high. Not yet.
"Fifty," I said before the bidding could climb any further.
They all looked at me.
"Fifty Valis per bottle," I repeated. "Flat. No haggling, no credit, no complaints if you come back late and I'm sold out."
The room went still for a breath, and then the first man grinned and slapped a coin onto the table. "I'll take one!"
That broke the dam. Coins hit the wood like rain—silvers, bronzes, a few smaller denomination pieces that I'd only half-learned to recognize. I kept my composure, handing out bottles one by one, the cool plastic gleaming under the lamplight. Every time someone twisted the cap and took a sip, their face changed; confusion melted into wonder, then satisfaction.
It wasn't just clean water—it was miraculous. Clear, cold, no smell, no metallic aftertaste. Even the innkeeper took another and muttered that she hadn't tasted anything so pure since she was a child.
By the time the last buyer left, nine bottles were gone and my coin pouch felt noticeably heavier. The table was littered with small droplets of water where condensation had fallen—tiny proofs that the impossible was real.
I gathered the remaining bottles back into the case, feeling the weight ease subtly in my hands. My phone chimed in my pocket with a soft, familiar tone—something about "transaction volume detected" that I ignored for now.
Fifty Valis a bottle. I'd just turned a morning delivery into almost twice its value.
As I cinched the pouch shut and sat back in the chair, a grin crept onto my face before I could stop it.
"Welcome to entrepreneurship," I murmured. "Population: me."