FFF-Tier System, SSS-Rank Wife-Chapter 61: Queue stones

When thinking about crossing roughly half of the town to get from the inn we stayed at to Greg’s smithy, all I could imagine were huge crowds of people occupying every single inch of the street.

From the carriages busying the middle of the town’s road to scatter all sorts of wares throughout the city’s shops like delivering goods like veins would deliver oxygenated blood to human organs to the masses of pedestrians rushing to go from point A to point B in their everyday struggle against life itself.

Then, I expected to see some kind of a massive crowd gathered out in the distance, where the town’s adventurer’s guild was supposedly located, with their crowd alone contributing at least a third of all of the town’s foot-traffic, with the paths by the adventurers deciding which part of the town would be busiest and which would be spared most of the noise.

The reality, however, was often disappointing.

The town was rather active in the morning, there was no denying that.

But it was nowhere near the level that I expected, almost as if the greatest rush hour of the day wasn’t around the late morning to early afternoon hours, but much earlier.

Almost as if the time in this town wasn’t decided by when people felt most rested, but when the sun would rise up in the sky, providing them with just enough light for the locals to wake up and go about their jobs.

"I guess it’s another small oddity that I will have to get used to," I’ve muttered under my nose, still unable to shake the weird feeling of being but a tourist in this town rather than its rightful member.

"Another one of your observations?" Selia asked, her demeanour changing back to how she was yesterday as soon as we hit the streets. "A bronze for your thoughts."

"I would pay a bronze not to share them," I shook my head. "Just watching how different this town is to what I would expect a mere week ago."

A week ago would mark the weekend during which I was busy with coming up with new layouts for my factory within a popular game. And given how Selia was with me from almost the very beginning of my journey in this world, she was the only one in this town that could understand the true meaning of those words.

"Is it really all that different?" she asked, locking her hands behind her back and then leaning forward just a bit, only to then lean back and push her chin up, staring up at the blue sky first before turning her eyes towards our surroundings.

By all means, this wasn’t the most glamorous part of the town.

Heck, I would be amazed if this place actually had a fancy part to it!

That left us with nothing but low-rise, two, maybe three stories-high houses all around, with some of them sporting some sort of a workshop at the ground floor while the residents of others would use their front yard as a sort of a trading spot where they would either display their own wares or put down some sort of runes that apparently described what they were interested in buying.

It was both an interesting and a clever system, where businesses would send people around to collect this information. Then, between the third and fourth ringing of the town’s bell, the lunch break would begin, with negotiators dispatched by those very businesses to settle on the exact details or bid with each other if any of their customers got an offer from competition.

Then, throughout the rest of the day, those salesmen would send out delivery teams, each saddled with the product on their way to the customer and then returning with the agreed-upon amount of money.

Obviously, it was a system that existed alongside your usual trading scenario with market areas of the town where people could set up their stalls or the workshops selling directly to those who approached with a request.

And I could even see the signs on just how this sort of scheme was developed, given the adventurer-centered economy of the town.

Those were just small hints, though, nowhere near enough for me to construct a precise answer on just how did those two systems come to be at the same time, and end up reinforcing each other by pushing everyone to engage in trade as opposed to stilling each other’s potential.

"Here we are..." Saintess muttered just loud enough for me to hear.

Yet, as I turned out and realized we were still on a town’s street with buildings all around, I couldn’t help but stop right in my track.

"Wasn’t the smithy way on the edge of the town?" I asked, confused by the discrepancy between my memories and Selia’s sudden pit-stop.

"That’s right," she nodded her head only to reach her hand out and point at an orderly line of stones neatly arranged by the street’s gutter.

There were no marks on them at all. Or, at the very least, no marks that I could recognize as a word, system of writing, rune or even an intended picture.

"What are those?" I asked, leaning over the orderly line of the rocks.

"Queue rocks," Selia shortly explained only to reach into one of the sacks hanging off her belt, pluck out a small, engraved pebble before carefully placing it a foot behind the last stone in line. "And judging by its length, we have around two, maybe three hours before we will be able to get to the store."

My eyes widened up at the mention of time.

"Two, three hours?" I asked, not sure whether I heard correctly.

I then looked up the street, then over my shoulder to the back...

And save for two adventurers who approached, placed their queue stones behind Selia’s and then left without a word, I couldn’t spot a single living soul!

"How do they even know if their turn is coming up?" I asked, still puzzled, "It’s not like Greg’s smithy could have someone running all over the town, warning people their turn is about to come!" I protested.

This system, while smart on the outside, came with way too many problems for me to just take it on a face’s value!

And yet...?

"Yeah," Selia nodded her head, proving the point I just made was indeed as ridiculous as I saw it. "They did away with that method about five years ago. But after the initial mess..." she then shrugged her shoulders.

"People simply learned to respect the queue, lest they wanted to cause trouble and be thrown out of it, with no regard of who started the trouble and who ended it."

The shrug of her shoulders said it all.

The disregard, a sense of superiority that brimmed in her voice as she spoke of ’Those morons’ that couldn’t wait for their allotted turn.

Heck, as I’ve listened to her story, I came under the impression that even the town’s mayor, assuming they had someone like that, would have no other choice but to obediently stay in the line!

A short-lived misconception. For when the ringing of the town’s bell filled the air, only to made Selia’s lips twist in a slightly devilish grin.

"Obviously," she smiled as she locked her arms over her chest and tapped her fingers against her forearm in the world’s common pose of impatience, "if you know how, you can skip most of the queue altogether with this one simple cheat called bribe!"