With the young farmer's help, passing through the gates lost all of its difficulty. And while someone stuck-up would grieve the loss of the opportunity to smack a guard's face with his royal identity, Theo simply felt grateful for all the time he saved by missing this less-than-interesting interaction.
"Now that we are inside," with the gate left behind them, the young farmer grew a bit more brazen, "is the market really what you are here for?"
The man's voice carried just the tiniest hint of suspicion. As if he wanted to know if he would come to regret his choice to help Theo out.
"Believe it or not, but yes," Theo replied with a smile. "And while I'm here to sell exactly what you might assume from my clothes, what I'm here to buy…?" Theo shook his head with slight exasperation. Then, his smile grew. "How about you try to guess?"
The young farmer raised his eyebrows, only to then smile himself.
"A formation stone!" he quickly voiced out his guess. "That's what's the most popular ware the caravan brought, after all!"
Theo's smile grew even larger, only for him to shake his head in denial.
"Not at all," he grinned with a triumphant look on his face. "All I want is sugar, salt, booze, and then some pastries," he revealed with a shake of his shoulders. "In all honesty, I'm just a glorified delivery guy today, picked for the job only because my status can stop the merchants from… an unreasonable level of price hikes."
It was pretty much common knowledge that cultivators would pay a lot more for everything. It was a rule that applied to everything other than stuff only cultivators would use, born from their disinterest in the world of the mortals they often found to be below their stature to be interested in.
With cultivators and nobles simply refusing to mingle with the common folk, it made them perfect targets for the merchants who happily doubled, tripled, and sometimes even quintupled the prices of every common good whenever trading with a cultivator.
A noble wouldn't even notice the difference in the cost, after all, while a merchant or a farmer on the other end of the stall could make a neat profit.
It was as much of a secret as it was just another of the weird social dynamics developed simply by people living their lives in the circumstances surrounding them and trying to do the best for themselves.
And judging by the farmer's small smile, Theo mentioning it only served as the greatest proof he really came to Vistra for what he claimed.
"Some kind of a celebration?"
Theo nodded his head again.
"Yeah. My sect leader is about to break through, so I'm here to prepare for a feast. And well, if you were to ask me…" Theo intentionally shifted his tone to a conspiratorial one, acting as if he was about to reveal some kind of a big secret, "I think he actually grew an unusual fancy for intense foods. So getting the supplies for the feast? Pastries and booze?" Theo shook his head.
He then leaned over the farmer's side, covering his mouth with his hand while bringing it closer to the man's ear.
"I think that he just wants to restock on sugar and salt so that he can indulge!"
The young farmer turned his head, giving Theo a shocked look. A look that then quickly transformed into one of knowing and understanding.
"I see," he muttered, before squinting his eyes and looking down while reaching up with his free hand to rub his chin. "In that case, you might want to ignore the caravan and go to Kresby," he muttered, still rubbing his chin. "While they charge a bit more than a farmer would, you should get a relatively fair price with him."
"Kresby?" Theo asked, happily taking note of a potential clue, although for quite the different reason than the young farmer might assume.
"He's the head of the farmer's cooperative," the young man quickly explained. "And the owner of the big shop over there," he added while reaching out with his hand to point down the street and then away from it, to one of the bigger buildings in the entire town when excluding the castle's district. "Not to mention, you should be able to sell whatever it is that you want to sell at his place too!"
"That's actually…" Theo's eyes turned wide open as he stared at the young farmer, "a massive help, man, really!" he admitted without any restraint. "If anything, rather than high prices, wasting time by scouring through every stall in the town was what I feared the most!"
That part was perfectly true.
Given the amount of salt and sugar Theo needed for his own purposes, he fully expected to visit every single stall in the city before getting his money's worth.
'I would say I'm really lucky to be offered such great advice,' he thought, giving the young farmer a quick yet piercing glance, 'if not for that guy being a cultivator himself.'
The "young farmer's" disguise was perfect. His clothes had just the right amount of dirt on them to sell the idea of him working the fields just before setting off for the city. There was even dirt stuck underneath his nails and hiding in the locks of his hair while the man, quite literally, smelled of fresh crops and fertilizing manure.
In the eyes of a normal cultivator, this man would appear as a bona fide farmer, one with just the level of cultivation one could expect from the frontier farmers.
And with just his cultivation-borne senses, Theo wouldn't see anything beyond the man's near-perfect disguise either, not unless he suddenly jumped two if not three ranks higher than he was!
But…
For a mage, the man's disguised strength was too much of an obvious clue to miss.
By suppressing his cultivation from a realm clearly beyond Theo's own strength to something between the second and third realms of spirit vein awakening and Qi manifestation, the mana around the man inevitably acted… strange.
Its flow was too intense for the man to be on the level that he pretended to be!
And with this one clue as a starting point, Theo could easily dismantle the rest of the illusion.
The young farmer… wasn't young at all. It was actually a man in the strength of his years, with a physique that betrayed him as a seasoned fighter.
With that in mind, it wasn't all that hard to figure out the man's identity either.
'A silent protector, huh?' Theo thought while doing his best to keep his findings to himself, stopping the pride from uncovering the man's secret from reflecting on his face.
It was perfectly reasonable for one of the city's defenders to draw his eyes towards an unknown cultivator. Or, in Theo's case, to rush to find out just why did the Slevian-sect-affiliated royal arrive at the gate facing the direction opposite to where he should've come from!
Still, given Theo's status, it wasn't something a mere guard or even a high-ranking cultivator could openly investigate, not without the risk of inviting royal ire.
Which made the silent protector, one of Vistra's hidden powerhouses, a perfect man to sneakily investigate to ensure there was no foul play in the making.
"Thanks a lot, man. You have no idea how much bother that advice of yours saves me," Theo spoke while oversaturating his voice with relief. "And while I don't really have any money on me right now, I will be sure to leave a tip in your name at that Kresby you mentioned!"