The Shopkeeper of All Worlds in the British Wizarding World

Chapter 169 Strange Shop
When they arrived at the largest bookstore in Mahogany Town, Ryan and his friends discovered that today was the school's student purchasing day, and the bookstore took the opportunity to invite several famous writers to attract customers. As a result, the entire bookstore was packed with wizards who came here, and it seemed that they might not even be able to squeeze in.

In this case, the bookstore can only be regrettably crossed out from the travel destination. After all, it is really not suitable for reading in such a noisy place.

Since this big bookstore is not working, Ryan immediately thought of going to a second-hand bookstore to shop. As a place where books are as expensive as in the UK, there are naturally many second-hand bookstores. However, because the profit of second-hand books is not high, bookstores will definitely not be set up in such a busy commercial street. After all, the profit may not even be able to pay the rent.

You mean selling other things under the name of second-hand books? Well, things that need to be sold under other names are not suitable to be placed on a busy street like this.

Because he was a little worried about going to the back streets, especially since the news in his previous life did not describe the security in South America very well, Ryan found an excuse to put something in his pocket out of Hermione's sight before continuing their journey.

After asking several people and walking around the streets a few times, Ryan and Hermione finally found a second-hand bookstore on a small street with few people.

This shop looks a bit like Ollivander's Wand Shop in Diagon Alley. The storefronts are very small, but give people a mysterious feeling. There are piles of books in the gray window. There is a severely oxidized metal sign on the window, which reads in Spanish: Skorzeny's Shop.

After pushing open the door, Ryan found that the store's front was not big, but the space inside was not small. All kinds of goods filled the rows of shelves. After roughly scanning the items on the shelves, Ryan found that this was not a simple second-hand bookstore, but a large second-hand store.

Strings of colorful feathers, old wands with various scratches, strange stone sculptures, various herbs (Ryan, who is proficient in plants, swears that most of them are fake), props and magic books that emit colorful light, these things are stacked layer by layer on the shelves. Except for the simplest classification, they are placed in a mess, and the whole store looks like a large garbage recycling station.

After walking around a small pile of specimens whose original shape was unclear and stepping over a broomstick with only a stick left, Ryan saw the owner of the shop, a white-haired old man who looked to be in his 70s. He was sitting behind the counter in a black wizard robe and dozing off.

After seeing Ryan and the other two standing in front of him, he just waved his hand weakly and said, "There are prices on each shelf. After you choose the items, just come to me to check out. Remember, once you take it off the shelf, you must buy it. There are magical surveillance cameras in the store. Don't think about getting away with it."

Ryan returned to the shelves and took a closer look, only to find that the prices marked on the shelves ranged from one Sickle to ten Galleons.

After browsing a few shelves, Ryan came to the conclusion that the owner of this store was a black-hearted businessman. He couldn't understand why such a pile of junk was priced so high. Most importantly, there were runes on each shelf to block magical perception, which meant that you could reach into the shelf to look at the things, but you couldn't know what they were like until you took them out. No wonder the store required you to buy the goods you took off the shelf.

Watching Hermione flipping through some of the Ilvermorny and Castrobrook textbooks on the shelves, Ryan quietly walked aside to explore the goods on other shelves.

Although every shelf has released concealment and isolation magic by magic, it does not mean that these magics are foolproof. When Ryan used the perception of Taoism to perceive the goods on the shelf, he found that he could vaguely feel the magical energy contained in some things. This is not surprising, after all, Taoism is a completely different system of extraordinary power. It is very likely that the boss did not think of this kind of thing when setting up the magic. So it is expected that Ryan found some loopholes.

In the Taoist perception, Ryan found that the owner of this shop was even more evil than he thought. For example, the thing called wood essence that was introduced in Castrobrushuo's potion class (this thing has a non-magical subspecies called American ginseng) was very expensive because of its vitality-replenishing effect and low yield.

Ryan saw a complete wood essence on a shelf with a price tag of ten Galleons, which was far lower than the market price. However, in the perception of Taoism, the wood essence on the shelf actually only had the outermost layer of skin, and the inside was filled with the roots of another unknown plant.

To be honest, with such a sophisticated level of fraud, even without these magic barriers, I think many people would still be fooled.

Although there are many fakes in this store, it does not mean that there are no good things. After all, this store seems to have been operating in this place for a long time, and there are only so many people in the magic world. If there were only fakes, this store would have been smashed long ago.

For example, Ryan found a thousand-year-old lightning-struck wood the size of an arm in a pile of garbage that was worth one piece. The only regret was that it was made of mahogany instead of peach. However, for Ryan, it was enough to make a magic sword. Looking at the size of the wood, in addition to making a sword, it was enough to make a set of talismans.

In addition to this, Ryan also picked up some minerals with magical reactions and prepared to go back and see what they could be used for.

When he took a bunch of things to the counter to pay, he unexpectedly found a black leather notebook under the boss's counter. The cover of the notebook reflected the sunlight from the window. Ryan could see a triangle, a circle and a vertical symbol embossed on it, which looked like a triangular eye.

Ryan paused for a moment because he recognized the symbol on the book as Grindelwald's Saint. Thinking about the age of the shop owner and the German name of Skorzeny, Ryan felt that the shop owner was probably one of the Saints back then.

Thinking of this, Ryan felt that he was about to break out in a cold sweat. After all, a person's reputation is like a tree's shadow. Unlike Voldemort's group of Death Eaters, Grindelwald's Saints were much more organized than Death Eaters. It was hard to say what would happen if the shop owner knew that he had discovered his secret, so Ryan just wanted to call Hermione and leave the shop quickly.

But sometimes what you fear will come true. After the owner saw what Ryan took out, he suddenly smiled at him and said, "Boy, your eyesight seems to be good. Do you want to come with me to see the good stuff in the warehouse at the back?"

(End of this chapter)