After reversing time again, Loki went along with everyone else and did everything he was supposed to do without causing any trouble. He even paid attention to Muni's 8-hour lecture on cultivation. This was to ensure that he didn't miss out on anything.
But things changed that evening when Muni granted them access to the market. Everyone was excited to go to the market, but he was the most excited one.
As usual, Slav looked down on them for being poor, but Loki ignored him. Loki also ignored Slav's jests when he lined up to take a loan.
There were some differences in the mockery this time around because Loki was the first to sign up for a loan. Slav was very creative about making fun of Loki's previous identity as a slave and how it made him inclined to sell himself.
Loki continued to ignore him, but he thought to himself, "Just keep gallivanting about like some proud peacock while you still can. You might be a peacock, but you're still a fowl. So you can still be killed and turned into the main material for a soup."
After getting his loan of 100 energy stones, Loki didn't return to the lodgings to cultivate. Instead, he rushed to the gambling houses with the 100 energy stones to try his luck.
The game of chance that he went to try his luck on was the beast-fighting game. He didn't try the lottery because he didn't see anyone win it in the last timeline. He also didn't try Metac lode gambling because the reward will be Metacs, which he can't use right now because he doesn't have any Core Metacs.
To top things off, even if he picked out a Metac lode with a living Metac in it, he will still have to safely bring out the Metac within it and make sure that the Metac doesn't die when the stone encasing it is broken open. So he picked the rather straightforward beast-fighting gambling.
The reward for winning bets in the beast-fighting arena is low, but he has at least seen a lot of people win it before. And as it turned out, he was incredibly lucky, too.
Every bet that he made always won, and he always increased his money, which increased the amount of money he bet on the next games.
Some odds of the games were as low as 2, and some were as high as 10. However, because he always won his bets, his money quickly snowballed to a size that even his greedy nature deemed was more than enough.
He only bet four times in a row, and he bet on games with payout odds of 2, 5, 8, and 10. So by the end of the fourth bet, he had earned 80,000 energy stones.
He couldn't bet anymore because the gambling house refused to take his money. In fact, they kicked him out in anger because some people had bet along with him and made the gambling house lose a lot of money.
Loki left the gambling house feeling smug. He looked at the gambling house one last time before shaking his head and leaving.
Then he said to himself, "What a pity. I could have earned more if they weren't so stingy."
But then he chuckled and said, "I guess I should be satisfied with what I have because if not for the fact that killing is forbidden in the market, they would have killed me to take back their money."
As he was talking to himself, he walked over to a shop nearby that sells Metacs. Then he bought 24 cloudy dates at the cost of 1,800 energy stones each.
They sold the cloudy dates to him for 1,800 energy stones because he asked for a discount. He asked for a discount because he values money too much.
As someone who used to be a slave and didn't even own the rags he was wearing or his life, he wasn't going to let a sudden increase in his money make him lose his reverence for money. Especially now that he knew that money is power to specific cultivators.
So he insisted on getting a discount, and because he was buying 24 of them at a time, he was given a 10% discount. So he only had to pay 43,200 energy stones for them, not 48,000 energy stones.
Of the 24 cloudy dates that he bought, 9 are for his three energy chambers. He will need one cloudy date to go from early to middle stage, from middle to late stage, and from the late to peak stage of rank 1.
So each energy chamber needs 3 cloudy dates, which makes a total of 9 that he needs currently. The remaining 15 are for the energy chambers that he will open in the future.
After purchasing the 24 cloudy dates, he also bought some Metacs that he was interested in. He bought one Branch Metac from the three pathways that he wasn't going to specialize in.
His main goal for buying them was to devour them and use them to open up more energy chambers in Fenrir. And since he was sure that Fenrir would have a limit, he only wanted the best of the best and was willing to pay for the best.
For the Enslavement Pathway, he picked the Insect Taming Metac. He picked this because he wanted to enslave the copper armor ants whose diet is the copper metal.
He thought that this was a good idea because he would be working with metals and ores when forging, so he wouldn't have to specifically look for them. To him, it was hitting two birds with one stone.
For the Death Pathway, he picked the Ghost Servant Metacs. This is Metac for enslaving spirits. These spirits are low-maintenance and won't require much in terms of feeding.
Finally, he picked the Money Armor Metac for the Money Pathway. This is a Metac that uses money to defend him from attacks. Since he was rich and had a lot of money lying around, he thought that it was a good idea to get something like this to save his life.