The harvest caused a riot.
Not literally. But close enough.
Yuki started pulling produce from dimensional storage in the caravan yard — baskets of sunbloom citrus, crates of ironheart nuts, bundles of starberries — and the merchants smelled opportunity the way wolves smelled blood.
Word spread in minutes. Merchants who'd been loading cargo dropped what they were doing and came running. The sunbloom citrus alone drew a crowd — a fruit that replenished mana and accelerated healing, available in such large quantities that the eastern markets hadn't seen in years.
"Where did you get these?"
"How many do you have?"
"I'll take the entire stock — name your price—"
"Back off, I was here first—"
Yuki looked at Lira. She was standing beside him, watching dozens of grown adults scramble over each other to buy fruit, and she caught his eye at the same moment.
He laughed. She smiled. The absurdity of it — two teenagers standing in the middle of a feeding frenzy they'd caused by just picking oranges — was too perfect.
They sold methodically. Lira handled the negotiations — she was Varlen's daughter, and the merchant instinct ran deep. She set prices, managed quantities, and played buyers against each other with a ruthlessness that made Yuki glad she was on his side.
The Duke's steward arrived within the hour. Duke Aldric wanted a bulk purchase — sunbloom citrus for the town's medical stores, ironheart nuts for the garrison, starberries for the canton's alchemists. The price he offered was fair enough that Lira accepted without countering.
The remaining stock went to the caravan merchants. Every last berry, nut, and citrus fruit — sold, paid for, and loaded into wagons within the afternoon.
Yuki's dimensional storage was lighter. His gold reserves were significantly heavier.
"We just made more money in three hours than my father's caravan makes in six months," Lira said, counting coins into a strongbox.
"We should do this regularly."
"You have an endless supply of rare produce growing in a walled garden with irrigation and you can teleport it anywhere on the continent." She looked at him. "You're not an adventurer, Yuki. You're a trade empire waiting to happen."
"I just like gardening."
She threw a starberry at him. He caught it and ate it.
While the merchants packed the last of the produce, Yuki noticed something.
One of the caravan's merchants — a quiet man with spectacles and careful hands — was loading crates into a bag. Not a wagon. A bag. A leather satchel, roughly the size of a messenger bag, that was swallowing crates of perishable goods like they were coins dropped into a well.
Yuki watched a full crate of smoked meat disappear into the opening. Then another. Then a barrel of preserved fruit.
A spatial bag. Like my dimensional storage, but in a physical object.
He walked over. "That bag — it stops time inside?"
The merchant looked up. "Preserves contents, yes. Nothing decays, nothing spoils." He patted the bag with obvious pride. "One of two in the caravan. I rent storage space to the other merchants — three copper per day per crate."
"How much does a bag like that cost?"
The merchant named a figure that made Yuki blink. More than most houses.
"They're crafted by special enchanters in the western cities," the merchant explained. "Maybe a dozen people in the Confederation can make them. Supply is low, demand is high." He gestured at the other merchants loading perishables into his bag. "That's why the rental model works. Most merchants can't afford one, so they pay me for space instead."
Yuki looked at the bag. Looked at his own hands. Thought about dimensional storage. Thought about mana-conductive metal. Thought about the enchantment he'd built for Lira's necklace.
I can make those.
They left Millhaven that afternoon. Four wagons, a dozen merchants, Varlen at the lead, and Yuki sitting next to Lira on the bench of the second wagon.
She drove. He had no idea how to handle the reins or communicate with the draft animals, which Lira found unreasonably funny.
"You can tear holes in space but you can't steer a wagon."
"The wagon doesn't respond to mental commands."
"Pull left to go left. Pull right to go right. Pull back to stop."
"That's three inputs. Spatial magic has infinite degrees of freedom. This is actually harder."
She laughed so hard she nearly drove them off the road.
The caravan settled into a rhythm. The road west was wider and better-maintained than the grassland trail — packed earth, graded, with stone markers at regular intervals. The Amber Plains rolled by on either side, golden and endless.
While Lira drove, Yuki worked.
He pulled leather from dimensional storage — boar hide, tanned and cured during his months at the homestead. Dark, supple, high quality. He laid it across his lap and began.
The bag's structure was straightforward — he'd been making mana-woven material for months. But the enchantment was the challenge. He needed to replicate what that merchant's bag did: a spatial pocket stitched into a physical container, with temporal stasis on the interior.
He'd already cracked dimensional storage. He'd already cracked temporal theory from the grimoires. The combination was new, but the components weren't.
He wove mana thread through the leather — reinforcing it, making it nearly indestructible, giving it the structural integrity to anchor a spatial enchantment. Then he embedded a small blue mana-conductive stone into the interior lining — the power source, drawing ambient mana to sustain the spells.
The spatial pocket came next. He folded a bubble of space and anchored it to the bag's opening — the same technique as his dimensional storage, but miniaturised and bound to a physical object instead of his own mana signature. Anything placed through the opening would enter the pocket. Anything retrieved would exit through the same point.
The temporal stasis was the hardest layer. Temporal magic — time manipulation. The grimoires had said no living mage could cast it. But the merchant's bag existed, which meant someone had figured it out at some point. And Yuki had been thinking about it since the library.
Time, like space, was a fabric. A dimension. If he could fold space, he could fold time. Not in a dramatic way — not time travel, not reversal. Just... a pause. A local cessation of entropy within the pocket. Contents placed inside would exist in a frozen moment, unchanged, until removed.