The Beggar's Warning the Merchant's Daughter Mocked

Betaal began once more, telling of a wealthy merchant's daughter, proud and quick to judge others by their appearance, who overheard a ragged, unkempt beggar sitting outside her father's warehouse warning passing clerks that a particular shipping venture her father was about to invest heavily in was doomed to fail, describing specific, plausible reasons involving weather patterns and rival competitors that the beggar seemed, oddly, to understand in surprising detail.

The daughter mocked him openly, loudly wondering aloud how a man too poor to afford proper clothes could possibly know anything worth trusting about complex maritime trade, and instructed the household staff to send him away from the property before he could "spread nonsense" that might worry her father unnecessarily.

Weeks later, the venture failed in a storm exactly as the beggar had described, and only because her father's most trusted clerk had quietly investigated the beggar's warning independently before it could be dismissed entirely, delaying the family's own largest investment in the same venture at the very last moment, was their fortune spared while several other merchants who dismissed the same warning lost everything. "Tell me, Vikram," Betaal demanded, "should the daughter have listened to a beggar's warning in the first place?" Vikramaditya answered: "Yes — the value of a warning depends entirely on whether its reasoning holds up to scrutiny, not on the wealth or appearance of the person delivering it. Dismissing sound reasoning because it arrives in ragged clothes is exactly as foolish as trusting bad reasoning because it arrives in fine ones — the coat tells you nothing about the truth of what's underneath it." His answer given, the vow of silence broke once more, and Betaal vanished, laughing, back toward his tree.