My retarded ass finaly fixed path to mage city getting your character stuck in black screen.

This quest is heavily screwed toward assassin lord with Forbidden cults enables as you can get ego reroll for free. And in my opinion artefacts from merchant are not worth it, as they are expensive, while character returning from far east is most likely armed to teeth with them. And he lacks ego reroll. As it stands there is no real reason to choose merchant instead of Assassin lord, as reward for merchant is worse than from assassin lord while being harder to get.