Chapter 45: MONEY PROBLEM SORTED
While the hunters celebrated and began frantically hauling the silver and gold down the stairs, I wandered toward the back of the vault.
"Uncle Korin, look at this!" Jace’s voice echoed off the stone walls, thick with awe. "A solid gold chalice! And I think these are emeralds on the rim! It must be a ceremonial goblet for demon kings!"
I glanced over my shoulder. Korin, who was currently hefting a crate full of raw silver ingots, squinted at the golden cup in Jace’s hands.
"That’s a spittoon, Jace," Korin said flatly.
Jace froze. He looked down at the chalice, his expression rapidly shifting from awe to horror. "A what?"
"A spittoon," Korin repeated. "For chewing tobacco. And demon gristle. Put it down, boy, you don’t know when it was last washed."
"Why would anyone put emeralds on a spittoon?" Jace demanded, holding it out at arm’s length as if it were highly radioactive.
"Because warlords have objectively terrible taste, Jace," I called out from across the room. "It’s a universal constant across all realities. Just put it in the cart. Lyra can melt it down."
Jace shuddered, tossing the golden spittoon into the nearest handcart with a loud, metallic clatter.
Shaking my head, I turned my attention back to Malakar’s personal desk. It was a massive slab of polished dark wood sitting in the corner, completely out of place in a crude mountain cavern. It was covered in tribute records, tax collections, and scribbled notes about local hunting grounds.
I began sifting through the papers, looking for anything that might indicate why the Emissary had been interested in this specific tribe.
I didn’t find any dark prophecies. I didn’t find any sinister letters bearing the Fallen King’s seal, or ominous warnings written in blood. But I did find something much more interesting.
It was a heavy, leather-bound ledger buried at the very bottom of the drawer. It wasn’t written in the messy scrawl of a mountain demon. The script was elegant, precise, and highly detailed.
I opened it up, the light of my torch reflecting off the glossy, expensive pages.
"Find something shiny for Mira?" Korin called out, his heavy boots crunching on the stone floor as he walked over to my corner of the vault.
"Something like that," I muttered, slowly turning the pages.
It was a modern, highly detailed intelligence map and political ledger of the entire continent.
It showed the heavily fortified borders of the Kingdom to the south, explicitly marking the locations of their mana-shield generators. It mapped out the intricate sky-train routes connecting the major demon city-states, noting the exact times the merchant guilds transferred their wealth. It listed regional powers, massive mercenary guilds, and the exact locations of the Imperial Magic Academies.
There were even notes on entire continents across the Abyssal Ocean, drawn in meticulous, careful detail.
I traced a finger over the map, finally locating the northern mountain range where we currently stood. Elderglen was marked as a tiny, insignificant dot on the absolute fringe of the known world.
The old storyteller hadn’t been exaggerating yesterday. The world was massive.
But more importantly, Malakar hadn’t just been a warlord. You didn’t keep intelligence maps of shield generators and sky-train schedules if you just wanted to extort a few mountain villages. He had been a piece on a very large board, keeping tabs on the shifting borders of empires for whoever he reported to.
"You look entirely too serious for a man standing in a room full of gold," Korin noted, leaning over my shoulder to look at the ledger. "What is that?"
"A reminder that there’s always a bigger fish," I said.
I rolled the map and the ledger up carefully and slid them into the deep inside pocket of my coat.
"Well, right now, we’re the ones emptying the fish’s pockets," Korin grunted. He pointed a thick thumb toward a rack of weapons near the desk. "Grab something for the girl so we can leave. Jace is about to try on a set of cursed armor, I can feel it."
I turned to the rack and grabbed a small, highly polished silver dagger. It had a dull, unsharpened edge and a large, gaudy ruby embedded in the hilt.
Korin stared at the dagger, then looked at me. "You are giving a six-year-old a knife."
"It’s completely blunt," I defended myself, tapping the edge against my palm. "It’s basically just a very pointy spoon. She said she wanted a shiny treasure. This is shiny."
"Lyra is going to skin you alive," Korin said, entirely serious. "She is going to take that blunt dagger, sharpen it, and stab you in the neck."
"I survived a mad demon," I said confidently. "I can survive Lyra." And then I added, "Maybe."
"I will start digging your grave the moment we get back to the village," Korin sighed. "Hey! Jace! Put that helmet down, you don’t know where that demon’s head has been!"
An hour later, the two wooden handcarts were groaning audibly under the sheer weight of the recovered wealth.
We had taken the silver, the gold, the refined ores, and the best of the enchanted weapons. We left the massive crates of imported silk and the bulkier furniture items; we would have to send a second, larger team back for the rest tomorrow.
Hauling the carts out of the cavern was a completely different task than pushing them in.
"Why," Jace grunted, his boots sliding against the stone as he struggled to push the back of the second cart, "is gold... so heavy?"
"Because if it were light, it would blow away in the wind, boy!" Korin barked, at the front. "Push with your legs, not your back!"
I was walking next to the first cart, holding onto a leather tow strap with one hand and casually pulling my half of the weight. I wasn’t even breathing hard. Nascent Soul cultivation had a lot of perks, and absolute cardiovascular supremacy was definitely one of them.
Korin, who was sweating profusely in the freezing air, glared at me.
"Are you even pulling?" Korin demanded, panting heavily.
"I’m pulling my exact half, Korin," I said, offering him a cheerful smile. "Maybe you’re just getting old."
Korin looked like he was heavily debating dropping his side of the cart just to tackle me, but the sheer value of the silver stopped him. "I hate you. I truly, deeply hate you."
As we finally pulled the heavy carts out of the cavern and back into the bright, crisp sunlight of the plateau, the mood shifted back to utterly triumphant. The village’s financial problems weren’t just solved; Elderglen now had enough capital to establish itself as a major, independent trading hub in the northern peaks.
They could build their stone walls. They could buy their enchanted plows. Korin wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his arm, catching his breath in the air. He looked back at the loaded carts, gleaming in the sunlight, then looked out over the valley. A massive, unstoppable grin slowly split his scarred face.
I walked up beside him, adjusting the collar of my coat against the wind. I gestured toward the literal mountain of gold sitting in the wooden cart in front of us.
"See?" I said casually, clapping the giant hunter on the shoulder. "Sometimes violence is a fantastic investment."
Korin threw his head back and let out a booming, echoing laugh that rang out across the free mountains.
