Chapter 142: Selling Alloys [III]
"They are perfectly pure," Peter noted with his voice barely above a hush. "Not a single trace of external mana contamination... Mining these by hand without cracking the internal matrix requires a level of artisanal precision I haven’t seen in a decade."
Peter simply did not have words to explain what he was seeing and he doubted anyone would believe him unless he showed them.
’What is this...? A god has decided to descend upon me?’
Peter finally pulled himself away from the table, practically lunging for his terminal keyboard.
"Fifty thousand Spirit Credits per pure gem," Peter typed frantically. "Three gems. One hundred and fifty thousand."
The appraiser hit the final execution key on his heavy keyboard. The terminal chimed loudly, a bright green confirmation screen flashing across the monitor.
Peter turned around, gripping the edge of the steel table to steady himself. He looked like he had just run a marathon.
His expensive charcoal suit was wrinkled, his forehead was slick with sweat, and he was staring at Silas as if the man were a walking god of commerce.
"The transaction is complete, Lord Graves," Peter announced, his voice echoing in the quiet room. "The funds have been transferred directly into your secure bank account which is linked to your ID."
Silas pulled his phone out of his dark trench coat. He tapped the screen, opening his encrypted financial ledger.
The numbers updated instantly.
[Current Balance: 2,050,000 SC]
Over two million Spirit Credits...
Sitting in liquid easily accessible Earth currency, generated entirely from rocks he dug out of the dirt in his backyard.
Lia, who had been quietly standing against the wall observing the entire interaction, let out a sharp audible gasp.
She wasn’t looking at the glowing rocks anymore.
She was staring directly at the screen of Silas’s phone with her jaw completely wide.
She had spent the last two years living on the streets, stealing fifty credits here and a hundred credits there just to afford a bowl of synthetic nutrient paste and a dry place to sleep.
She vividly remembered the days in the slums when Silas would come home bleeding from scraping rust off corporate armor just to hand her a crumpled ten-credit note so she wouldn’t go to bed hungry.
They couldn’t afford food... They couldn’t afford heat and they couldn’t afford medicine.
And now, her Big Brother... the same scrawny exhausted boy who used to skip meals for her was casually standing in a heavily guarded corporate vault, making millions of credits in five minutes without breaking a single drop of sweat?
Lia looked up at Silas, her large brown eyes wide with existential shock.
She looked at his broad shoulders, the expensive trench coat, and the unshakeable confidence that radiated off him.
He was truly a king.
Silas locked his phone, slipping it back into the inner pocket of his coat. He looked across the empty steel table at the exhausted appraiser.
"Thank you, Peter. The transaction was efficient..." Silas said, offering a curt nod of approval.
Peter bowed deeply, pressing his hand to his chest.
"It was an absolute honor, Lord Graves. If you ever have further surplus to offload, my vault is always open to you."
Silas turned on his heel, signaling the end of the meeting.
He grabbed Lia gently by the shoulder, guiding the stunned eleven-year-old girl toward the heavy metal door leading back out to the corridor.
Just before he pushed the door open, Silas paused.
He looked back over his shoulder at the appraiser with his expressionless face fading to reveal a deeply tired annoyed older brother who just wanted to finish his errands.
"By the way," Silas asked. "Does this place, uh... sell books? Or do I need to head back out in the rain and find a bookshop? Ah forget I asked."
The heavy vault door of Peter’s appraisal room clicked shut behind them, sealing away the blinding radiant blue glow of the Starfall Steel and the gravity of the Deep-Earth ingots.
Silas stood in the quiet corridor of the Lord Association Building, his hand resting casually inside the pocket of his dark trench coat.
Under his fingers, the metallic chassis of his phone vibrated faintly as the digital banking protocol finalized its encryption cycle.
He didn’t need to pull the screen out to double-check the balance... He would have done so if he was still broke and struggling.
Right next to him, Lia was practically vibrating out of her peeling waterlogged sneakers.
She was clutching the oversized sagging hem of his dark gray t-shirt with both hands with her wide brown eyes staring up at him as if he had just transformed into a multi-headed Abyssal leviathan right in front of her.
"Two million," Lia whispered, her voice cracking slightly as she practically tripped over her own feet trying to keep pace with his long stride down the corridor. "Silas... you just... that guy just gave you two million credits for four chunks of glowing blue dirt. Do you have any idea how many bowls of synthetic nutrient paste that buys? Do you know how many buildings that buys in the outer wards?"
"It’s not dirt, it’s mana-conductive astral alloy, and stop yelling the numbers out loud..." Silas instructed her calmly, reaching down to firmly grab the collar of the oversized shirt to keep her from drifting into the path of an automated floating transport cart that was whizzing down the hallway loaded with crated beast cores. "In this city, talking about your bank account above a whisper is just inviting every desperate mercenary guild and corporate scavenger within a five-mile radius to try and cut your throat while you sleep."
Lia’s jaw snapped shut instantly.
She shot a paranoid aggressive street-rat glare at two armed Association security guards stationed outside a nearby processing room with her small hands instinctively diving into her pockets as if she expected them to try and pick her pockets right then and there.
Before Silas could press the glowing call rune for the private VIP elevator to take them back up to the bustling ground-floor lobby, the thick soundproof door to the appraisal vault slid open again.
Peter stepped out into the hallway.
The appraiser had taken off his silver-rimmed glasses, furiously cleaning the lenses with a silk handkerchief.
His charcoal suit was still rumpled from the chaos of evaluating four different grades of metals, and he looked at Silas with respectful reverence.
"Lord Graves," Peter called out softly, jogging two steps down the corridor to catch up before the elevator doors could open. "Forgive the interruption... You asked a moment ago about literary acquisitions? Whether the Association complex housed a dedicated bookshop or commercial reagent depository?"
Silas turned around, releasing Lia’s collar.
"I did. I need specific civic infrastructure components. Specialized ink, high-grade paper rolls, and several books... I’d prefer not to drag my sister out into the Valoria rain to hunt down independent book vendors if I can handle the logistics under one roof."
Peter smiled, gesturing upward with his glasses toward the towering ceiling of the subterranean level.
"Then you have no need to brave the weather, my Lord... The Lord Association Building is a self-contained commercial ecosystem designed explicitly to service every conceivable requirement of a growing sovereign territory."
The appraiser stepped over to the glowing runic elevator panel, tapping a sequence of override commands that bypassed the standard public directory.
"You want the forty-second floor," Peter instructed him clearly, his tone shifting into efficient corporate guidance. "It is the Civic Infrastructure and Territorial Architecture Promenade. It is restricted exclusively to certified Lords who are actively expanding the physical and cultural foundations of their grid... You will find specialized book merchants, architectural reagent purveyors, and high-tier civic blueprints there. With the liquid capital currently sitting in your phone, you could procure the materials to construct what you want if you so desired."
Silas raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised by the sheer internal scale of the Association’s inventory.
He had assumed the LAB was strictly an administrative hub for core registries and trading of not only ores but monsters.
"Good to know," Silas said, offering the appraiser a curt, professional nod. "Thanks for the information, Peter. I appreciate the efficiency."
Peter bowed deeply, pressing his right hand over his heart in the traditional gesture of elite guild respect.
"The honor is entirely mine, Lord Graves. Safe travels to your territory."
The heavy steel doors of the VIP elevator slid open.
Silas stepped inside, guiding Lia by the shoulder, and tapped the glowing blue numeral 42 on the brushed-metal control matrix.
The doors hissed shut, cutting off Peter’s bowing form, and the anti-grav repulsors beneath the floorboards hummed smoothly to life, launching the car upward at a neck-breaking velocity.
For the first fifteen floors, the ride was silent.
Silas stood with his arms crossed over his chest with his golden-ringed eyes watching the digital floor indicator rapidly climb through the twenties and thirties.
Lia leaned her small back against the glass wall of the elevator, her bare legs swinging slightly where the oversized shirt ended at her shins.
She watched him for several long seconds with her brow furrowed in deep childish concentration as she tried to compare the terrifying broadsword-wielding Lord who had held a blade to her neck an hour ago with the calm ridiculously wealthy "noble" standing next to her now.
"So," Lia broke the silence, poking his thigh with her finger. "You’re building a city?"
"A territory," Silas corrected her smoothly without looking down. "There’s a difference... Right now, it’s a militarized fortress surrounded by a forest full of monsters that would eat you in one bite."
"And why do you need books for a fortress?" Lia pressed, tilting her head. "Can’t you just hit the monsters with your giant sword until they stop moving? That seemed to be your primary strategy when we lived in the slums."
A faint, amused smirk touched the corner of Silas’s lips.
"Hitting things with swords is the easy part, Lia. The hard part is keeping eighty frontline combatants alive, fed, and organized when they’re stationed three miles away from the supply armory... If my scouts can’t read a basic topographic map, they walk into slimes... If my mages can’t decipher the runes on a high-tier spellbook, they blow up the barracks. A faction without intelligence is just a mob waiting to get slaughtered by someone smarter... in a sense."
Lia blinked, soaking the explanation in.
Her pickpocket brain, trained on short-term survival and grabbing whatever cred-sticks were within arm’s reach, slowly began to grasp the massive long-term mental chess game her brother was playing.
Before she could ask another question about the mages, the elevator repulsors disengaged with a soft, melodious chime.
The digital readout flashed.
[FLOOR 42 - CIVIC & ARCHITECTURAL PROMENADE.]
The heavy steel double doors parted cleanly, revealing an entirely different world from the militarized industrial warehouse aesthetics of the underground appraisal vaults.
The forty-second floor was a sprawling designed commercial galleria that looked like a cross between an ancient high-society university library and a futuristic corporate showroom.
The ceilings were thirty feet high, supported by polished white marble pillars veined with glowing blue sovereign runes.
The floors were laid with dark polished ironwood planks that absorbed the sound of footsteps, and the air smelled of aged paper, cedarwood shavings, expensive binding leather and ink too.
’Hopefully it’s Starlight Ink... Haah...’
Dozens of high-tier Lords dressed in expensive silk robes, tailored corporate armor, and formal military uniforms were strolling through the wide aisles, inspecting floating holographic projections of automated watchtowers, mana-powered irrigation grids, and defensive siege warding arrays.
"Stay close," Silas ordered quietly, dropping his hand onto the crown of Lia’s head to ensure she didn’t dart off into the crowd to try and pickpocket a guild master and get both of them killed.
They stepped out of the elevator and walked down the primary floor of the promenade, scanning the glowing overhead signs for a civic reagent and literary specialist.
They didn’t have to search long.
As they rounded a wide display of floating miniature architectural wireframes, they approached a massive semi-circular commercial stall constructed entirely from polished obsidian and reinforced glass.
Standing behind the pristine counter, meticulously organizing a stack of glowing leather-bound grimoires, was a woman who practically radiated dense mana.
She looked to be in her late twenties, wearing an impeccably tailored dark crimson scholar’s robe trimmed with gold thread.
Her long raven-black hair was pinned up in a sharp, professional bun, and a pair of sleek wire-rimmed glasses rested on the bridge of her nose.
The mana bleeding off her skin wasn’t wild or aggressive like Morwenna’s... it was very controlled, like Rowena.
As Silas approached the counter, the woman looked up from her books.
Her dark eyes behind the lenses swept over him, instantly bypassing his simple civilian tunic and locking directly onto the luminous golden-ringed pupils that gave away his immense physical body.
Her posture straightened immediately with her professional demeanor shifting from standard retail courtesy to high-level respect.
"Welcome to the Grand Civic Archive, fellow Lord," the woman greeted him. "I am Scholar Vane. How may I assist in the infrastructure development of your Territory today?"
