Chapter 30: Money is POWER

Chapter 30: Chapter 30: Money is POWER

Amelia was finally able to leave the Marshalls’ by about sunset.

It took Allan’s butler 15 minutes or so to get her to leave. All the excuses she made for staying got weaker and weaker, until finally the butler said something gently and with the greatest care: that an Arclight heiress dragging her feet out of another man’s estate wouldn’t be quite the image she wanted to give.

Amelia considered this for a moment.

"Maybe dignity is something people without better options have, so I should care not," she said at last, and then kissed his cheek. She turned to leave.

Allan listened for a few moments to the sound of Amelia’s footsteps receding along the corridor, and after a certain amount of time, silence followed.

"Haaa...." He sat at his desk.

The System window was already waiting.

[Would you like to cash in your investments?]

[YES] [NO]

Of course. He clicked yes.

[Investment Cash-In Confirmed.]

[Calculating accumulated returns.]

My first return in proper villainess investment. What could it be? I hope it’s not some SSS-rate skill.

What he wanted was the token. In the game, he had ignored these tokens, focusing only on high-tier skills. But now he wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

The results came in one at a time.

[Investment Return Generated.]

[Reward: Evolution Token.]

He read it twice.

"YES!"

The description was brief.

[Evolution Token: Evolves one eligible skill to a higher rank.]

Allan sat back, a slow smile creeping up his face. He had expected good returns from Amelia’s venture, but this was better than he had hoped for. Thank the gods.

Apparently Amelia’s thoughts on him were beyond positive, it seemed.

And what was he going to use it on?

Allan opened his interface, searching for that one skill.

[Instant Reward — D Rank]

Yes, the skill he used on beggars, and the same skill he used on Bela. It was something he always kept with him, useful for small things, much like a pocketknife. Yet it was not something he had ever seriously invested in during the game, his first sin, his first sin which he would never repeat.

He selected it.

The token dissolved into light.

[Instant Reward has been selected.]

[Skill evolution commencing.]

[Rank D → C.]

[C → B.]

[B → A.]

[A → A+.]

[Skill evolution complete.]

The screen changed as Allan stared at it in slight amazement.

"A+."

He rubbed the side of his jaw.

He opened up the Skill Ledger, watching as row upon row of talents working for Oakwood appeared, all good investments.

Allan shifted his focus to the stack of documents sitting on his desk.

Oakwood had changed. It had been a dying estate when he inherited it, but now it was something else entirely.

The warehouses were full to bursting, a steady stream of merchants passed through the estate, adventurers came and went to restock between jobs, and Bela’s workshop was churning out a variety of potions which were beginning to earn a name for themselves outside the local area.

And there were accountants, lots of them, tracking the money that Allan, for the most part, had forgotten he even had.

Which meant there were people worth investing in.

A young accountant from Oakwood entered the room after a ten-minute walk. She looked worried and was clearly trying to figure out where she had gone wrong on the way.

Allan kept it simple.

"Take this and set up a proper accounting division for Oakwood. Fifty gold. Something that can scale."

She stopped moving entirely.

"Fifty gold."

"Yes."

"My lord, that’s—"

"A lot?"

"A ridiculous amount."

"Good. Then you’ll know I mean it."

He slid a contract across the table. The second she signed, the System came alive.

[Investment Detected.]

[Investment Target: Oakwood Financial Division.]

[Investment Capital: 50 Gold.]

[Relationship Compatibility: Moderate.]

[Instant Reward Activated.]

[Return Multiplier: 5x.]

[Reward Generated: 250 Gold.]

Allan smiled for a moment as he looked at the System message, then burst out laughing, a short, totally genuine laugh that he immediately tried to suppress.

"Five times," he muttered to himself. "Not bad."

He kept going.

For a short while, other interesting individuals from around the town came to negotiate as well. They ended up signing for twice the return, four times the return, eight times and even nine times the return. In the end, however, no one reached ten times the return, as he had expected.

Eventually he leaned back in his chair, contracts strewn all over the floor and a veritable mountain of gold in their place.

He thought about Bela. In the past.

Pulling up the numbers for Bela showed a rough hundred times return. Given that there had been no established trust and no real relationship to speak of at the time, Allan found her rather remarkable.

He laughed quietly to himself.

"Bela really was remarkable. Oh, how I wished I could have invested thousands of gold on her, but..."

Apparently, the System didn’t do do-overs.

"With this fund, I will have enough..." he said.

He set the numbers aside. The amusement faded as the thought surfaced.

House Emberwind.

"Enough to buy them out..."

Allan already knew where a large part of that money came from.

Slavery.

His fingers went still on the page. He knew that to put the Emberwinds back in their place, he needed to do it.

He thought of Lira and Seris, where he had first found her.

"Maybe there is another way..."

For years the powerful House of Emberwind had profited greatly from the plight of many individuals unable to defend themselves against the Emberwinds and their vast fortune, all built upon the misfortune of others.

Allan set the report down flat.

"I could use force. Assassinate them."

The use of force had crossed his mind on more than one occasion. He would be lying if he said the idea didn’t have its appeal: a dead house, a burned manor, the dying out of such a rotten line, all so clean.

But also stupid.

Allan pushed the file away. "House Emberwind can survive a lot of things," he said. "The death of a lord is easy to deal with. He can be replaced at any time. And a burned manor house, an abandoned mine, generations of poor decision-making, it could all go.

"But one thing above all else can bring them crashing down: the loss of all their money. Not some of it, all of it. All of their income, all of their trade, all of their storage, all of their contracts. All of the leverage those contracts grant the Emberwind family. Once that is all gone, the name Emberwind is nothing more than a faint memory long after the rest of society has moved on."

He called the accountant back in and asked for the details. She couldn’t help but be in awe.

"Cost to buy them out, my lord?" She blinked. "House Emberwind?"

"Contracts. Their commercial holdings. Warehouses, freight routes. The slave-trading operation," he added after a pause.

The room went quiet in a specific way.

The accountant looked at him carefully, as if recalibrating something.

"My lord. That business is—"

"Profitable."

"Extremely, but..."

"Then we buy it."

"Other noble houses could have opinions about that," she said slowly, her eyes working through the implications of his words.

"I know."

"The Church might get involved as well. They despise the slave trade."

"I know."

"House Emberwind might refuse to sell."

"Then we offer them enough that refusing hurts more than agreeing."

She looked down at the numbers in front of her. "And what does Oakwood do with the business after the purchase? And what of Lady Lira and Lady Seris?"

There was silence for a long time.

He thought about Lira again. He thought about Amelia. He thought about what he wanted for Oakwood, a question he had been avoiding because of the implications it held.

"We will still buy it."