Free Web NovelChapter 24: Small Fortune, Real Estate
The manager came fast.
He was a lean man in a dark, well-cut coat, the kind of person who moved through the Aurum Exchange like he owned a percentage of it, and his bored expression lasted exactly as long as it took him to round the counter and see the pile.
His eyes narrowed.
He crouched, ran his own scanner over three cores at random, and watched the readings spike each time. He picked one up, weighed it, turned it in the light, set it down with the care of a man handling something that could pay his salary for a year.
’...Pristine Tier-10 cores. Hundreds of them.’ His jaw tightened. ’It seems we’ll have to get some Tier-10 Spirit Stones.’
He stood, took a slim crystal card from his inner pocket, and pressed it once. It lit, and he spoke low into it, half-turned away.
"Tell the Blazeworth Guild to send Tier-10 Spirit Stones from their Spirit Veins. They recently secured a new Tier-10 Terrorized Dimension with a vein, so they’ve got plenty to move." A pause. "Make them lower the price, and ask for a big amount. We need to restock our own reserves anyway."
He pocketed the card and turned back to Aidan with a different face entirely. Warmer. Attentive. The face the Aurum Exchange kept for its most important customers.
"Apologies for the wait, sir. My appraiser was right to call me." He gestured at a private booth off to the side. "Shall we discuss numbers somewhere comfortable?"
...
The numbers were obscene.
Aidan sat across a polished table while the manager and two appraisers worked through the cores in batches, scanning, grading, calling out values.
"Tier-10 Monster Cores price by their power and purity," the manager explained, sliding a tablet across so Aidan could follow. "Standard rate is one to ten Tier-10 Spirit Stones per core, depending on quality. Yours run high. Most are eight, nine, a handful are full ten. The bones, hides, and fangs price the same way by material, just lower multiples."
’One to ten Tier-10 Spirit Stones each.’ Aidan kept his face neutral under the mask, but inside he was grinning. ’And a single Tier-10 stone is worth a mountain of lower ones.’
He didn’t sell everything.
He let two hundred cores go, plus the matching bones and hides and assorted parts, and kept the rest tucked away in his inventory, over four hundred more cores and their materials still sitting unsold, along with every scrap of the meat. The meat wasn’t for selling. The meat was breakfast, lunch, dinner, and emergency rations for a man with Divine-10 Health and a dragon who ate like a collapsing star.
Two hundred cores was already more than enough to do what he came to do.
When the manager finally totaled it and slid the final figure across the table, even Solenne, who’d grown up watching a top-30 guild count its money, went very still under her hood.
A heavy storage pouch changed hands, dense with Tier-10 Spirit Stones, each one a faceted shard of condensed energy that hummed faintly against Aidan’s palm.
"A pleasure," the manager said, and meant it. "The Aurum Exchange would be glad to handle the rest of your stock whenever you choose to sell. Privately, if you prefer."
"I’ll think about it." Aidan stood, pocketing the fortune like it was loose change. "Thanks."
...
They ate first.
Aidan picked a restaurant near the top of a commercial tower, the kind with a view and prices that would’ve made his old self choke, and ordered most of the menu.
"Eat," he told Solenne, pushing a plate toward her. "Properly. You look like you’ve been running on nothing for a month."
She had been. She ate slowly at first, then less slowly, and somewhere around the second plate the careful blankness she’d been wearing cracked enough to let a little color back into her face.
Aidan ate like a furnace, which is what he was. Three platters in, his stomach finally stopped complaining, and the low burn of his body’s hunger for high-tier sustenance eased off. He topped it up later anyway, picking quietly at his own stored Tier-10 meat when no one was looking, the real fuel his body needed.
"You don’t ask anything," Solenne said eventually, watching him. "About what they did. About what I was going to do."
"Don’t need to." Aidan didn’t look up from his food. "I saw your eyes. I’ve seen them before." He shrugged. "You’re alive, they’re not, and you’ve got a new name. The rest is just details you can tell me or not."
Solenne looked at him for a long moment.
Then, very quietly, she kept eating.
...
After the meal, they went looking for a home.
Aidan didn’t bother with the mid-range listings.
He took them straight to the best real-estate agency in H City, a glass-fronted office on a high floor with a curated wall of the priciest properties in the region, and told the agent he wanted the top end. Ultra-luxury. And his preferences were specific.
"Remote," he said. "Peaceful. No neighbors if you can manage it. Lots of nature. I don’t care about being close to the city. I care about quiet."
The agent, sensing money, pulled up the high-end remote listings with a practiced flourish, and one of them caught Aidan’s attention immediately.
A walled estate set in untouched wilderness well outside the city, a sprawl of forest and hill with a clear pond at its heart. What sold it wasn’t the architecture.
It was the energy.
[A natural Tier-7 Spirit Energy array runs through this property, Player Aidan. The ambient energy gathers and pools toward the pond at its center. Living in such a place would slowly temper your body day and night, and the concentration around the water would be ideal for refining Spirit Stones or cultivating.]
’A house that makes me stronger just by sitting in it.’ Aidan’s eyes glinted under the mask. ’And quiet. Sold.’
"This one," he said.
The agent beamed. "Excellent taste, sir. Given the Tier-7 Spirit Energy array, the property is priced in Tier-8 Spirit Stones. The valuation reflects both the land and the energy concentration, the richer the natural array, the higher the—"
"I know how it works." Aidan was already reaching for his pouch. "I’ll take it. Full price, now."
And that was when a smooth, amused voice cut in from behind them.
"Ah. I’m afraid that one’s spoken for."
Aidan turned.
A young man stood there, early twenties, dressed in clothes that cost more than most Hunters made in a year, flanked by two beautiful women who hung off his arms like accessories. He had the easy, glossy arrogance of someone who’d never once in his life been told no, and the way the agency staff straightened the instant they saw him said he was someone worth straightening for.
"Young Lord Barten." The agent’s voice climbed half an octave, suddenly flustered. "I, we didn’t expect you today—"
"Clearly." Barten waved a lazy hand, but his eyes weren’t on the agent.
They were on Solenne.
They’d been on Solenne since he walked in.
His gaze crawled over her ash-grey hair and pale amber eyes with open, proprietary interest, the look of a man browsing a shelf, and his smile widened a fraction.
’Two on my arms already, and here’s a third worth collecting.’ Barten’s eyes glinted. ’And she’s with some nobody in a plain coat. Easy.’
He’d followed them in from the lobby. Aidan had clocked it three minutes ago and said nothing.
"That property," Barten said, strolling closer, addressing the agent while watching Solenne, "the one with the Tier-7 array. I’ll take it. Whatever this gentleman was offering, I’ll pay more."
The agent froze, caught between a famous name and a paying customer.
Around them, the staff went quiet, and Aidan could feel the shift in the room, the silent recalculation everyone made at once. They knew exactly who Young Lord Barten of the Brimlock family was. Heir to a powerful house, son of the people who owned the Brimlock Heaven Guild, ranked 89th in the world.
And the man in the plain coat with the forgettable face?
A nobody. fɾeewebnoveℓ.co๓
Everyone in the room had already decided how this ended.
Aidan looked at the young lord, at the two girls, at the way his eyes kept sliding back to Solenne like she was a thing on display, and he felt that old familiar prickle at the back of his skull, the small, slow rise of something he’d spent every day learning to keep on a leash.
’...Huh.’ Aidan’s lips twitched under the mask. ’And here I was hoping for a quiet afternoon.’
"You’ll pay more," Aidan repeated mildly. "Sure. Let’s find out how high you can count."
