Demonic Devourer's Development

After that, the last thing I had to solve before I was free to relax before it was time to deal with Bishop's new recruits was deciding what to do with my money. I had a solid chunk after Rosha sold the griffin eggs… Plus, now Bishop decided that his money was my money, too.

It was good, but I was unsure what I could spend this money on. More food and booze, yes—but there was only so much you can spend on it without buying really expensive things, and I believed that buying expensive wine when cheap one was just as useless—it's not like I could get drunk, was a total waste of money. Same went with food.

I could always just buy cattle and eat it for EXP, but… First, I decided to explore Bishop's ideas. I wasn't sure there were this much cattle in the area for me to buy.

"Ten thousand gold pieces… or a thousand cows. Isn't that a little much? Where did it come from, Bishop?"

By that time, Yvenna left the house. Gi was still around, but in another room, where Bishop made him a bed for the boy to sleep in. It was day, but his biological rhythms didn't adapt to the surface yet..

"Six thousand gold pieces were your part of the profits from the griffin eggs. Three thousand gold pieces Rosha sent later as your part of the profits from the items from your webs that she sold. Three more thousand are donations from your church members. Two thousand I spent on the books by Willorio," Bishop explained, pointing at the numbers he neatly wrote in the ledger that was lying on the writing table between us.

"Rosha did?" I frowned and hummed. "I don't remember telling her to… Oh well. And what you propose to do about these?"

"Invest! If we put this money into thriving businesses, later they will make us more money. With enough money, many new doors will open for us. It won't happen immediately, of course… The less risky the business scheme, the more time it needs to pay off. I took on myself liberty of finding several small businesses which have the best ratio of risk to benefit. We can spend a lot on them, or a little, and put the rest somewhere else. But besides that, I had another idea…"

"Do tell," I said dryly. For now, Bishop's idea didn't impress me. Investments, yeah. I didn't have time to bother about it, especially with the bastards who called themselves gods already sniffing around. By the time I could afford to wait for the investments to pay off, I will be able to take whatever I needed by force.

Bishop read my mood and hunched on himself a little. "I hope you will like it more. It comes with the recent activity of Goddess of Wizards' templars. The tales they spread caused a lot of uproar, and the increased fervour with which they began to knock on doors of simple citizens after getting slightest suspicions didn't make people happier about them. It's a truth that they can get quite… annoying. But if we'd spend some money, say, just a thousand gold pieces, to bribe a few of the most unhappy city officials here and there, we could undermine church of the Twelve here and now."

I perked up. That sounded much more appealing… To undermine these bastards—that I was always happy to do! But… "Is there a real danger of you being noticed by templars, Bishop?"

"Not myself, but some of the fresher siblings of mine… I don't wish to speak ill of them, but not all of them are that good at masking and hiding the truth. If you believe that this money is better to spend somewhere else, I will adhere to your decision and say these people to keep as low as they could, but putting an end to these searches would've made things easier for everyone."

"Then do that," I decided. "Bonus points if you can humiliate as many templars as you can, Bishop. Anything else you wanted so spend money for and didn't decide to just go for it like with these awfully expensive books?" I raised my eyebrows.

Bishop looked at me with the most apologetic look. "Forgive me for that misstep, my lord. It was a onetime offer, and I truly believed they will be useful…"

I let Bishop squirm and wring his bony hands under my level stare for a few more seconds, then snorted and waved my hand. "They were." I didn't read them all yet, but I skimmed through a few by now, and Pest confirmed that some of these spells sounded like a great groundwork for one that will transport me to Heaven. Just a groundwork, but… I had to read the rest of them, too, later. There were more useful spells.

"Thank you, my lord." Bishop lowered his head in visible relief. "And another thing I wanted your approval for is relocating some of my trusted people into the capital, where they will preach the word and search for the knowledge you seek in the biggest libraries of the world. But they will need money for that, too. Travel expenses, money for bribes—they will need those, money to purchase a place to gather in secret, and, of course, a reward for their hard work. All in all, two thousand should be enough, I calculated."

I inclined my head to the side. "A real spy network, is it? Do you trust your cultists to do the job well? Where did you even pick them up?"

"These are rogues, former thieves. They have plenty of experience in being sneaky and fooling simple folk, but since they have heard the word of our Prophet, they have reformed." Bishop paused and cleared hit throat. "I didn't mean that they stopped conducting illegal business, but they do it now in your name, my lord."

I let out a bark of laughter. "You and your cultists, Bishop… Alright, I've decided what you're going to spend my money on…"