Novel Full Chapter 63: Planning
The night air surrounding Lornfell Academy was crisp and biting, but Arthur barely felt the chill.
He walked silently across the manicured courtyards, favoring the deep, stretching shadows. His custom Shadow-Weave leather armor performed flawlessly. Every step was completely muffled, the pitch-black pelts actively absorbing the ambient light.
At his right hip rested a heavy, dark iron sheath.
Inside it sat the Necrotic Dagger. Even through the dense metal scabbard, Arthur could feel a faint, toxic hum radiating from the jagged blade. It was a masterpiece of lethal craftsmanship.
He had bought and paid for it with a mix of raw credits and the absolute, degrading submission of the blacksmith’s wife.
Arthur reached the first-year dormitories, slipped inside unnoticed, and unlocked the heavy wooden door to his private room.
The moment the lock clicked shut, his adrenaline completely evaporated.
The sheer physical toll of coping up with the animalistic fierce dwarf, finally crashed down on him.
His muscles ached. His brain felt like it was wrapped in heavy cotton.
He stripped off the dark leather, carefully setting the expensive armor over a wooden chair. Beneath it, his undershirt was soaked. The heavy, unmistakable scents of oxidized iron, sweet vanilla, and intense dwarven arousal clung stubbornly to his skin.
Arthur stepped into his small washroom and turned the brass dial. Freezing cold water washed over him. He scrubbed the grime and sweat away, shutting off the water before toweling off.
He didn’t bother checking his stats. He didn’t pull up his ledger.
He barely made it to the edge of his narrow mattress before his eyes slid shut. He fell into a deep, dreamless, and entirely exhausted sleep.
The rest of the academic week passed in a blur.
Arthur coasted through mundane classes and basic physical conditioning. He let his muscles recover while grinding out his daily Intelligence points in Professor Elena’s lectures.
She kept her distance. However, the lingering, heated glances she threw his way made it clear that her submission in her office was far from forgotten.
By Friday evening, the academy had settled into the relaxed, noisy atmosphere of the weekend.
Arthur sat alone at his heavy wooden study desk. He turned the dial on the small mana-lamp, casting a dim, yellow glow across his room.
The physical fatigue was gone. His mind was sharp. It was time to get back to the macro-plot.
With a simple mental command, his system interface materialized. The translucent blue screens hovered in the dark.
Arthur pulled up his financial ledger, resting his chin on his hands.
The extortion payout from Leon Braveheart’s deep noble pockets had cleared perfectly: 50,000 credits.
The academy’s SSS-Rank hazard bonus had added another 10,000.
Combined with the leftover funds from his previous dungeon runs, the spider silk, the venom glands, and the massive haul of generic F-Rank cores, he was sitting comfortably at roughly 70,000 credits.
For a first-year academy student, it was an astronomical fortune. He was undeniably the wealthiest cadet in the dorms.
But Arthur wasn’t competing with students anymore.
He looked at his projected expenses. His Phantom Sniper class was a terrifying glass-cannon build, but it was incredibly mana-hungry.
Spamming Mana Quiver and Mirage Shot required a constant, steady supply of high-tier blue potions. He needed specialized arrows, enchanted field rations, and regular maintenance for his custom gear.
The reality was harsh.
In the brutal, macro-economy of the city’s underworld, 70,000 credits wasn’t wealth. It was just an extended runway. It cost thousands just to repair high-tier gear once.
Arthur dismissed the blue screens. He pulled a worn leather notebook from his desk drawer.
He flipped past pages of dungeon layouts and mob spawn rates until he reached a specific heading: The Obsidian Hand.
He stared at the ink, cross-referencing the current reality of the city with his deep meta-knowledge of Lornfell’s Legacy.
The guild was dying.
Unlike the massive, corrupt corporate guilds funded by the high nobility, the Obsidian Hand had a humble origin. It was founded a year ago by a group of ambitious, independent hunters led by a young woman named Sylvia.
They had pooled their savings, bought a warehouse, and thought creating the guild was the finish line.
They were horribly wrong.
The brutal reality of the guild system was that it was a bottomless, money-swallowing swamp. The constant, daily bleed of equipment repairs, healing potions, city taxes, and guild registration fees was suffocating them.
They were bleeding capital faster than they could farm it. Now, they were weeks away from forced dissolution.
In the original timeline of the game, Sylvia failed. The guild shattered, and its members were scattered to the wind.
But Arthur knew the hidden truth.
Those scattered, desperate rookies didn’t just fade away. Tempered by the failure of their guild, they eventually evolved into absolute monsters.
Some were poached by massive factions, becoming the untouchable, elite vanguards of the late game. Others went rogue, turning into broken, hyper-lethal solo NPCs that terrorized the hardest dungeons on the continent.
Arthur tapped his pen rhythmically against the desk.
He didn’t want to fight those monsters in the future. He wanted to own their contracts right now, while they were still broke, unrecognized, and desperate.
But the capital deficit was a massive roadblock.
If Arthur walked into Sylvia’s office tomorrow morning and dumped his 70,000 credits onto her desk, it would be nothing more than a band-aid on a bullet wound. The money would pay off their immediate debts, but the core rot would remain.
A month later, the maintenance costs would bleed them dry all over again.
A dying guild didn’t just need a one-time cash injection. It needed a sustainable, endless economic engine.
Arthur’s eyes narrowed. A highly exploitable piece of the world’s lore surfaced in his mind.
In this world, dungeons were not simply one-time gauntlets. According to the Guild Association’s strict legal framework, dungeon rights—the absolute monopoly over the resources inside—belonged to whichever guild officially cleared and claimed it first.
The real trick was the Dungeon Core.
If a raid squad reached the bottom of a crypt and shattered the core, the dungeon collapsed. The threat was neutralized.
However, if a guild deliberately kept the core intact, the ambient mana of the earth would continue to pool there. It would endlessly, reliably respawn monsters.
It became a permanent "Farm Ground." An endless supply of monster materials, alchemical reagents, and mana stones. This is the primary source of income for guilds.
For a struggling guild, a secured, private farming dungeon was a literal printing press for money.
Arthur reached to the back of his desk. He unrolled a massive, highly detailed topographical map of the city’s southern territories.
Relying entirely on his meta-knowledge, Arthur didn’t just look for one dungeon. He needed a diversified portfolio to shock-proof the guild’s economy.
He dragged his finger over the heavy ink lines, bypassing the heavily populated mining sectors. His finger stopped on three distinct, heavily overgrown areas.
They were completely unmapped, undiscovered F-Rank caverns hidden deep within the wilderness. Nobody in the city knew they existed.
Arthur dipped his quill into a pot of dark red ink. He drew sharp, distinct circles over the three hidden coordinates.
The first was a subterranean crawler cavern, perfect for harvesting infinite low-tier iron and ores just like the Iron-Vein dungeon he visited last weekend. Except that one belonged to the city council. This one would be entirely theirs.
The second was a mutated flora grotto, a goldmine for rare alchemical herbs and healing reagents.
The third was a generic beast-kin den, guaranteeing a massive, daily output of standard mana stones.
Arthur stared at the three red marks.
He wasn’t going to hand all three over at once. That was playing his hand entirely too fast.
He would offer Sylvia the exact coordinates to one dungeon first. It would be his down payment. Proof of his omniscience and value.
Once she verified it, signed the legal paperwork, and officially allocated fifty percent of the guild’s shares to his name, then—and only then—would he hand over the rest of the portfolio.
Fifty percent. An equal partnership.
Sylvia would get to keep her title as Guild Master. She would keep her pride and her dream alive. But Arthur would hold half the equity, half of the endless profits, and ultimate veto power over the future of the roster.
It was an offer she literally could not refuse. He would provide the 70,000 credits to clear the immediate red ink, and hand her the keys to an absolute monopoly to secure their future.
Arthur rolled the map up, tying it off with a leather string. He casually tucked it into his spatial inventory alongside his heavy pouches of credits.
"A dying guild doesn’t need a savior," Arthur muttered into the quiet room, a cold, calculated smile slowly spreading across his face. "It needs a monopoly."
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