Chapter 591: Limited Stock? [Bonus - ]

Chapter 591: Limited Stock? [Bonus Chapter]

Number Five closed her eyes behind her mask, pinching the bridge of her nose beneath her midnight-silk hood.

"Ah! Business before pleasure! A woman after my own practical heart!" Musvi cheered, clapping his hands together with a sharp clap.

"Right away, Lord White! One moment please!"

Musvi turned around, humming a cheerful out-of-tune folk melody as he began rummaging through the towering dark-wood shelves behind the counter.

He dragged a rolling ladder across the polished floor with a loud rhythmic clack-clack-clack, reached up to the highest alcove, and pulled down a heavy dust-covered chest carved from tarnished silver.

He dropped the chest onto the dragon-bone counter with a dull heavy thud as a small cloud of gray dust erupted from the lid, making Number Five cough softly behind her porcelain mask.

Musvi rubbed his hands together, his painted theater grin gleaming under the ceiling crystals.

"Let’s see here... administrative allocation... military reserves... ah, yes!"

With a series of rapid rhythmic flicks of his wrists, Musvi began dealing out thick metallic cards across the counter like a blackjack dealer in a high-stakes casino.

SNAP! SNAP! SNAP!

The cards were forged from an ancient alloy, each one etched with glowing complex summoning runes.

Musvi gathered them into two neat precise stacks, squared the edges with a satisfying tap and pushed them across the bone counter toward Kara.

"Tada!" Musvi announced proudly, spreading his arms wide with a flourish. "Your official recruitment allocation, certified by the World Council’s archive!"

Kara looked down at the two piles and she blinked.

She looked closer then she slowly picked up the smaller stack, fanning the cards out between her fingers.

There were four.

...Exactly four golden Hero Summoning Cards.

She turned her gaze to the larger stack. It was roughly three inches thick and she counted the edges with her thumb.

One hundred and fifty... There were one hundred and fifty silver Troop Summoning Cards.

Silence hung over the fossilized dragon-bone counter for three long agonizing seconds.

’Huh?’

Musvi stood behind the desk, his head tilted at an innocent ninety-degree angle with his painted smile looking wide and vacant.

Beside them, Number Five kept her hands tucked deep into her sleeves, staring fixedly at the floor tiles as if suddenly discovering a profound spiritual truth in the grout.

Kara’s left eyelid began to twitch as a deep terrifying vein pulsed along her forehead.

"Musvi," Kara said, her voice dropping into a low vibrating growl that made the brass service bell tremble.

"Yes, my lovely conqueror?"

"What..." Kara began, lifting the four golden cards between her thumb and forefinger, "...in the unholy hell is this?"

Musvi blinked through his wooden mask.

"Those are your cards, Lord White! Top-tier craftsmanship too!"

"I asked for a hundred Hero Summoning Tickets!" Kara yelled, her composure completely shattering as she slammed her palm down onto the counter with a concussive bang. "I asked for tens of thousands of Troop Summoning Tickets! Why the hell are there four?! Why are there only a hundred and fifty troops?! What is this pathetic little deck of cards?!"

She threw her hands up, turning a furious incredulous glare toward Number Five.

"You are the bloody World Council!" Kara roared, her voice echoing through the endless labyrinth of ancient bookshelves. "You rule nine superpowers and you hoard the continental wealth of an entire planet so how in the seven hells is this the entirety of your stock?! Are you running a global empire or a failing pawn shop in the lower slums?!"

Musvi paused.

He slowly lowered his arms, tapping his painted chin with a thoughtful wooden finger.

"Well, you see, Lord White..." Musvi explained, his voice sounding unbothered and carrying a soft apologetic lilt. "...to be completely technically accurate, the last time the World Council’s reserves were refilled was roughly four hundred and twenty years ago."

Kara stared at him, her jaw slack. "Four hundred years?"

"Four hundred and twenty, give or take a winter!" Musvi nodded brightly. "You must understand the historical context, my dear! When the rifts opened during the First Apocalypse, humanity was fighting for its survival... Every house, every legion, and every Lord burned through Summoning Tickets like dry kindling in a furnace! Millions of troops were summoned! Hundreds of legendary heroes were deployed to hold the defensive perimeters! By the time the borders stabilized and the modern Nine Powers were established... well, the terrestrial supply was practically exhausted!"

Musvi leaned forward over the counter, lowering his voice into a conspiratorial whisper that held zero actual secrecy.

"If you truly desire thousands of high-tier Troop Tickets and hundreds of legendary Hero Summons, Lord White, you shouldn’t be digging around in this dusty basement... You need to head straight to Central City in the Sovereign Realm! That is where the true treasuries are anchored!"

He gave another dramatic wink from behind his painted eyeholes.

"In fact," Musvi added cheerfully, "when you eventually visit Central City, you should definitely pay a visit to the Grand Silver Bazaar... You might even run into my lovely daughter! She manages a high-tier trading consortium out there, she’s a wonderful girl and very sharp too while being excellent with numbers... Though, to be fair, I haven’t seen her in three hundred years, so who knows? She might have six children and a fleet of void-caravans by now! Time flies when you’re reading books, doesn’t it?"

Kara stood frozen in front of the counter, holding the four golden cards in her hand, staring at the cheerful masked lunatic before her.

For the first time since she had walked into the Citadel, the terrifying Lord of Blessed Land was completely speechless.

’I... I... I don’t know what to say.’

Kara stared down at the polished fossilized bone counter with her dark eyes completely fixed on the pathetic insulting stacks of metallic cards resting under the amber lamplight.

It felt like an insult to her status... One hundred and fifty silver Troop Summoning Cards and Four golden Hero Summoning Cards?

’Four,’ Silas repeated to himself in the quiet, smoldering privacy of his own soul. ’Four bloody cards... what was supposedly a grand allocation from the supreme rulers of nine global superpowers, and it looks like the leftover stock from a clearance bin in a dying border outpost.’

Beside her, Number Five remained standing in silence with her small hands tucked away inside the cavernous midnight-silk folds of her sleeves.

The featureless white porcelain mask gave away nothing, but the subtle, stiff rigidity of her shoulders betrayed an exhaustion that transcended mortal lifespans.

Across the six-foot-tall dragon-bone counter, Musvi’s painted wooden theater mask was tilted at that exact same bright, cheerful ninety-degree angle.

His red-painted wooden cheeks gleamed beneath the glowing crystals overhead, his oversized carved theater grin wider than a crescent moon.

Kara slowly pinched the bridge of her nose with her single right hand, letting out a long heavy hiss of air through her teeth that rattled the brass paperweights on the desk.

"Musvi," Kara said, her voice dropping into a dry tone that practically dripped with venom.

"At your service, my glorious, broad-shouldered conqueror!" Musvi chirped, leaning both elbows onto the bone counter with an eager flourish.

’What’s with all these names?’

"Let me get this straight," Kara continued, gesturing with her single hand toward the cards. "Again, you’re telling me the World Council, the supreme all-powerful governing body that levies continental taxes on billions of living souls, hoards pre-calamity relics, and struts around the Citadel like gods among insects, is running a military reserve with four Hero Tickets?"

"Yes!" Musvi nodded. "It’s been quite a while since they restocked me though, since the third centur—"

"I don’t give a damn about the third century, you fossilized clown," Kara scoffed, leaning her hip against the counter with a heavy scowl. "I have an entire territory to build... I have walls to raise, watchtowers to garrison, and farmsteads to secure. Furthermore, Blessed Land is situated out in the middle of nowhere. It’s miles away from the established trade corridors, tucked into an isolated valley that doesn’t even appear on the Council’s primary survey maps... How am I supposed to reach the core markets with four heroes and a hundred and fifty footmen? Am I supposed to march them across three mountain ranges on foot every time I need a bag of salt?"

Musvi blinked through the dark circular eyeholes of his mask.

"Oh!" he gasped, striking his open palm with a wooden fist with a sharp sound. "Why didn’t you say so, my dear?! You’re talking about spatial spells right?! You need an anchored bridge! Something that can fold the dimensional threshold and link your private territory sanctuary directly to Central City in the Sovereign Realm!"

’Oh... He has that?’

Kara raised an eyebrow, crossing her single arm over her chest.

"Yeah. Exactly that. Don’t tell me you ran out of those four hundred years ago too."

"Perish the thought!" Musvi beamed, his voice rising into an excited operatic crescendo. "An anchored threshold gate is a staple of high-tier infrastructure! A delicate matter of dimensional power, yes, but nothing an archivist of my peerless caliber cannot unearth! Give me ten seconds... no, eight seconds! Do not blink, Lord White!"

SWOOSH!

Before Kara’s eyes could even track the displacement, Musvi vanished.

There was no crackle of lightning, no displacement of air and no lingering whiff of ozone or vibration of mana as well.

He didn’t slip into the shadows or step through a spatial tear either.

One second he was leaning against the fossilized dragon-bone, and the next, the space behind the counter was vacant making Kara’s dark eyes narrow into cold razor-thin slits.

Her internal senses flared.

Behind the placid exterior of Kara White, Silas pushed his spiritual perception outward, sending an invisible microscopic web of high-frequency vibrational mana sweeping through the cavernous rotunda.

He swept the floor, the vaulted stone rafters fifty feet above, the towering bookshelves of petrified wood, and the shadowed corridors radiating into the archive.

...Nothing.

There was not a trace... It was as if Musvi had never existed in physical reality to begin with.

’What kind of movement technique is that?’ Silas analyzed, a quiet chill settling behind his ribs. ’Even with a Gold Core’s sensing, I can’t track a single thread of his wake.’

Beside her, Number Five let out a heavy suffering groan that sounded like rusty hinges scraping together.

"Every single time," the short woman muttered, her muffled voice dripping with disgust. "Every single time an outsider arrives, he puts on that ridiculous minstrel routine..."

She turned away from the high counter, her midnight-silk robes dragging across the polished slate floor.

Spotting a small ornate wooden armchair tucked into a quiet alcove near the primary bookshelf, Number Five walked over, turned around, and casually allowed her weight to drop backward onto the velvet cushion.

WHOOSH!

There was no chair.

The moment her rear met the carved mahogany armrests, the entire seat dissolved into a faint swirling wisp of lavender mist!

Number Five’s center of gravity betrayed her instantly.

Her legs kicked out beneath her robes, and she plummeted straight down with her backside slamming hard onto the unforgiving stone floor with a hollow thud.

BANG!

"Agh, damn it all to the void!" Number Five cursed loudly, her porcelain mask tilting straight toward the vaulted ceiling as her small fists slammed into the floor tiles. "May your ancient soul rot in the deepest trench of the rift, you miserable moldy old bastard!"

Kara leaned her back against the bone counter, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

"Nice landing," Kara remarked, looking down at the heap of midnight-silk. "Real majestic for a World Council Head..."

Number Five slowly pushed herself upright, brushing invisible dust from her skirts with violent jerky motions of her wrists.

She didn’t bother looking for another chair as she simply stood there in the center of the aisle, her small frame practically trembling with frustrated rage.

"It is an illusion spell, or you could say something beyond that..." Number Five snapped, her voice tight and breathy beneath the porcelain. "Musvi does not move through physical space like a normal mortal. The entire foundational structure of this grand library is an external manifestation of his domain so his flesh and the petrified dark-wood are synchronized at a conceptual level... Once he steps away from that counter, he moves across these shelves like an incorporeal wraith... He is everywhere and nowhere simultaneously so unless he deliberately anchors his mass to speak to you, not even the World King could locate him with a direct divination strike."

"I see..." Kara murmured, letting her gaze wander back across the endless curving rows of towering bookshelves as a quiet sobering realization settled into Silas’s thoughts.

The world was vast.

...It was disgustingly and terrifyingly vast.

Back in Sector Forty-Four, it had been easy to feel invincible.

Crushing Devan Varma into the star-iron floor, shattering the nobles, hell even threatening Vanderbilt Senior while eating... it was intoxicating.

But watching Musvi dissolve into thin air and listening to Number Five speak of domain synchronizations served as a blunt cold reminder... The only reason he was standing in this room, dictating terms and stuffing his pockets with billions, was because of the Gold Core.