Chapter 69: Full of Letters and Upgraded Victoria

Despite my busy schedule of building revolutionary safes and counting my growing fortune, I was not completely isolated from the outside world.

Letters arrived at our guild hall on a regular basis, bringing news from friends who had moved on to very different paths while I stayed behind to build my financial empire.

Arielle was still studying at the Royal Magic Academy in the capital. Over the past two years, her magical talent had exploded, making her one of the top star students in her class.

The rumors about her reached all the way to our city, but she didn’t need rumors to keep me updated.

We never visited each other in person. The distance between the commercial district and the high noble academy grounds was wide, and both of us were buried under mountains of work.

I had orders piling up for high security locks, and she had endless lectures and mana control exercises. Instead, she sent letters.

Lots of them.

Every two weeks, a sleek white academy owl would land on my bedroom windowsill, dropping a neatly folded letter written on high-grade red parchment. Those birds were arrogant, too. They would sit there tapping their beaks on the wood until I handed them a piece of dried meat.

Her letters were always long, detailed, and written in elegant, perfect cursive handwriting. Not a single ink blotch ever ruined her paper.

She wrote about her strict mana control teachers, her annoying noble classmates who bragged about their family crests, and her progress in mastering advanced elemental spells.

She detailed how the academy cafeteria served tiny portions of fancy food that left her starving, and how the aristocratic girls tried to compete over who had the most expensive magical robes.

Somehow she also mentioned some of our moments when I was his magic advisor years ago. She kept bringing up those old training sessions where I gave her advice, bringing up how na?ve we used to be. Reading those parts always felt strange.

It feels cringe reading her romanticized version of the past, especially when she made me sound like some wise ancient mentor instead of a teenager who just wanted to make money.

Reading her letters was enjoyable, but replying to them was a complete nightmare.

My hands were brilliant when holding an iron pick, a precision file, or a forging hammer. I could shape tiny gears without making a single mistake, fitting teeth together with small precision.

I could feel the tiny flaws inside a heavy lock mechanism just by running my fingertips over the metal surface.

But the moment you placed a thin goose-quill pen in my fingers and asked me to write words on parchment, my fine motor skills vanished completely. My hand would cramp up instantly. I held the quill like a chisel, putting way too much force into every stroke.

My handwriting was absolute garbage. It looked like a blind spider had crawled through an inkwell and suffered a terrible seizure across the paper.

The lines were uneven, the letters leaned in random directions, and half the words were smudged because my palm dragged across the fresh ink.

Most of the time, I simply read her letters, smiled, and tossed them into my desk drawer without writing back. I was far too busy designing vault tumblers to struggle with ink bottles for three hours.

A single misplaced gear in a vault could ruin my reputation and cost me hundreds of gold pieces, so writing polite updates about my day sat very low on my priority list.

Earning more gold coins is what matters the most.

That strategy worked fine until four months ago, when Arielle sent a letter demanding to know why I had ignored her previous five messages. She even threatened to send an academy tracking spell to see if I was still alive.

Feeling a sudden rare wave of guilt, I sat down at my desk, grabbed a quill, and spent two agonizing hours painstakingly scratching out a short reply.

I ruined three sheets of parchment before getting something readable. I explained that I was busy, that my safe business was doing well, and that she should stop worrying about me.

Three days later, the white academy owl returned. It slammed down on the sill harder than usual, looking just as irritated as its owner.

I opened her letter, expecting a polite response. Instead, the parchment practically radiated pure fury.

"SILVESTER!" her letter began in massive, heavily inked letters that nearly tore through the paper. "What is wrong with you?! I spent forty-five minutes trying to read the terrible squiggles you sent me! The mage instructor of the theory department looked at your note and asked if I was exchanging secret coded messages with a mountain troll! If you are going to write me a letter, at least use actual words instead of dragging a muddy nail across the page!"

I stared at her letter for a long moment, then slowly rubbed the back of my neck.

"The fuck?!," I muttered to myself, shaking my head. "I spend two hours writing a thoughtful message, and she compares me to a mountain troll!"

I never sent her another handwritten letter after that. If she wanted updates, she would just have to wait until we met in person. I wasn’t going to destroy my wrists for someone who insulted my penmanship.

Ignatius, on the other hand, did not care about neat handwriting at all.

His letters arrived through standard merchant couriers, written on cheap, rough parchment that usually smelled like campfire smoke, stale ale, or dried monster blood.

You could tell immediately when an Ignatius letter arrived because the guild clerk would hand it over using only two fingers.

After registering at the local guild, Ignatius had quickly outgrown the simple goblin hunting requests around the city. He got tired of waiting for low paying local jobs.

He joined a mid-tier party of veteran adventurers called the ’Rainbow Guys’ and set off on a three year journey across the distant territories outside the kingdom.

His letters were short, chaotic, and full of ridiculous stories. Spelling mistakes were everywhere, and half the words were crossed out with thick black scratches.

"Hey Silvester!" one of his letters read, the ink smeared heavily near the margins. "We just cleared a nest of swamp wyverns near the southern border! My axe broke in half during the fight, so I had to beat the last one over the head with a heavy bronze cooking pot! It worked great! The party leader says I am a natural born vanguard, but the cook was furious about his pot. How is the guild? Are you still hiding behind your wooden bench? You should get out here and see the world! The food is terrible, but the monster fights are amazing!"

I sat at my workbench, holding his grease-stained letter with a quiet chuckle.

"A cooking pot," I whispered, shaking my head. "Very resources hahaha."

While my friends were out chasing high noble honors and fighting swamp wyverns, my world remained grounded right here in the workshop. I had my own monsters to fight, mostly in the form of greedy merchants, rival locksmiths, and endless administrative paperwork.

But reading their letters reminded me that the world outside our small kingdom was vast, loud, and full of motion.

It made me want to finish my preparations even faster.

While my Earthen Vaults were bringing in massive piles of gold, Victoria was going through her own incredible transformation right alongside me.

When I first met her, she was a skilled but struggling local locksmith who barely managed to keep the guild’s doors open. Back then, her days were full of endless stress and headache.

She was constantly worrying about paying the shop rent, buying cheap mineral oil, and replacing worn out hand files.

She knew how to fix basic house locks, repair broken chest latches, and handle standard ironwork, but complex mechanical structures were far beyond her reach at the time.

Over the past two years, watching me work and studying the advanced blueprints I left lying around the shop changed everything for her.

Victoria was a genius in her own right. She did not have my Locksmith’s Eye skill, nor did she possess my memories from a previous life, but she possessed an incredible work ethic and an intuitive feel for metal tension.

While I was busy counting profits or working on my own secret vault projects, she spent every spare moment absorbing everything I did like a sponge.

She spent her late nights practicing pin alignments, studying mechanical tolerances, and mastering heat-treatment techniques for high-grade spring steel.

Her fingers became covered in small calluses and minor burn marks from the forge, but she never complained once.

She would sit at her workbench until the candle burned down to nothing, reassembling complex gear arrangements over and over until she could do it with her eyes closed.

By the time I turned ten, Victoria was no longer just the owner of a small commercial guild. She was widely recognized as one of the finest master locksmiths in the entire capital.

Her growth brought a completely new demographic of customers to our front door. We were no longer just serving local shopkeepers or low rank adventurers needing simple lockpicks.

Now, wealthy merchants, guild representatives, and even nobility were coming directly to us to secure their valuables.

One sunny afternoon, a luxurious black carriage drawn by four pure white horses pulled up right in front of our guild hall.

The carriage was made of polished dark oak with gold leaf trim along the wheels, instantly drawing the attention of everyone walking down the street.

The door opened, and a tall, elegant man wearing a velvet cloak decorated with silver embroidery stepped down onto the cobblestones. He carried himself with an unmistakable air of high authority, his sharp eyes scanning the sign above our door before taking a single step forward.

He was accompanied by two tall bodyguards wearing heavy plate armor that bore the crest of a foreign duchy from the neighboring small Kingdom of Venixia.

The guards held their hands near the pommels of their swords, watching the surrounding street with fierce glares as if an assassin might jump out from behind a bread cart at any second.

The front door chimed softly as the foreign noble walked inside, looking around our clean, well-lit showroom with a proud, distant expression. The showroom had undergone quite a bit of remodeling lately, featuring display cases filled with intricate gear displays and cutaway lock models, but he still looked like he expected to catch dust on his expensive velvet sleeves.

"Greetings," the noble said, his accent smooth and foreign. "I am looking for Master Victoria. I was told that the finest mechanical security artisan in this district operates from this location."

Victoria stepped out from the back workshop, wiping her hands on a clean cloth. She was wearing her comfortable leather work apron over her dress, her dark hair tied up neatly behind her head.

Even with a few stray smudges of soot on her cheek, she had an air of effortless confidence that commanded immediate respect.

"I am Victoria~," she replied in seductive tone, offering a polite, professional nod. "How can our guild assist you, my lord?~"

The foreign noble raised an eyebrow, clearly surprised to see a relatively sexy young woman standing before him instead of an ancient, gray-bearded dwarf or an old retired blacksmith. He hesitated for a second before regaining his composure.

"I require a custom lock for a family heirloom vault located in my home territory," the noble explained, pulling a small parchment scroll from his velvet cloak. "The vault requires a triple-cylinder rotary lock capable of resisting any spells. My local locksmiths claimed it was impossible to forge without royal dwarven tools."

Victoria took the scroll, unrolling it on the counter. I watched silently from my corner workbench, leaning against my stool with a small, proud smile on my face while pretending to clean an old iron tumbler.

She inspected the blueprint for less than thirty seconds. Her eyes moved calmly across the mechanical lines, her thumb tapping rhythmically against the wooden counter while her mind calculated the tolerances.

"It is not impossible," Victoria stated smoothly, looking up at the foreign noble with absolute confidence. "Your local locksmiths simply do not understand how to balance internal spring resistance against thermal expansion. If you use standard brass tumblers, the spells will bend the cylinder. But if we forge the internal rotors from tempered star-steel alloy and align the pin tracks in a staggered spiral, the lock will hold easily."

The foreign noble stared at her, his proud expression instantly melting into utter shock. He had clearly spent weeks hearing from foreign experts that his vault was an impossible dream, only for a young woman in a leather apron to dismantle the problem in a single breath.

"You... you understood the flaw just by looking at the draft?" he stammered, pointing a manicured finger at the parchment.

"I can have the lock forged and tested in four days," Victoria continued, completely ignoring his surprise. "My rate for custom foreign orders is eighty gold pieces, with half paid upfront as a material deposit."

"Eighty gold?!" one of the armored bodyguards barked, taking a step forward with a hand clenching his sword hilt. "That is outrageously expensive for a commoner workshop!"

Victoria did not even flinch. She did not shrink back or look to me for support. She simply rolled the scroll back up and laid it gently on the counter.

"My price reflects the quality of my work, sir," she said flatly, her voice firm and cold. "If you prefer a cheaper lock that breaks the first time a spell hits it, you are welcome to try the street vendors near the lower docks."

The foreign noble stared at her for a long three seconds, taking in her unyielding posture, then suddenly let out a loud, delighted laugh that echoed through the shop.

"Brilliant!" the noble declared, pulling out a heavy pouch of gold and slamming it onto the counter. "Absolute brilliance! I will pay your deposit, Master Victoria! In fact, if the lock works as promised, I will double your fee!"

Watching that interaction filled my chest with a deep sense of relief.

Two years ago, Victoria worried about paying novice locksmith allowance and buying mineral oil for the guilds tools. Now, she was casually setting high prices for foreign nobles and backing them down with pure technical authority.

The guild was no longer just afloat. It was a thriving, respected institution that could easily run without me.

Master Victoria was a true master now. She did not need a child locksmiths assistance to teach her anymore.