"Little princess has been looking for you for weeks already, but so far, I was able to hide you from her. Also, feral one, why does she call you her underling?" Myrra asks.

"Stuff happened," I say simply and then watch Myrra's tail twitch in annoyance.

"Anyway, I finally secured the metals you were asking for and some mana stones. They will be delivered to your house tomorrow, nya."

"Took a while." I decide to ignore the last word of her sentence.

"Obviously. They were expensive. And when I say expensive, I mean expensive even for me."

"I'm rich, I can pay for them," I say.

Myrra smiles and then tells me how much they cost.

"I see, thank you for your patronage, Miss Myrra!" I say respectfully.

Maybe I'm not as rich as I thought. I should prepare some stuff to sell in the auction. My pride won't allow me to be some sort of gold digger sucking up to rich weirdo lynthari.

"The plan still applies?" Two lynthari bow to Myrra, but she ignores them.

"Yup," I answer while munching on a snack I bought from a merchant, "The auction is in around two weeks, and then around two weeks after that, we can go on and deal with the Living Tree."

Hopefully, the second trial of Beyond won't take longer than two weeks. I'm really excited for the auction. So far, I have no reason to think that it will take that long, but it's not like I have too much information to judge it from, so who knows? The system is an ass.

We exchange a few more sentences, set some plans, and Myrra leaves to go and talk with other guild masters as well. Lately, they have been really quiet and I bet it's also thanks to her.

The past few weeks were… easy, unfitting to the 4th floor, and something tells me it's as I thought and only the "final bosses" will be strong enough to turn it into Hell difficulty.

Damn, I bet easy-difficulty people might only have to kill one level 150 ant or something. I'll make sure to ask them during the tournament.

Before returning, I stop by the workshop of the enchanter whom I met one night and who so excitedly taught me about his craft. The older man is someone I have visited a few times already and even talked with him about my plan, obviously without much detail. He offered truly priceless advice and saved me quite some time and a lot of wasted materials.

"You again," he sighs as I enter his workshop, but I see that he seems in a better mood immediately.

I still don't know his name, nor does he know mine, and even though it should be easy to guess what I might plan to do, he doesn't ask and pretends not to know and just talks about his craft.

I put a mana stone on his table, "I think I almost got it," I say.

"Sure sure," he grumbles but immediately takes the stone, and with almost youthful curiosity, he starts going through my inscriptions.

"You twisted it in a really weird way here and here," he shows me the mana stone, pointing out the twist.

"Yes, I did, it has something to do with my skill," I tell him.

"What a weird skill you have," he says and then continues to inspect it.

It takes 10 minutes longer, but when he is done, he just looks at me. "I didn't ask you before, but who are you?" he says carefully, his voice solemn. "The things you are inscribing are terrifying, and the speed of your progress is even more so."

I stay quiet, but that doesn't stop him.

"I tried to hold my curiosity back, but this," he waves the mana stone in his hand, "this is way too much. You don't even realize what you just created."

"With your help," I tell him.

The old man laughs. "I'm not dumb, I know how small my help was." He sighs. "This stone, with its inscriptions, is probably worth more than some epic items to the right people. You don't realize it, but there is so much new stuff and theories that can come up from this."

Oh?

"People would pay good money for it?" I ask.

He laughs. "They would sell their firstborn son just to glance at it for a few minutes."

What weirdos. I spend just a few minutes playing with the stone and training for my plan of killing the Living Tree.

"Are these people rich?" I ask.

"Rich? Enchanters that would be interested are some of the richest people in the city."

Maybe I can become even richer.

After enchanting some smaller mana stones with simpler circuits that say nothing about my plan, I leave them to the old man and tell him to sell them. He will get 20% of the money.

Hearing that, he starts sweating as it seems like even 20% will be plenty.

Good!

When I enter my house once again, Min-Jae welcomes me with a big smile, the twins close behind him.

What did they do?

"Nat! We scammed lynthari!" the young Korean boy laughs happily.

This can't be good; it's enough when I'm screwing up the floor, I don't need three teenage boys to help.

"We sold them one of the epic items," Dennis joins in, excited to share.

"Not sold, you dumbass, we leveraged it!" Aaron corrects him, smug about his fancy new word.

"You're the dumbass, I just wanted to say that," Dennis shouts back and then they fight.

Min-Jae starts explaining, "We found a rich lynthari and showed him the shadow teleport ring thingy, I forgot its exact name. We asked Hadwin to borrow the ring to us. Then we asked for a loan from rich lynthari and said if we won't pay back, he can take the ring." He giggles.

I can see where this is going.

"We set a one-year time to pay the money back, but in that time, we will be long gone to the 5th floor," Dennis pushes Aaron's face away from him and happily joins.

"It's free money," Min-Jae is still smiling as he says so.

"Min-Jae," I start, and the smile disappears from his face, "you don't even realize the mistake you made?"

Twins shut up too, all boys thinking and worried expressions appearing on their faces.

So, I tell them, “We have more than one epic item we can leverage.”

They become happy once again and start talking over each other.

Greedy little twerps, I love them.

We spend the rest of the day borrowing money with our epic items as collateral. The conditions are outright predatory, but why should we care? By the time the loans are due, we're gonna be long since gone.

Sophie and Isabella are brought together with us and forced to read emotions and mind blend a bit to get even “better” offers. The sisters are an extremely good duo. Isabella can read if the lynthari is willing to offer more and Sophie can… well, make them a bit more inclined to agree.

We use all the epic items we have. The ones from the 3rd floor, Elydor’s sword, the items from the Champion's house.

The process is a bit more difficult as we have to let them examine the items and write it down properly, sign multiple papers, some even with our mana signatures, and always one high-ranking lynthari appears to watch over the deal.

Epic items are just that valuable. In the entire city, there are currently only around 20 of them, and since we are basically giving 5 normal ones and the 3 weaker ones from the 3rd floor away, the lynthari almost fight each other for the opportunity to fall for our scam.

While leveraging the 5th item, the lynthari that is called there to watch over the deal just unbelievably stares at us, unable to think what kind of dumbass would have so many items and would be as willing to get screwed over.

Surprisingly, they don’t seem to be too untrustful. Who the hell would dare to scam the lynthari? That’s just something one doesn't do and they even use some skill to mark the items. Some sort of tracker.

The sheer amount of mana stones is way too much, so we use their version of a bank to store them after selling the items to multiple lynthari. We pick the richest ones from the information we were able to collect and always just shamelessly walk to their houses and tell their servants what we want. It always leads to them quickly letting us in.

So, in the end, we get something like a card made from silver mana conductive metal and on that card, there is a number etched that apparently syncs with our bank account.

Weirdly, we can even use this card to pay at some places. Just like a credit card back on Earth.

On the card, there are so many zeros I don’t even bother trying to read how rich I am and on our way back I am Group 4's sugardaddy, buying them anything they want.

Snacks for Biscuit? Sure, here I will pay instead of you, Isabella.

A few pieces of rare equipment? Not a problem, Dennis.

A metal that conducts mana and you want to use it as projectiles for your [Telekinesis]? I will pay, Min-Jae!

The amount on the card doesn’t even change and it seems to be impossible to spend it all. But, there is a thought in my mind.

Should I maybe sell Biscuit this way and use him as collateral against loan? The best doggo of the 4th floor surely will be more valuable than some random epic item.

Then, to flex on Maya, I buy some extremely expensive snacks and a few mana battery stones she could use, as a thanks for showing me a new use for a skill both of us posses. For Tess, we order a few rare javelins, also made from endurium.

The boys keep telling me to buy a ring for Lily. So I just ask Izzy to read their emotions while I start asking them why they keep staring so much at Tess, Sophie, and Maya when they think the young women aren't looking.

The trio shuts up surprisingly quickly.

Only when we reach the house do I realize that we forgot Hadwin, but I shrug it off. He can buy whatever he wants a bit later.

I hand the silver card to Tess, “There will be an auction in a while so don’t spend much.”

Tess checks the number on the card multiple times and then shakes her head a bit. “Nat, do you even know how much it is?”

Huh? Not really? I didn’t bother learning how their currency that are mana stones works here.

I wave my hand at Tess to gesture her to stop from explaining, “I leave it up to you.”

Sure, money is nice, but how can it compare to personal power or even mana?

Yeah, I thought so.

Then I enter the living room that is already taken over by Isabella, who also returned with me and immediately rushed in. She continuously pokes the egg on the table, the one that Sophie spent 5 thousand shards to buy. An amount enough to buy an epic item.

Hopefully, it isn’t consumable.

(Food?) Biscuit also asks. Indeed, brilliant minds think alike.

I ruffle his head a bit and we continue to look at the egg.

“It’s not food!” Isabella shouts, sounding like an angry kitten.

“The system called it a beast egg and the description says that it’s a beast with the bloodline of some ancient monster,” Sophie says, and Isabella gives her a harsh look, yet her older sister continues, “We don’t know what monster and it seems to be randomized? I picked it so I could have someone to defend me close range hopefully, and Isabella wanted to make Biscuit jealous.”

“Ehm?” I get out of myself.

“Yes, I know,” Sophie sighs, “Izzy saw something similar in a drama on TV before we got into the tutorial. Just with men and women instead of a monster.”

Oh, that quite makes sense, doesn’t it?

“You got it wrong, Soph. It’s for your protection and for us to get a new friend!” Even while Izzy says it, I can feel her connecting to the egg and constantly trying to grasp any emotion from it.

The little girl also continuously uses her [Pyrokinesis] to keep an egg nice and warm. As I watch how she handles it, I see a clear mark of improvement. The way she handles her skill and mana is much better now, and the heat she produces is nice and warm, but not overly so, and evenly covers the surface of the egg.

“Just a few days and it should hatch!” Izzy says after a while as she turns to me with a big smile on her face, “Just wait! You will be so jealous.”

Aren’t you too cheeky right now?

I continue to let her read my emotions, so she immediately knows what I am doing.

“N-no…” Isabella whispers in a broken voice.

But I already pull out a piece of dried deer meat and offer it to Biscuit, who immediately follows me back to my room, leaving Isabella behind, only with her weirdo egg.

Back in my room, I jump into the armchair, and Biscuit jumps onto my lap, closing his eyes immediately while I check the timer.

Two days left until Beyond's second trial.

With closed eyes, I get back to training what Maya showed me a few days ago.