Chapter 254: A Year of Chaos

While Shin was spending a full year in the lost dimension, chaos spread through the tower, thanks to his plans.

The origin of the problem was the fact that neither he nor Carolina ever completed the entrance test, having explored a bug about the tower system that only he paid attention to. The test wouldn’t end unless all participants had either died or gotten approved.

As a consequence, the expansion system remained suspended. Without it, guilds couldn’t wage war against one another, and neither could the clans. What had been a small rule, originally meant to provide stability during the short testing period, had instead become a nightmare.

The guilds were the true foundation of the clans’ power. They were system entities capable of holding territory, with ownership over those lands that could only be overwritten through a guild war, and such conflicts were now banned while the expansion system remained blocked.

Basically, during the testing period, all guild territories were safe. It was even a great time to start a new guild, since you couldn’t be attacked. The obvious problem was that this safety was supposed to be temporary... or so it should have been.

Knowing that he would remain in the test for an entire year, Shin ordered Eve to explore this newfound safety. He also wanted her to take advantage of another problem: expanding a guild’s territory cost system points.

For various reasons, it was common for large areas to remain under a group’s influence without being under the direct control of any guild.

In such free areas, anyone with enough money could simply come and establish their own guild. This was possible by exploiting yet another loophole: creating a guild was not considered an expansion.

Once created, however, the guild could not expand beyond its original size, since all expansion was banned. But this also meant that the existing guilds could do nothing about it. Any piece of land that had been left free was now a potential vulnerability.

The whole plan would be enough to cause a big impact, but to make things even easier for the queen, Arlo, following Shin’s orders, showed up and approached her, offering money to finance her operation.

And just two months after Shin had entered the lost dimension, Eva was smiling from ear to ear after receiving a report from some of her subordinates, mostly newcomers she had begun to recruit.

The plan of creating the guild was going as expected, and almost all of the first tower, from the second to the 20th floor, was in pure chaos, especially the 18th floor, as the blonde girl kept her promise to Arlo. The member of the Ice Wolf clan had asked her to create chaos there.

With excited steps, she strode around the first floor until she reached an unassuming inn. She opened the door and quickly closed it behind her.

The place was quite dark, the only source of light coming from Kaho’s desk. Books and documents were scattered all over the simple room, which contained little more than a couple’s bed and the desk.

"You don’t need to keep this place so dark all the time," the queen commented, turning on the lights.

Kaho immediately recoiled from the sudden brightness, grimacing as she raised an arm to shield her eyes.

"Too bright," she complained to her best friend. "Are you trying to blind me?" she added, her voice low and slightly weak.

Eva blinked in shock; it was difficult to recognize the woman beneath the mess.

Her usually beautiful face was almost entirely hidden behind long, disheveled strands of hair, which had apparently been left uncombed for far too long. Deep, dark bags had formed beneath her eyes, making her look as though she hadn’t slept properly in days. Her normally sharp and lively expression had been replaced by the vacant, exhausted stare of a zombie that had somehow been given paperwork.

She was wearing nothing but a long, loose shirt that hung carelessly around her body, and, impressively enough, she had found a shirt so large it could contain her boobs, even stretched as it was, and still reached almost to her knees.

There were ink stains on her fingers, a few on her sleeves, and several crumpled sheets of paper had somehow ended up beneath her feet.

Judging by the state of the room and the sheer number of documents surrounding her desk, Kaho seemed to have been working for days without stop.

Eva approached her quickly, her eyes laced with worry as she looked her friend up and down, checking on her condition.

"Have you been eating properly?" That was her first question as she forcefully pushed Kaho away from her desk. "Heck, have you even been drinking water?" she added, looking around.

A relieved sigh escaped her lips when she at least spotted a used jar of water. Still, she couldn’t see a single plate of food anywhere.

Eva had only been away for three days, and in that short period her best friend had once again immersed herself completely in her work. Kaho was extremely smart, but sometimes she needed to be taken care of like a child.

"Well... I..." the busty woman stumbled over her words.

The truth was that she had been so absorbed in her work that she had forgotten to do anything else.

"Anyway, I’ve already doubled our money," she commented, hoping the good news would save her from a lecture.

"What?" Eva blinked in shock once again. "There’s no way. I’ve only been away for three days..."

"It’s true. Take a look at this." Kaho approached her desk and opened the shop system. "See? Do you remember how I suggested using 25% of the money Arlo gave us to buy goods? I figured our actions would cause inflation."

As she explained, the woman opened a new tab in the shop system. It was the tower’s internal marketplace, and, just as expected, prices had skyrocketed. The fact that the shop system centralized almost all commerce within the tower made the effects appear much faster.

"A few products that can be found on a wide variety of floors have remained at roughly the same price. But the ones I bought were exactly the kind that only drop from monsters on one or two floors," Kaho explained, showing how, once the prices peaked, she had sold part of their stock.

"I wasn’t expecting to see the effects so soon," the queen admitted.

"It’s probably because some people are buying in massive quantities, hoping to make even more profit later," Kaho explained.

Still, she argued that it was best for them to sell at that point. The prices wouldn’t rise much higher, and, more importantly, having more money meant they would have more resources to carry on with their plans.

"I’ve also been mapping out our next targets," Kaho said, once again hoping that this would make Eva completely forget the fact that she hadn’t eaten in three days.