Chapter 69: The Cross-Continental Copyright Campaign

The plaza outside the Vance Commerce Headquarters in the capital of Solaris was packed this morning with dozens of diplomatic convoys bearing the crests of seven neighboring kingdoms.

Steel-bound wooden crates full of pirated translations of The Elegy of the Nameless Knight — in Dwarvish, forest Elvish, Beastkin tongue, and southern island dialects — were being carried into the main hall. Foreign envoys and representatives from international trade guilds stood in long lines, applications for official distribution licenses in hand, desperate to avoid sanctions from the Solaris military and trade coalition.

Inside the top-level negotiation chamber at the very top of the building.

Lucian sat at the head of the table, dressed in a crisp black suit trimmed with silver thread. Sylvia and Vance Commerce's team of corporate lawyers flanked him on either side, a mountain of cross-border copyright contracts stacked in front of them.

BOOM!

A hairy, powerful hand slammed down against the granite table.

Thordar Ironbeard, Governor of the Eisenwald Dwarven Trade Guild, shot to his feet, his long grey beard trembling all the way down to the floor. He swept his stack of documents aside and roared in a gravelly voice like rolling stone.

"Vance Commerce, don't push your luck! Demanding thirty percent of book sales revenue across the entire Dwarven territory is highway robbery! If you don't cut the royalty fee down to fifteen percent, the Eisenwald Alliance will immediately blockade every export route for Mithril ore to the Solaris Empire!"

The negotiation chamber froze solid. Vance's lawyers held their breath, glancing over at Lucian.

Mithril was a lifeblood strategic resource, essential to forging armor and weapons for every human army. For two hundred years, not a single nation had dared to openly challenge the Dwarven monopoly on it.

Lucian leaned back in his chair, slowly twirling a jade-inlaid quill.

He didn't look at Thordar. He simply reached into his spatial ring and pulled out a thick manuscript titled The Legend of the Nameless Hero, Volume 2, opened it to page thirty, and slid it across the table until it stopped right in front of the dwarf's nose.

Lucian pointed at a circled passage.

"Governor. Read this."

Thordar frowned, leaning down to look at the page.

'...The nameless knight mixed the ash of a Tartarus mana-tree into a bath of molten iron, using the compressed heat of wind-element mana to strip away the carbon impurities... turning ordinary iron into a blade twice as hard and twice as elastic as Mithril alloy, without a single ounce of dwarven ore...'

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Thordar read the three lines, and the hand braced on the table began to shake violently. The stub of cigar in his mouth dropped straight into his teacup with a sizzle.

Lucian took a leisurely sip of herbal tea and spoke, flat and even.

"When I was seven, I wrote that passage just to hit my Titan Script vocabulary quota. But yesterday, my head engineer, Lady Evelyn Wright, tested this exact formula in the Floor 1 foundry of the World Tower. It worked one hundred percent perfectly."

Lucian looked up, staring straight into Thordar's ashen face.

"If the Eisenwald Alliance cuts off Mithril supply, I'll print ten million copies of Volume 2 and hand out this steel-forging formula, free of charge, to every blacksmith on the continent. At that point, your Mithril ore will only be worth using as paving stones."

Thordar stood frozen in place.

He stared at the black-covered novel, then at the ten-year-old boy calmly sipping tea in front of him. Every trace of a mining superpower's ambassadorial swagger dissolved into nothing.

Trembling, he grabbed the quill and hastily signed the licensing contract at a rate raised to... forty percent.

"I'll sign! We accept every clause of Vance Commerce's terms!"

Ting! Ting!

A Unified System v2.0 notification appeared before Lucian.

['NAMELESS HERO' NOVEL OFFICIALLY TRANSLATED INTO 17 INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGES!]

[NEW SKILL UNLOCKED: 'MONOPOLY NEGOTIATION' LV.1!]

• Effect: Automatically secures 100% monopoly leverage at the negotiating table when holding revolutionary intellectual property.

[ADDITIONAL CLEAN QUARTERLY REVENUE: +2,000,000 GOLD!]

At the same moment, viewed through a magical telecommunication crystal orb set up in the Vance estate's study.

Sword Emperor Regulus, feet propped up on his desk, a jug of fine wine in hand, watched his son's negotiation unfold and let out a booming laugh that shook the roof tiles.

"Valeria! Did you see that?! Our precious son just used a cheap pulp novel to shake down an entire Dwarven kingdom! Having this kid was the single best investment of my life!"

Valeria, sitting beside him knitting, smiled gently.

"He's just like you — never willing to lose a single copper."

Back at the negotiation chamber, Sylvia moved briskly, collecting the signed contracts and stamping each page with Vance Commerce's red seal.

The foreign envoys, taking back their signed contracts, all bowed deeply to Lucian, eyes filled with reverent dread. In the eyes of the surrounding empires, the Vance Publishing House was no ordinary printing company — it was a supreme strategic intelligence arm of the Solaris Royal Family, holding ancient arcane formulas powerful enough to collapse any nation's economy.

Lucian picked up the jade seal and stamped it firmly onto the hundredth contract of the day.

He opened his spatial ring and glanced at the guaranteed clean banknote balance ticking rapidly upward.

"Two million gold in passive income per quarter..."

Lucian leaned back in his chair, a small smile tugging at his mouth.

"Enough to let Evelyn finish installing all thirty automated production lines on Floor 1 of the World Tower."