Chapter 3: Too easy, or not?

Chapter 3: Chapter 3: Too easy, or not?

Allan stood in the dark of the alley between a dilapidated warehouse and a crumbling wall. He flipped his last silver coin off his knuckle. It felt so light, as if it were made of paper. The last one always did.

It had been three days since they’d started rationing in the big house, and what little they had left was almost entirely the half sack of grain they’d managed to scrounge from the nearby market, along with a few dried roots that had likely been old even when they were plump and green.

Lira and Seris no longer commented on the meals either. Thank god for that.

But that told him even more. People who were too proud to beg, but too loyal to leave, communicated in silence.

I still don’t know why they stayed. That thought had been with him for a while now.

It was supposed to be a wonderful dream world, Yggdrasil, where one could live out the most unfortunate circumstances of their life and rise above them in the end.

He had a system. A unique skill. Others, no doubt transmigrating with a host of sword arts and dragon bloodlines, would get to hack and slash their way through the countless hordes of monsters that threatened to overwhelm the land.

Not Allan, however. His skill was the stuff of rumor, a theory the game’s various forums had long since clustered together to call a troll pick.

He’d tested it on rats, then a half-dead dog, and last of all a rather poverty-stricken beggar.

Yes, the returns weren’t exactly through the roof, but they were there, like having change left over after flipping a coin. Plenty of people in his early gaming days had clowned on this skill.

Instant Investment.

"Still working, apparently," he muttered, walking down a dingy alley, the game reinstating itself around him in a very familiar setting.

"An opportunity for a useless skill like mine to shine has to actually manifest into real gain. A diamond in the rough would be fantastic right about now." He looked around. "And I think I’ve found her."

The young woman sat on a low crate outside a shop that was closed up tight. As far as he could tell, she was about his own age, twenty-five or so. Her clothing had been mended so many times the original color had become a guess.

The bruise on her jaw had begun to fade to a yellow-green color. It wasn’t healing properly.

Two days ago, Allan had overheard a merchant at the reagent stalls calling her a "failed assistant" before dismissing her outright. "The world has forgotten you," the man had said. "Do us the same courtesy and leave."

Allan hadn’t forgotten her. Only the game had.

The system fed him the data he already knew, cold blue text confirming what he’d calculated moments before.

[Target identified: Bela Rosy]

[Current Potential: F-]

[Future Potential: S+]

[Investment Option: Available]

[Investment means: 3 INT stats and 1 Silver]

Allan’s heart rate spiked as he closed his hand around the last coin and walked toward her.

"Hey there."

She looked up slowly, registering the man standing before her. Disappointment crossed her face in a fleeting moment as her eyes took in his clothes. "Who... are you?"

"Good, a chance to apologize in advance, because that was rather a dreadful opening line." He winced at himself.

The hopelessness in her eyes only seemed to deepen. She must have heard worse from men far less decent than him.

"I mean no disrespect, but please. Leave me alone. I have nothing worth stealing and even less worth looking at."

"Good thing I’m not here for either."

Her eyes went puzzled for a moment.

Allan crouched down to her eye level, so there was no looking down at her. What followed was, admittedly, a rather absurd proposal from one stranger to another.

"Are you aware that the formulas you’ve been struggling with in your head aren’t actually beyond you? The only thing keeping you from the solutions you’ve been chasing is that no one ever gave you a nudge in the right direction."

"Who... how would you know that?"

"The reagent stalls were your job long before a sleazy merchant decided you were worth less than the crates you’d been minding for him." He let that land, then added, quieter, "I also know you haven’t eaten today, because you gave your bread to the boy outside the temple this morning."

"I notice things. It’s sort of my whole personality."

She stared at him as if he’d read her diary without permission. "Who are you?"

"Call me Allan. This is going to be one of those offers people mistake for a scam, a curse, or a joke. It’s none of those." He took her soot-stained hand, opened it flat, and pressed the single silver coin into her palm.

"Invest."

[Skill: Instant Investment used]

The coin vanished from her palm, the way a candle flame disappears when pinched between finger and thumb. Bela stared at her hand in blank surprise, looked up at him with the same surprise, then back down at her hand again, as if expecting the coin to reappear.

[Candidate accepted: Future Goddess of Alchemy Healing]

[Investment successful.]

[1 silver coin and 3 INT stats invested.]

[Target potential increased.]

She gasped, both hands flying to her chest, fingers pressed hard against her ribs as though trying to hold something inside that had suddenly grown too large to fit within her.

For one dreadful moment, Allan thought the system had gone catastrophically wrong.

"I can see the formulas," she breathed. "The ones I was never able to finish before. They’re so clear it’s almost painful."

She traced shapes and figures in the air with her fingers, mouthing complex reagent ratios under her breath, murmuring them like a prayer she’d finally remembered the words to.

She took two short steps in one direction, spun on her heel, then took three steps in another, as though she’d nearly gone under and had only just remembered how to swim.

"Wait," he started, half-entertained, half-concerned. "You might want to..."

Too late. She was already gone, running down the alley with her skirts hiked up in one fist, toward the lower quarter and its cheaper alchemy houses.

No time for thanks, and Allan wouldn’t have wanted them anyway. Bela had a decade of catching up to do, and she was clearly too busy running to start it.

"You’re welcome," he said to the empty alley, mostly for his own benefit.

[Calculating Investment Return...]

A moment passed. Then the system chimed again.

[Investment Return: 100x]

[100 silver coins received.]

A neat stack settled into the spatial sack the system had given him on arrival.

One hundred silver.

Not enough to buy back his title or repair the mansion’s cracked walls, but enough to keep Lira and Seris fed for weeks if he stayed careful, and enough to buy a second spatial sack, just to see whether the first one had limits he hadn’t found yet.

"Ha. Ha. Ha," he said, stunned, dragging a hand through his hair.

"Thank the gods. Here I thought I’d transmigrated with the single worst skill in the entire game, and it turns out it just needed worthy people. Very on-brand for me, honestly.

Imagine that. A skill that only works on the ones everyone else has already given up on."

With that settled, Allan set off for the mansion. The supplies he’d buy would last a long while, so he wasn’t worried about running out of food anytime soon.

No high-quality meat. No fancy clothes. Grain, oil, salt. A few cheap healing salves for the odd cut a servant might get catching themselves on a rotted floorboard or a creaking banister that finally gave way.

He returned to the same quiet little shop and bought another spatial sack from the same enterprising vendor, who this time didn’t even bother asking where Allan was headed with it.

He kept his eyes open, hoping to find another investment worth making, maybe another alchemist, or a carpenter, someone who’d strike it rich at 100x or even 1000x.

But the system stayed quiet until the marble steps of the Arclight townhouse.

Amelia von Arclight stepped down from a carriage.

Dark hair in two tight braids down her back. Her eyes a deep, mellow brown, like good chocolate just beginning to turn. She moved with the slow, practiced grace of someone who had never once been told to hurry.

And then, just as his memory supplied the rest, the system text arrived.

[Target identified: Amelia von Arclight]

[Current Rank: B+ Noble Heiress]

[Hidden Potential: S+ Dark Saint]

[Projected Future: The Crimson Empress]

[Investment Return: Extreme]

[Investment Availability: None]

Allan went still, his usual running commentary abruptly cut off.

He knew the name. The first major boss after the early arc of the game’s storyline, the B+ noble heiress of a minor family, who played the lute at parties for her peers and gave coin to the poor on a whim.

Promised in marriage to a rising officer from a poor but respectable family. Then the accusation of practicing forbidden magic. Then watching her parents and siblings publicly beheaded on the capital square, their blood scrubbed from the stones days later.

The first Dark Saints, a dormant bloodline of power and malevolence, had awakened in the middle of that execution. After that, she brought fire and ruin to kingdom after kingdom, continent after continent, a campaign of destruction that mirrored her own inner ruin.

Players, mostly unsympathetic to her story, had written her off as the worst final boss in the game, until the true final boss arrived and stole that title from her, though even then a few disgruntled players still cast their vote for the Crimson Empress out of spite, because at least her tragedy had meant something.

Wasted potential, Allan thought, not for the first time. A scorned noble with a heart that could have stayed gold, if only someone had reached her before she was led out to that square.

He watched her disappear into the townhouse, the carriage door shutting behind her. The butler followed a few steps later, as he always did.

"Too early," Allan murmured to himself. "Wait for the right opening. You don’t invest in a fire that hasn’t started burning yet."

Amelia paused in the doorway, looking back at the street where Allan had just been. Behind her, the butler waited to see if she’d give further instruction.

Curiosity was something she rarely encountered, not in her short and thoroughly guarded existence. But that was what she’d felt, watching him watch her.

"Should I have him arrested, my lady?" the butler asked, his voice low.

"No." She paused, trying to place where she’d heard the name before. "Who was that?"

"Allan Oakwood. Son of Barry Oakwood. The fallen slaving family."

She repeated the name once under her breath, testing its weight. Her pale eyes narrowed slightly.

"Ah," she said. "He might be useful, then."

The door closed behind them, and Allan, unaware of any of it, was already plotting his best route through the crowded streets of the lower markets, wondering what kind of person might carry a ceiling as high as Bela’s S+ rank.

***

Allan arrived at the mansion just as the sun was setting behind the row of western roofs. The windows of the huge house looked dull and foreboding for a few moments, then settled back into their usual bleakness.

Lira met him at the front door. She’d been in the kitchen all day and was still wiping her hands on an apron that had once been white.

Seris stood silently behind Lira, the way she always did. Her silence spoke louder than words ever could have, had she chosen to speak at all.

"Late, I see, Master," Lira observed. There was no accusation in her tone, and that made Allan feel even worse than if there had been.

"Late, but not empty-handed."

A large bag of grain hit the floor, followed by a smaller sack of dried fish, then a clay pot of rich, golden oil. It had been so long since Lira had seen real oil. Thin, rancid liquid had been doled out in drops for far too long.

The second sack of coin stayed hidden under his coat.

"Rejoice, ladies. We shall be eating well tonight. And tomorrow. And the day after that. And the day after that, if I don’t manage to get myself into some sort of mess."

Lira’s eyes flicked from the food to his face, sharp as knives. She knew better than most how things worked in this house. Good news from Allan usually arrived in disguise.

"How."

"Simple. I made an investment." He kept his smile up, though it had gone a little strained. He knew that answer alone would leave her unsatisfied.

"It paid off. That’s the whole story, I’m afraid. No dungeons and dragons involved. Just me, a coin, and someone worth betting on."

"Master, respectfully, I have known you three months, and you have never once told me the whole story on the first try." Lira crossed her arms, still standing in the middle of the room, apron and all.

"Good. I’m wounded." Allan played along, well aware he was still in the doghouse with Lira for far greater transgressions than keeping a small secret. He felt something close to affection for her, in the same way one feels affection for a large and protective guard dog, right up until it decides to attack.

"Fine. I have a skill, and I used it to find someone the world seems to have thrown away. I bet on her instead. It worked better than I’d hoped. That’s all. No crime here, Lira."

"There is always a crime buried in there with you, Master. I simply haven’t found out which one it is yet."

A long silence passed before Seris finally spoke. "More?" she asked softly, her voice echoing faintly off the cold walls of the empty hallway.

Allan glanced at Seris, then back at Lira, and in that brief moment realized both his servants had been living in this house with nothing to do but serve him, while he had nothing to offer them but debts.

He still didn’t fully know why he’d kept them on. Perhaps they had nowhere else to go. Perhaps they simply had more patience than he did, waiting to see where this new course of his would lead, and whether he’d turn out to be as good as his word.

"Of course there’ll be more," he said, dropping the joke from his voice entirely.

"Until your master, that’s me, in case the title’s gone to my head, is standing in this house, your future isn’t going to look like this house currently looks. There will be more. But we go slow. No loud spending for a while, no expensive clothes to draw attention to ourselves. Just grain and cheap oil until we can afford better. I promise you better."

Lira nodded once, already calculating at speed, scaling up the proportions of grain to oil in her head, her eyes never leaving his face. It was as if she’d never once been without this kind of work to do.

Seris turned away and walked toward the kitchen. At the door she paused, glancing back over her shoulder. "Thank you, Master," she said, voice just above a whisper, before disappearing from view.

It landed harder than Lira’s whole interrogation had.

***

Allan climbed the stairs to the study. The desk there had a working surface, and the window didn’t leak when it rained, which currently made it the most comfortable room in the house.

He sat, opened the system interface, and read the Amelia entry again, twice, then a third time, as though rereading it might change [Investment Availability: None] into something more forgiving.

A great house was about to fall. A new bloodline was about to awaken. And soon, within a few short years, all of it could be reduced to nothing more than ash and dust across half the globe, all because no one had bothered to rewrite a few lines of the script before it went up in flames.

He pulled out a notebook and wrote down everything he knew about her: the dates, the names, the exact shade of wrong that would send her world into cinders if he moved too slowly, or ruin it entirely if he moved too fast.

Then he wrote about Bela. Not as long an entry, but a happier one, for now.

And finally, one more line to add beneath the entries for Amelia and Bela, a question he’d been wanting to write down since the moment he’d opened his eyes in this old, crumbling house and realized the game was no longer just fiction:

How do I rise to power?

He stared at the page for a moment. It was a soft question, a hero’s question, and he hadn’t mistaken himself for a hero in a long time. He tore the page from the notebook and crumpled it into a ball.

He knew exactly what it would take to reach the top of this world. He’d watched countless players stumble through the game of power with real ineptitude, and he’d watched a handful play it well. Allan knew, without much room for argument, which category he fell into.

How will a scoundrel rise to power?

That one he kept.

He closed the diary, and as he leaned back in the creaking old chair, he let himself grin.

He was Allan now. A man with a name, a surname, and a growing pile of coin, all one silver to start, the rest earned through his own cleverness. Allan Oakwood, last scion of a fallen noble house.

"Never," he said to the empty room, and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, meant every word of it.

"Never."