A New Star Chapter 95 (Patreon)

Francesca did as prompted, leaving after just a moment and sending Cain up to the room. The large man was even more agreeable, not questioning any of my strange commands. I would like to say it was a tough fit in the big tub for the rather large fellow, but I had planned ahead, and the volume that the tub was capable of containing was immense. It was a monolith that most groups of day laborers would have struggled to lift, but I had carried it up to the lab myself, or rather the pieces. The thing had two basic enchantments on, one of which allowed the sides to be disconnected, making it much easier to fit through doorways, and the other of which made sure the tub was tightly sealed, other than the surface. I hadn’t wanted anything too fancy, as too much magic might interfere with the medicinal baths that were the whole point of even buying the thing, but this much was nothing.

“I feel…even stronger,” Cain said after he had emerged from the bath and I had checked him over.

“Of course you do,” I sighed, slightly exasperated. “What, did you think that bath was to make your skin more lustrous? It was a body cultivation method, you dolt.”

“Right, of course,” he said, slightly sheepish, if I could read his tone and facial at all yet.

“Now, finish cleaning up and send Lester up here. I need to finish these elixirs,” I said, immediately dismissing him from my mind as I continued working. Not that I totally ignored him; it didn’t matter what I was doing, some part of my senses were always on the area around me and what was happening there. I had been taken unawares by assassins and stealth specialists several times early on in my last life and had spent centuries of rigorous training to make sure that never happened again. The lessons were deeply ingrained in my mind; even being in another’s body and starting over hadn’t wiped out habits that had lasted more than five centuries.

“Lady,” Lester said when he entered the room, waiting for my attention.

“We need to finish going over what our next steps are,” I said calmly.

“I’m listening,” he said, focusing on me.

“Firstly, as long as they’re…quality, continue to recruit selectively,” I said. “I have no issues with that. Secondly, I will likely be having Francesca and Cain work with you after the next few days. I want to give them some pointers myself and go over some of their duties that I expect them to carry out. Beyond that, how is the monitoring of the criminal element proceeding? Smoothly?”

“We’ve had no issues,” Lester said, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall next to the door. “The twins are the real deal, at least when it comes to monitoring and tracking. I can sit in taverns and gambling dens, lean on some contacts here and there, and do a little work on the side to get a few pieces of information, but they get more information than I do and do it five times as fast.”

“They were a good hire,” I said. “They feel their compensation is adequate?”

“They want to scout the Wilds,” he returned immediately. “That’s one of their goals; exploring and finding interesting things. They had plans to rank up a few more times and then offer their services to any expeditions in the next few years before we hired them. They would work well if we were taking a small, elite expedition out there.”

“Good to know,” I said. “The gangs?”

“Right, yes,” Lester said, clearing his throat as he gathered his thoughts. “Much of what you did when you broke the cult operation has been undone, to the extent that the gangs are fully back to normal. We’ve investigated for cult activities as well, but we have trouble finding any trace of them. Not that we think they’ve disappeared, just that we’re quite sure they are still gone to ground more thoroughly. I wouldn’t expect to see anything from the cult in the capital for some time yet.”

“I’ll have to do a thorough sweep before I leave,” I said, interrupting his explanation. “I have a penchant for sniffing out death and undead magic that others lack. I can pick up on even very faint traces; I’ll do a lap the day before we go back north and see if I can find anything more concrete.”

“Very good, Young Lady,” Lester said with a nod. “As to the criminal elements themselves, it seems that the gang you broke is thoroughly done. None of them are even still working in the city; not as criminals, at any rate, as some of them are doing honest work now. The others left the capital for greener pastures, at least according to what the twins have found, and are up to their old tricks in other cities or towns.

“In the meantime, a few smaller organizations popped up to fill in that gap, specifically. After about two years, they were basically all gobbled up, and we’ve looked into that. One of them basically pulled a similar trick, though not with the, uh, death cult thing. They have the backing of a minor viscount, an un-landed noble that has a small manor here in the capital. Their family gained their noble title through wealth, marrying into a failing viscount’s line two generations ago. The viscount’s of the time’s daughter brought the noble title, the other family brought immense wealth, and the two merged.”

“Not an uncommon thing these days, especially with the merchants holding greater power,” I commented idly. The nobility would, not right this moment, but soon find out that wealth was the only thing that really mattered. At least, for most species, that was how things went. Some, due to their biology or very long ingrained social norms, could avoid that period during industrialization and the modern era where industrialists and corporate capitalists took over everything, but that wasn’t common. It also wasn’t necessarily better, as I had encountered one species that had taken a form of noble control of society…not to an extreme, necessarily, but man, were they set in their ways. It had also, not all that surprisingly, slowed their growth as a civilization to a moderate extent, though maybe it was not all that bad, considering they hadn’t as wantonly and carelessly destroyed their own ecology while growing.

Lester continued, breaking me out of my thoughts, “The viscount’s line since then has not…performed very admirably. Far be it for me to question ones of noble peerage, or suggest some failing of the blood, but it seems that the line hasn’t seen great success the last couple generations. Noble titles can be revoked or transferred, though it’s not something the crown does a lot of these days, but the current viscount is really racing for that. He’s mismanaged his finances to a rather absurd degree, and, deciding that wasn’t enough, has turned to criminals to fill the whole in his ledgers.”

“His funding providing one of the small gangs that was filling in the gap the materials and manpower needed to consolidate?” I asked, though it was more a statement.

“Correct,” Lester nodded. “We haven’t take any action to interfere, as you asked us to simply monitor, and they’ve secured an area of the warehouse district that the former gang, the ones working with the lich, were running. That does put them in a position to mess with our current operations, though only some of the product Robin moves these days is smuggled.”

“Any good smuggling operation should be done through a legitimate trading operation,” I said calmly. “You should understand after a couple years of this how true that is.”

“Right you are. Easier to hid a few illegal potions as an extra crate of tomatoes in a legitimate shipment than try to get some secret shipment in through some hole in the wall,” Lester said.

“More than that, it’s something the guards can ignore easier,” I explained. “Minor smuggling like that is hard to identify or fish out, and a lot of that requires thorough investigation of both records and cargo, something the regular guard still isn’t trained or equipped to properly deal with. It’s easier to bust that hole in the wall that everyone’s hauling boxes through, as guaranteed all of that is illegal. The hole also leads to a lot bigger problem; if people think they can get away with five big boxes of contraband a day, why not six? Ten? Fifty? I’ve seen cases like that before, especially in some of the older historical records. The reason a lot of smuggling operations get caught is they get greedy and balloon too big or, in the same vein, too many operations are using the same entry/exit points and method to move goods. The guards have a lot of trouble picking out one or two extra or mislabeled crates in a regular shipment, but that hole in the wall that has five hundred people running back and forth through?”

“A good point,” Lester grunted, thinking about what I said. “I see why Robin does it the way she does now. I knew the point of sale or purchase was the most dangerous for her, but knowing that the guard has a lot harder time with the small tricks you mentioned makes more sense.”

“Anyway, continue,” I said, finishing my last step and bottling what I was working. I washed my hands and cleaned up the workspace while Lester finished explaining.

“We’ve been making sure they’re not trying to interfere with Robin, but with the way she operates, it’s more about them bullying in on a seller or buyer she uses,” Lester said. “As long as she can sell the stuff you brew or find under the table, and grab some of the rarer or, uh, less regulated things you need under the table, we’re fine. The thing we worry about is if people start strong arming the gray market and black market dealers she works with; then we get into a financial and possibly physical battle over the merchants safety and continued business.”

“But, nothing so far?” I asked, leaning against one of the two large work tables.

“Nothing yet,” Lester confirmed. “I think Robin’s smuggling is too small in terms of affect. The fact she caters to only a few, high-end clients with what she sells on the side means the gangs in the city aren’t really interested. The only thing that I’m worried about is the materials you request, because that would get caught up. If a gang wants to make a move or shift their business, it could mess up her purchases from certain suppliers. But, in the end, we’re monitoring them and haven’t seen anything that’s alarming enough to inform you.”

“Good. Keep me up to date,” I said, motioning Lester to walk out first. “Those elixirs I just made in that case are for the group to drink. Should provide a bit of a bump without having to do the full bath for physical cultivation. Just don’t take more than one in twenty-four hours.”

“Understood. I’ll grab them later today,” Lester said with a nod.

“Now, let me grab those that need training and do some work with them. Francesca and Cain should stretch their bodies a little after having the baths,” I said calmly.

The next couple hours saw me instructing the entire group, even the twins, in martial combat, though I kept it light. This wasn’t some hardcore conditioning session, which would have been detrimental for Francesca and Cain after having just done medicinal baths. I was reviewing technique and small-group tactics in the training yard we had rented, covering some of the basics. This was foundational stuff for the team, as I didn’t intend to grow some massive organization with thousands or millions of members. Given the possibilities that affinities and their grades presented, a single man or woman could do the work of ten, a hundred, or even ten thousand others.

After the lesson was another banquet, but not for the others. This was a smaller one with only upper nobility attending, and I was dragged along as my entire immediate family was there, rubbing elbows with dukes, marquises, and some few counts. The Count himself, ironically, was not in attendance, but that was only to be expected. The man, for all that he was enmeshed with my family and the politics of the country, was still a foreign dignitary; he didn’t get a free pass to every event or every gathering, even given his status as a Y-ranker. A status that likely would be changing soon, if I wasn’t totally off in my guess.

The event itself was, fortunately for my fraying patience, nothing noteworthy, and I managed to go the entire thing without causing or witnessing an international incident. The next day, I spent time with the team in the morning, training and instructing them before having lunch with the full group. Lester had instructions from me, including a few other things to look into, and I had priorities for the team, in terms of their training and growth. I wasn’t going to be taking anybody back north with me, not at this point, and left them all in Lester’s capable hands.

I took the train together with my family, though sans one Count Emmanuel, though I wasn’t the man’s minder. I had my own things to take care of, and was rather glad that the supervision would be lesser rather than greater for at least a few days. The first thing I had planned upon our return was some serious alchemy, especially timely considering I had just gotten my hands on quite a few good things in the capital. After that, it was time to head back into the Wilds, and to head further in than I had previously. I had plans for where I was going to explore and what I was going to do, but the situation remained somewhat fluid.

One of the great, and also awful, things about exploring the Wilds was there were no good maps. Every plan I had could only account for so much, as I had no idea where, precisely, I was going to go. Every time I made a trip into the Wilds, I learned more and my knowledge grew and changed, but the place was absolutely enormous. I could spend a decade in just the woods to the north of the mountains that the family estate butted up against and barely scratch the surface, which was tempting. I, however, wanted to have a good lay of the land, the whole land, which meant venturing further and in different directions every time. I was keeping both a mental map of where I had gone and what I encountered as well as an actual map, along with copious notes, marking things I had seen and done. Not where my fallback shelters were, of course, as that would be stupid, but the rest of what I was encountering.

Previous

Next