He understood exactly how the system worked.

The City Lord and the massive entrenched corporate guilds deliberately priced Summoning Cards in the millions.

They artificially controlled the entire regional supply line...

They did it to ensure that independent rising Lords without backing could never afford to build a massive Hero roster.

If you wanted elite heroes, you had to sell your soul, sign a predatory sponsorship contract, and become an obedient corporate lapdog for the big guilds.

They would fund your rolls, and in exchange, they owned your territory, your resources, and your life.

It was extortion.

’Why is it so stressful to be a Lord? I guess I’ll buy one next time...’

It was a perfectly designed ruthless bottleneck meant to keep the weak exactly where they were... grinding in the dirt for absolute scraps while the elites sat in their ivory towers.

Silas scoffed.

"Keep it." Silas ordered.

"My Lord?" the clerk asked, blinking in genuine wide-eyed surprise with his hand hovering uncertainly over the glowing runic lockbox. "Are you sure? Unregistered Summoning Cards are exceptionally rare on the open market. You won’t find one cheaper outside the Association walls—"

"I said keep it," Silas cut him off violently.

He turned his back on the metal counter.

He refused to bleed his hard-earned cash into a corrupt rigged casino system when he barely had money as of right now.

’Maybe the next time I come back... why does it have to be so expensive though?’ Silas thought.

He would just build unkillable monsters out of the ones he already had.

He walked directly out of the armory.

"Thank you for your patronage, Lord Graves!" Chloe called out after him, quickly waving, though she looked visibly disappointed she didn’t get the massive commission percentage on a half-million-credit card sale.

Silas ignored her completely.

He strode purposefully through the sprawling pristine marble corridors, bypassed another terrified front desk receptionist who practically hid under her monitor, and pushed through the heavy glass double doors of the lobby.

He left the Lord Association Building entirely, stepping back out into the cold, crisp afternoon air of the bustling commercial plaza.

He walked down the wide marble steps.

"Finally..."

He found his sleek tinted black luxury mag-cab idling exactly where he had left it, illegally parked against the red-painted curb.

He opened the heavy armored back door and slid onto the plush, expensive leather seats.

Silas then slammed the door shut behind him with a heavy thud, instantly sealing off the chaotic noise of the city.

The driver stiffened immediately in the front seat.

He frantically adjusted his peaked cap with his hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough to make the stitched leather loudly creak.

He had seen the terrifying aura this young Lord carried.

"Next destination, my Lord?" the driver asked nervously with his eyes darting to look at Silas through the rearview mirror.

"The textile district," Silas instructed smoothly.

He reached into his spatial inventory and pulled out the thick, heavy leather measurement ledger Aeliana had meticulously compiled for him.

He rested it casually on his lap.

"Take me to the one of the highest-end boutique in the city that deals with bulk products and is not too expensive."

"Yes, sir. Right away."

The cab’s anti-gravity engine hummed to life.

The vehicle smoothly navigated away from the brutalist intimidating architecture of the Lord Association and glided toward the wealthy pristine streets of the Silverleaf commercial sector.

Silas leaned back into the plush leather seats.

He pulled out his sleek black Spirit Phone, but he didn’t open the banking app to gloat over the remaining money. He just checked the time and kept it back.

’Now... the items in my Inventory.’

A series of glowing blue holographic menus materialized in the air directly in front of his eyes, completely invisible to the terrified driver in the front seat.

He pulled up the digital inventory list of the newly acquired gear he had just stored in his spatial ring.

[Item: Titan’s Cleaver (Tier 2)]

[Item: Phantom-Weave Bracers (Tier 2)]

[Item: Azure Channeler (Tier 2)]

[Item: Sylvan Staff (Tier 1)]

He looked at the cheap completely unadorned Ironwood staff he had purchased for Eluned.

The quartermaster and Chloe had looked at him like he was an absolute idiot for buying a ten-thousand-credit piece of baseline wood when he had a million in liquid cash sitting in his pocket.

They didn’t understand the fundamental math of his existence.

’Once again, why buy a pre-enchanted Tier 3 staff filled with complex conflicting elemental runes that will just violently detonate the second Eluned pumps her SSS-Rank nature magic into it?’ Silas thought with a shake of his head.

He looked at the glowing [Upgrade] prompt hovering next to the items in his interface.

He had thousands of Upgrade Points saved up from the slaughter of the Novice Trial.

He could easily mutate this cheap piece of wood into a divine artifact right here in the back of the cab but he stopped himself.

’No,’ Silas decided, closing the prompt. ’I want to have everything back home first before I upgrade... and then I’ll give it to Thora.’

Combining the craftsmanship of an S-Rank blacksmith with the reality-bending upgrades of his system would produce gear that completely broke the natural laws of this world.

Silas closed the interface entirely, resting his chin on his knuckles as he watched the high-end skyscrapers blur past the tinted window.

...

Meanwhile in the very building Silas had just left, the atmosphere in the subterranean appraisal basin was anything but calm.

The heavy, reinforced security doors at the top of the stone ramp hissed shut, completely sealing the massive underground warehouse.

Down on the blood-stained concrete floor, the Floor Director was standing dead still.

The slightly overweight man in the pristine tailored silk suit wasn’t putting on his greasy welcoming corporate-salesman smile anymore.

He was staring directly at the colossal, twenty-foot, headless torso of the Tier 3 Abyssal Gore-Fiend resting like a fallen mountain on top of the pile of dead monsters in the sorting pool.

Collin pulled a monogrammed silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and frantically wiped a thick layer of cold sweat from his forehead.

Next to him, the grizzled chief appraiser was rapidly chewing on his unlit cigar, his calloused hands still violently shaking as he held his runic clipboard.

"All this from the Novice Trial?" Collin whispered, his voice trembling as the impossibility of the situation finally sank into his capitalist brain.

He turned to look at the appraiser.

"You ran his registry ping on the central database, correct?" the Director demanded. "What did the system flag him as?"

"It flagged him exactly as he appeared, sir!" the appraiser replied defensively, holding up his glowing slate. "Silas Graves. He’s an unaffiliated independent and registered just last week as a baseline Blue Core. Excellent-Grade, sure, but still just a Blue Core!"

"Bullshit!" Collin snapped, completely losing his corporate temper.

He pointed a violently trembling finger at the crushed, impossibly dense bone-plated sternum of the Gore-Fiend.

"Look at that cut! Look at the physical trauma inflicted on that leviathan! The beast was decapitated in a single, perfectly horizontal strike! The bone marrow isn’t even shattered; it was sheared cleanly through!"

The Director began pacing frantically back and forth across the bloody concrete with his highly expensive leather shoes splashing carelessly in the toxic black monster sludge leaking from the drain.

"A newly awakened Blue Core does not possess the physical stat modifiers required to generate that kind of velocity," the Director muttered, aggressively chewing his thumbnail. "It’s impossible. A Blue Core swinging a heavy sword against that armor would shatter their own wrists from the recoil."

"Then what is he, boss?" the appraiser asked nervously, taking a step back from the massive carcass.

"He’s a liar..." a new female voice echoed across the quiet warehouse.

Both men jumped, spinning around toward the dark shadows beneath the descending stone staircase.

Stepping out from the gloom was a young woman.

She was stunning.

The woman wore a perfectly tailored, dark charcoal corporate pantsuit that clung flawlessly to her slender frame paired with a crisp white blouse.

Her long purple hair was cut into a bob that framed her jawline perfectly.

She reached up with a manicured finger and pushed a pair of sleek, modern, wire-rimmed glasses up the bridge of her nose.

Her violet eyes were devoid of human warmth.

"Harper..." the Floor Director breathed out, clearly relieved to see his daughter.

Harper didn’t offer a warm loving family greeting.

She walked directly past her father with her sensible black stilettos clicking rhythmically against the bloody concrete, and stopped right at the edge of the sorting pool.

She looked down at the massive bleeding mountain of high-tier corpses.

Her violet eyes physically glittered in the harsh fluorescent lighting as she ran her own rapid mental calculations.

"I accessed the regional leaderboard data while you were processing his wire transfer, Papa..." Harper stated with her voice as smooth and cold as polished glass. "After all, I am a newbie Lord myself."

"And?" Collin asked eagerly.

"The score of a specific Territory known as Blessed Land is astronomical," Harper replied, turning to look at her father. "Especially from today... the Lord didn’t just clear the Novice Trial, he completely broke the historical curve."

She tapped a highly encrypted file on the glowing slate she was holding.

"I am suspecting," Harper said aloud with her eyes narrowing. "That Silas Graves is the owner of that territory... Blessed Land."

The grizzled appraiser gasped aloud with his cigar completely falling out of his mouth and splashing into the blood puddle.

The Floor Director’s eyes went completely wide.

The blood rapidly drained from his face, replaced instantly by a flush of greedy realization.

"The... the Blessed Land?" Collin choked out with his voice dropping to a harsh secretive whisper as if he was afraid the walls were listening.

It was literally all the newbies talked about.

"Precisely," Harper confirmed, adjusting her glasses. "I don’t exactly have the location of this place... since it is probably in an Unknown Zone, you should have made him write about his territory so we would have a vague idea of where Blessed Land is actually located."

"B-but that’s impossible!" the appraiser stammered, gripping his desk. "A Novice Lord can’t hold such a territory! He would be slaughtered in his sleep on the very first night!"

"Do you see a slaughtered man?" Harper asked coldly, gesturing with her slate to the headless Gore-Fiend resting in the pool. "Or do you see a walking predator who just casually dumped a million credits of high-tier meat onto your floor?"

She looked back at her father.

"The database says he is a Blue Core for some reason which I can believe that he used to be a Blue core but somewhere along the line, he probably became a purple... maybe a purple," Harper analyzed with her brilliant corporate-trained mind connecting the dots flawlessly. "But the data is deeply flawed... The physical evidence completely contradicts the digital registry."

"You think he’s hiding his true rank," Collin deduced with his capitalist gears spinning wildly.

"I know he is," Harper stated with certainty. "There is something massive happening behind the scenes of his faction. To hold the Blessed Land and secure a haul like this within seven days... he isn’t a Blue Core. He is, at minimum, a hidden Purple Core."

She lowered her slate, her violet eyes narrowing into dangerous, predatory slits.

"Or, realistically... he might be a mythical Gold Core."

The weight of that statement hung in the heavy bloody air of the warehouse.

A Gold Core independent Lord? That wasn’t just a strong rookie... It was a complete regional power-shift waiting to violently detonate!

"Are we sharing this intelligence with the central Guild Alliance?" the appraiser asked nervously.

"Absolutely not!" Collin snapped violently, turning on the clerk with murder in his eyes. "Are you an idiot? If the major corporate guilds find out he holds the Blessed Land and possesses possible Gold Core combat stats, they will swarm his estate with sponsorship contracts! They will lock him into a corporate monopoly before the week is out!"

The Director smoothed the lapels of his expensive silk suit with his breathing accelerating as a massive corporate plot formed in his mind.

He looked at his daughter.

"This information stays strictly between the three of us," Collin ordered, glaring at the appraiser to ensure compliance. "We need to form a permanent, unbreakable, legally binding connection with this man immediately... With the industrial output of the Blessed Land under our family’s umbrella, our commercial business could grow explosively. We could literally buy a seat on the High Council!"

Collin walked over to his daughter, placing both of his hands firmly on her shoulders.

"I have a plan!"