A few weeks passed after Ludger and the others invaded the sealed labyrinth.
On the surface, Lionfang looked the same as ever.
The walls still stood thick and practical around the town. The market still breathed with the rough rhythm of a border settlement that had learned to become something more. Guild workers still moved through the streets with clear jobs. Children still ran where they shouldn’t. Northerners still laughed too loudly, argued too directly, and treated silence like a suspicious condition. Smoke still rose from chimneys. Steel still rang somewhere almost every morning.
But if someone stayed in the city for more than half a day, they would notice the difference. There were far more carriages and wagons coming and going now. Not a few more. A lot more.
The roads leading into Lionfang had grown busier week by week, until the flow of merchants, escorts, small noble agents, adventurer parties, and opportunists started changing the atmosphere of the town itself. Wagons rolled in carrying coin, questions, and greed. Carriages stopped at inns that had previously enjoyed the luxury of spare rooms. Teamsters cursed in line while waiting for unloading space. Guards hired for trade protection kept one hand near their weapons while looking around like they weren’t sure if they had arrived at a frontier town, a mining boom, or the beginning of a problem.
Most of them stopped at the guild. Lionsguard had become the center of it all.
Some came for the potions made with the magic water. That product had already built a strong reputation, especially among adventurers and traveling merchants who cared less about fancy labels and more about whether a drink could actually restore something useful after a hard day, a bad fight, or a worse mistake.
Others came for the durable clothes made from giant spider silk. Those had gained their own following quickly. Tough, light, and practical in a way normal tailors couldn’t imitate cheaply, they sold especially well to people who traveled dangerous roads and had learned through experience that comfort mattered less than surviving the thing trying to open your stomach.
But now those weren’t even the most talked-about goods anymore. Now Lionfang’s latest main product had taken that place. Runic swords. They were all made in the same design. That part was not an accident.
Each sword carried a hilt with a lion head worked into the guard, while the handle was shaped with the lines of a shield. The design wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t meant to be. Anyone who looked at one would know where it came from. It was branding with teeth. A weapon made to be recognized, remembered, and repeated in stories until the shape itself became advertisement.
And the swords were not just good-looking relics made for idiots who wanted to wave around something expensive. They worked. That was the problem. Or the advantage. Depending on where one stood. Because they weren’t only swords. They were runic swords with a mana shield effect.
The moment the user was attacked, their mana took the damage instead of their body.
Not forever. Not without limit. Not as some miracle that made armor and caution obsolete. But enough. Enough to turn a killing blow into a survivable hit. Enough to buy a breath, a second, an opening. Enough to turn “dead” into “alive and swearing.”
That was the kind of effect people remembered. And more importantly, it was the kind of effect people talked about.
Stories spread first in the way all useful stories did, through travelers who cared more about being believed than sounding dramatic. An adventurer in the east who should have died to a beast’s claw but walked away with drained mana and a half-broken sword instead. A merchant convoy caught by bandits on a forest road, where the lead guard took an axe strike that should have split him and only staggered because the sword on his hip burned mana to keep flesh intact. A caravan scout saved from a spear thrust long enough to kill the man who’d landed it. A reckless young noble idiot surviving his own stupidity for the first time in his life because a Lionfang blade had more sense than he did.
Then the stories grew. Fights against monsters. Ambushes on lonely roads. Duels. Raids. Border skirmishes. Hunters, escorts, wandering adventurers, minor household guards, all of them repeating some version of the same line.
The sword took the hit. The mana shield saved me. Buy from Lionfang if you want to live through your mistakes. And because the stories made too much practical sense to dismiss, more and more buyers began coming to Lionfang to buy them.
The city felt it. The inns felt it. The guild definitely felt it.
Coin moved faster. Request lists grew longer. Merchants who had once looked at Lionfang as an inconvenient frontier stop now treated it like a place that had to be negotiated with properly. More people arrived claiming they “just happened to be passing through,” which was the sort of lie that only became more insulting when repeated often enough. Some wanted swords. Some wanted bulk orders. Some wanted exclusive contracts. Some wanted to figure out how the hell a border guild had begun producing runic relics at this scale without the capital already sinking claws into its throat.
The answer, of course, was complicated. And dangerous. But from the outside, all anyone really saw was this: Lionfang was making money. Lionsguard was making relics.
And every week, another wagon rolled in because somewhere in the Empire someone had heard a story about a lion-headed sword that let a man survive when he should have died. That was all greed needed.
The town itself didn’t become softer because of it. If anything, the increased trade only sharpened its identity. More guards at the gates. More guild traffic. More apprentices hauling supplies. More temper in the market. More people watching strangers carefully. The border town still felt like a border town.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Just one with the smell of rising power on it. And in the middle of that movement, those swords kept leaving the city in growing numbers, each one another small cut into the enemy’s control of markets, supply, and expectation. Exactly as Ludger intended.
Ludger returned a few days later after handling business in the areas closer to the capital.
Not personal business. Not the kind that involved polite meetings, tea, or people pretending contracts weren’t just violence written in ink. Real business.
He had spent those days buying several businesses through proxies, partnerships, and arrangements that made it harder for outside eyes to immediately trace all the movement back to Lionfang. Some were small operations. Some were larger. A warehouse here. A transport concern there. A workshop that had been underperforming until someone with money and no patience bought it and started replacing incompetence with standards.
He hadn’t just bought them either.He had improved them. That was the important part.
Buying dead weight only made noise. Buying something and making it more useful changed routes, people, and expectations. The capital-adjacent areas were full of mediocre businesses surviving on old habits, weak management, or noble protection. Ludger didn’t have much interest in any of those. He wanted useful structures. Useful locations. Useful flows of goods and coin.
And while he was there, he also checked the roads.
The new members of Lionsguard had been creating them with geomancy, slowly but steadily extending and improving the routes that mattered most. What had once been rough, unreliable roads were turning into cleaner lines of movement, better packed, better supported, and much more useful for trade. That kind of change didn’t feel dramatic when looked at one stretch at a time.
But put enough stretches together, and suddenly the map itself started favoring Lionfang.
Which was the point. By the time Ludger returned, the city was taking in a lot of money. A lot. Enough that most normal guilds would have started celebrating, hoarding, or letting themselves become crazy and stupid.
Ludger did none of those things. He used it immediately. Almost offensively immediately.
Money came in from potions, from spider-silk goods, from runic swords, from increasing traffic, from contracts, from side sales, from speculation, from the growing appetite of a market that had started realizing Lionfang wasn’t a frontier curiosity anymore.
And then the money went out again. Into new businesses. Into new workshops. Into material stockpiles. Into housing. Into tools. Into wages. Into giving work to new guild members and the new inhabitants of Lionfang who had arrived because rising towns pulled people toward them the same way fires pulled the cold.
That was the trick most idiots never seemed to understand. Wealth wasn’t useful just because it existed. It was useful because it could be turned into structure. Ludger was doing exactly that.
Every coin that came in got shoved back into the body of Lionfang and the growing network around it. More jobs for new members. More labor for migrants willing to work. More routes. More output. More trade. More reasons for other people’s money to keep flowing in.
It was aggressive.
Almost predatory in the way it expanded.
And Yvar looked like he was about to faint every single day because of it.
The poor man had somehow become the human wall between Ludger’s economic warfare and total administrative collapse. Every day he sat surrounded by ledgers, reports, contracts, supply updates, route estimates, and revised numbers that kept getting worse in the specific way numbers got worse when there were too many of them and none of them were staying still.
Money entering.
Money leaving.
More entering.
More leaving.
Investments, acquisitions, payroll expansion, freight allocation, workshop upgrades, road contracts, raw material inflow, resale margins, regional influence purchases disguised as practical commerce.
Yvar had the expression of a scholar being forced to wrestle a river with paper.
At least once a day he looked like his spirit had briefly left his body and was considering not coming back.
Still, there was one bright side to all of it.
Ludger’s Merchant class was leveling up even faster than his Guild Master class.
Merchant Lv. 61 (+2 INT, +2 DEX, +2 LUK)
Skills: Trade Insight Lv. 61
Appraisal Sense Lv. 31
Haggler’s Edge Lv. 39
Market Thread Lv. 51
Reputation Ledger Lv. 25
Supply Chain Vision Lv. 17
Gives the user a clear mental map of how goods move, from origin to buyer.
Highlights weak points like escorts, routes, or storage hubs that can be exploited or protected.
Contract Binding Lv. 14
Forms system-backed agreements.
Breaking terms causes penalties like financial loss, reputation damage, or minor backlash, making deals harder to betray.
Bulk Efficiency Lv. 18
Improves large-scale operations.
Reduces material waste, speeds up production, and slightly boosts worker output when handling mass orders.
Price Anchor Lv. 16
Let the user influence prices in a region over time.
By controlling supply, he can stabilize, raise, or crash the value of specific goods.
Shadow Exchange Lv. 13
Opens access to hidden trade networks.
Reveals black market routes, illegal goods, and underworld contacts while reducing risk during those dealings.
Brand Authority Lv. 15
Items tied to Lionsguard carry weight.
Buyers trust them more, demand rises naturally, and merchants are more willing to stock them at higher prices.
Risk Appraisal Lv. 17
Evaluates deals before commitment.
Flags potential betrayal, political fallout, or hidden costs, giving the user a quick “worth it or not” instinct.
Resource Conversion Lv. 12
Converts excess or low-value materials into usable goods.
Turns waste into profit, basic components, consumables, or crafting inputs depending on available resources.