Chapter 358: What You Need Now Is Discipline
"Opaline!"
A strict male voice cut across the garden just as Opaline Asrephath hooked one leg over a thick branch and leaned farther through the leaves.
Opaline, age seven, did not have many friends. She used to have quite a lot of them, but ever since she awakened, her parents had made sure the children of the other wealthy families understood that Opaline was no longer at their level.
Without any one left to play with, Opaline settled with watching the neighboring children play in the lane beyond the estate wall.
Today, they were chasing each other with wooden staffs, yelling loudly enough to startle birds out of the hedges. As she watched them, Opaline laughed at the sight of one little boy tripping over his own feet and falling into a flowerbed.
She might have laughed longer if her father had not called again, sharper this time, his patience already gone thin.
"Opaline! Down. Now."
She looked over at her father, seeing the grouchy face she had become pretty accustomed to. Opaline pouted, then slid down from the branch with ease.
The grass crunched beneath her soft shoes as she landed lightly. Her golden hair ribbon had come loose again, and a leaf clung to one of her curls.
Opaline plucked it out, dusted off her dress, and turned toward the stone terrace where her father stood waiting in a dark coat lined with gold thread, one hand behind his back and the other resting against the head of a silver-topped cane he did not actually need.
Vaelric Asrephath didn’t look like a man greeting his daughter. He looked like a man checking the quality of an investment.
"The professors are here," he said. "You are late."
Opaline tucked both hands behind her back. "I was just looking."
"At what?"
She glanced toward the wall. "Outside."
His mouth tightened. It wasn’t in anger exactly, but it showed he had already stopped considering her feelings important enough to address.
Little Opaline was used to it.
"You have enough of the outside through books, broadcasts, tutors, and screens. I’ll buy you some of those phones if that’s what you want. But what you need now is discipline. The family has not contracted some of the finest instructors money can buy for you to waste their time climbing trees."
Opaline lowered her eyes. "Yes, Father."
That was the shape of her childhood. A magnificent house, endless rooms, marble stairs polished bright enough to catch reflections, private gardens, three separate libraries and a west wing full of locked vaults her mother called "the heart of the family."
There was wealth everywhere, so much of it that servants walked softly so they wouldn’t taint the expensive floor. But for all the size of the estate, Opaline’s world had always been very small.
It ended at the gates and fence. Or wherever her parents decided it should.
Awakening was supposed to be the greatest day in the lives of many. Opaline didn’t hate that she awakened, but she wasn’t particularly fond of it either.
Her entire life completely 360’d ever since that day.
The family had expected a strong Class. The Asrephaths were already a respected trade family before her birth, clever and connected and steadily growing.
If they had a powerful awakened daughter, they could gain stronger connections with the KRB and the Guilds.
But no one had expected what Opaline became. A Merchant Class. One of the, if not the very rarest Class in the world.
It was classified under the Summoner Class Group, granting the Awakener the ability to call forth magical items, weapons, armor, and relics.
Naturally, the Merchant Class was restricted to certain types of items, but then Opaline’s Class advanced and she became a Universal Merchant.
That meant she could summon ALL, literally ANY type of magical item.
At first even the family’s hired scholars did not fully understand what that meant. At least they pretended not to, so they wouldn’t get ahead of themselves.
Then they began testing her limits. One artifact after another. One category after another. One rule after another.
They learned that Opaline could summon anything truly, except when it was owned by another individual.
It seemed her power respected exchange. But even in that instance, she could still trace the item to wherever it was in the whole world.
Once she fixed on an item, she could follow it with perfect accuracy, helping find some of the rarest artifacts being hidden by old families or stubborn collectors.
Every time she did, her parents sent buyers and the buyers returned with the items. At the same time, she summoned unowned items, filling up the family’s vault with some of the greatest magical weapons and artifacts known to man.
That was the beginning of House Asrephath’s rise.
They had been wealthy before Opaline. After her awakening, wealth began gathering around them like iron filings around a magnet.
𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎
Rare blades. sealed grimoires. anti-curse rings. alchemical metals. enchanted armor. reliquaries from ruined strongholds. salvage from lost dungeon routes. relics with half-forgotten names.
Their family name spread across trade circles, then across kingdom circles, then into government contracts and Guild negotiations.
The old million-note family became something else entirely. Bigger. Harder. Hungrier. By the time Opaline was in her mid-teens, the Asrephaths were no longer simply successful. They were one of the great powers in the magical item trade, rich enough that auction houses had their family crests all over their walls.
And Opaline, who had made so much of that possible, remained inside the house.
Her parents never sent her to Awakener Supreme, Awakener Pride or Glory or any academy at all. Instead, they struck polished deals with professors, scholars, retired appraisers, combat tutors, magical law experts, and Summoner specialists.
Those people came to the estate one after another and taught her in private chambers with drawn curtains and expensive tea on silver trays.
She learned fast because she was bright, and because there was very little else to do. She learned item theory, summoning law, magical valuation, danger recognition, basic combat, Grace economics, and the philosophies behind exchange-based Classes.
She learned enough to amaze experts twice her age. But every lesson still ended in the same house, under the same roof, beside the same windows she could never cross.
Her mother, Melisande Asrephath, liked to stroke Opaline’s hair and call her "our little treasure."
Her father preferred other words. Asset. Blessing. Foundation. Future.
He never said them cruelly of course. But that didn’t make it any less bad.
Vaelric did love his daughter. Only it was in the way a proud man loved the miracle that had made him great.
He wanted her safe, healthy, respected and protected from thieves, kidnappers, rivals, and the world’s uglier intentions. But all of that love was locked inside ownership. He loved her with a closed fist.
So Opaline learned how to smile inside a cage.
She kept that smile better than anyone expected. She talked to servants. She named the birds that nested near the upper fountain. She spent long afternoons sprawled across couches watching television with sweets balanced on her knees.
She read romance dramas and adventure comics. She hummed when she walked. She made faces at her reflection in old mirrors. She waved at guards from balconies until even the stern ones stopped pretending not to like her.
If sadness took root in her life, she refused to water it where others could see.
The one person who saw most clearly was her butler.
Corven had entered the household long before Opaline’s awakening and had watched the family’s great rise. He was not old, though she had thought him ancient when she was a child.
He moved with efficiency most of the time. She had never seen him run or fall or daddle. She had also never seen him dress in a fashion that wasn’t impeccable.
Corven was an attentive man who, despite his talents, somehow became the person who brought Opaline tea, found the books she requested, and listened when she talked too much because no one else had time.
He should have been only a servant. Circumstance had made him something closer to a keeper, an older brother, and at times the nearest thing she had to a friend.
He was the one who found her one evening in the family lounge with both feet tucked beneath her on a velvet chair, staring so closely at the television screen that he feared she might fall into it.
"What has taken hold of you now, Lady Opaline?" he asked, setting a plate of pastries beside her.
She pointed at the screen so hard she nearly poked the air. "Look."