Chapter 344: Time to open gacha tickets
Ethan returned to his office drenched in sweat, his face and body covered in golden lipstick marks.
His cock was still throbbing faintly, and Ysara’s scent clung to his skin, warm and sweet.
They’d been training, and afterward—with Evelyn and Mireya leaving to meet Elena—Ysara had taken the opportunity to drain him dry.
She really didn’t give him much of a break, though it wasn’t like he was complaining.
Over the past few days, he’d done nothing but spend time with his wives and, of course, his mother and dear aunt. But now it was time to get to work.
Tomorrow would be the big day: the announcement of his child. And soon, the Lords who had accepted his invitation would arrive in Goldenveil.
Ethan sat at his desk, lost in thought, fingers tapping a slow rhythm on the wood while the scent of ink and parchment filled the silent room.
He already knew that not everyone would come.
He had escorts stationed in each of those cities, and according to their reports, only one delegation had set out for Goldenveil.
All the other cities and towns were on high alert, gates shut and soldiers drilling in a hurry.
That worried Ethan, of course. But all things considered, it also pleased him.
There were two people he wanted at his side above all others.
The first was the Lord of Fallenwinter, whose city he wanted to preserve for the forests of magical wood that surrounded it. The second was the matriarch of the largest elven city, which sat atop a gigantic elven silver mine.
Both cities had access to the sea and ports of their own, even if small ones.
If he could win over those two in particular, nothing else mattered.
Even just one of them, however, would be enough to satisfy him.
After dealing with the elven matriarch—which wouldn’t be difficult with Arwen’s support and his huge cock—he would only need to crush the others in battle.
As for Lord Fallenwinter, the reports painted him in a very positive light.
If he was truly the man his people claimed him to be, Ethan planned to capture him alive and keep him in command.
If winning his loyalty proved impossible, only death would remain—for him and his family.
Women and young children would be spared, and Ethan wouldn’t waste time hunting down those who fled. But any man of the Fallenwinter family old enough to remember his own parents’ names would die.
The last thing he needed was some vengeful young man carrying out a terrorist attack in his dead father’s name ten or twenty years down the line.
Of course, a woman was just as capable of something like that as any man.
But in this world, purges of noble families rarely extended to women, and Ethan had no interest whatsoever in staining his hands with their blood.
In Estria, eliminating a noble family’s male descendants was seen as prudent, while eliminating the female ones was seen as cruel.
Many said it was a cultural legacy of the last Emperor to unify the humans of the continent, but Ethan didn’t give it much thought.
The young lord sighed, pushing those pointless matters out of his mind.
Now it was time to use up all the gacha tickets stored in the System’s inventory.
In total, there were just over two hundred free tickets, nearly five thousand common ones, and seven hundred premium tickets.
Ethan started with the common and free ones, more than five thousand in all.
He didn’t want to spend hours checking one reward at a time, so he opened everything at once using the System’s quick-open mode.
A loading screen appeared in the air, spinning for about two seconds before unfolding into a list of over five thousand rewards.
Almost nothing there was of much use to him, so he simply set most of it aside.
He would send the weapons and armor to the Steel Vein Military Complex to be stored for the militia, while the steel would go to the city’s many blacksmith shops.
As for the seeds, they would go to the farms... or, to be more specific, to the Goldenveil farm. Currently, they had only one big farm in operation, and it was producing barely a fraction of its potential.
Of course, there were still some good items mixed in with all that.
Healing and strengthening potions, high-quality herbs, and—what excited him most—pop cards totaling five thousand new people, plus one card that would grant him another thousand soldiers.
Combined with the pop card worth two thousand five hundred that he’d received earlier, that made eight thousand five hundred new citizens.
To make things even better, he had over a hundred Rank S talent potions and ten thousand XP boost potions in his inventory.
Those would go to his wives and concubines first, of course, but there should still be plenty left over for the army.
Ethan stretched out in his chair, a satisfied smile spreading across his lips.
Lowering his arms, he used all the pop cards and set the soldier card aside.
He would use that one at the Military Complex, handing over command of the one thousand new soldiers as soon as he finished everything there.
Starting next week, Goldenveil’s population would grow by more than twenty-two thousand. He had every reason to be excited.
He had an obscene amount of gold stashed away, but to truly develop Goldenveil, he needed to find a way to start putting all that wealth to use.
A larger population meant more opportunities for that impoverished region.
He wanted to build forts, found more resource-gathering cities, and turn his mountain of gold into a functioning industry.
Ethan was deeply interested in Earth’s history. He wasn’t exactly a die-hard scholar, but he had still learned quite a lot, especially about attempts to rebuild fallen nations.
One of those lessons was quite simple: rebuilding a nation is a thousand times easier than building one from scratch.