Chapter 340: Episode 340_Life Is About Coming Empty-Handed and Leaving Loaded (1)

1.

The aide wore a grave expression and thought for a long time before finally nodding.

"You intend to use it as war funds, correct?"

"Of course. What, you think I’m going to run off with it? My pet Gold Dragon has to gorge itself on Gold for at least one Meteor to fall from the sky, so hand it over. You know the saying, right? If you hoard it, it turns to shit. Saving up fare for the afterlife is just fattening up your kids. Spend it while you can. The moment those bastards out there, eyes blazing to take the Rich Territory, break through, every coin you’ve hidden will be stolen anyway. Just think of it as using it to protect the territory."

He had only been talking off the cuff, but when he saw the aide actually taking the bait, his tone unconsciously grew more polite.

The words he had been tossing out carelessly grew more deliberate.

He’d had his suspicions, but still.

’Wow, so he really was hiding money.’

Considering that the Rich Territory and the Rich Casino were famous across the continent for raking in money hand over fist, it had always felt odd that not a single coin ever made its way to him.

So he really had just been a figurehead CEO.

Or maybe the aide had seen him not as the true lord, but as a convenient fool to milk.

It was infuriating, but he didn’t say anything.

As an aide, it was actually an excellent move.

Wasn’t the hardest thing in the world to evade taxes without getting caught?

The aide had pulled it off brilliantly.

Without giving him a single coin.

That took some serious guts.

It was worthy of respect.

More importantly, he was about to get all of it back now.

He quickly followed the aide, who walked ahead with a sour expression.

They passed through a dark underground passage so deep he hadn’t even known such a place existed within the territory, and finally reached the door of a massive vault.

"Wow."

He couldn’t help but let out a gasp of admiration at how deep and hidden it was.

Even though he had followed the whole way, the route was so convoluted that he wasn’t sure he could retrace it on his own.

He would have to take back what he had said earlier about all the hidden Gold being stolen the moment the territory fell.

This place would probably be safe even if five nuclear bombs dropped on the continent.

And yet, the reason the aide had obediently brought him all the way here, ready to hand over the Gold in response to Han Simin’s threat, could only be one thing.

"Please, you must protect the territory, my lord."

"So I’m only the lord at times like this, huh? When you’ve been squirreling everything away without giving me a single coin."

"...I apologize."

It was because he truly loved the territory.

The aide had nurtured this land to this point without abandoning it, even when it had barely been able to breathe without so much as a fence.

Han Simin was moved by that passion.

The world wasn’t completely rotten after all.

There were still people who valued something more than money.

It made him feel that it was worth the trouble to fleece him.

Still, the man had principles and a good heart, so he decided to only skim a little.

As he made up his mind, the massive vault door yawned open before his eyes.

A dazzling golden light flooded the dark passageway.

“Gah! My eyes!”

It was, how to put it—

An assault of wealth the likes of which Han Simin had never experienced in his life.

*

The Emperor’s vault had certainly been large and splendid.

However, that place had been filled mostly with rare jewels and mysterious artifacts that couldn’t be easily found on the continent, rather than gold.

Gold, after all, was something the Emperor could conjure up with a single word, so that was only natural.

In other words, to the Emperor, gold wasn’t valuable enough to store in his treasure vault.

But for the aide, that was not the case.

There were indeed artifacts and various gems in the vault, but what overwhelmingly filled the massive space were Gold bars that were blinding just to look at.

He had focused on stockpiling gold, which would retain its value as liquid cash if anything happened or if war broke out.

“Damn.”

Naturally, this was exactly Han Simin’s taste.

For someone like him, who saw everything in terms of money, the Emperor’s treasure vault had been a trove of items he could sell for a high price, whereas this was a vault of pure cash he didn’t even have to bother selling.

On top of that, everything was already in gold form, perfectly convenient for Squeaker to use.

“This is excellent.”

The thought he’d had ten seconds ago—’I’ll only skim a little’—was already long gone.

Han Simin asked brazenly and without shame.

“Let me ask you just one thing. How badly do you want to protect this territory?”

“...?”

“To be honest, I wasn’t going to say this, but your sincerity in laying your assets bare has moved me. I was originally planning to take about half for myself, but I’ll make a special exception and only take thirty percent. I’ll use the rest entirely for the war.”

“...”

“How much are you willing to spend?”

“My lord...”

“Hey now, don’t try to play up my connection to the territory to make me feel guilty, haggle the price down, or guilt-trip me into working on passion alone. You should be grateful I’m overlooking the fact that you embezzled all the money you were supposed to give me and stashed it here.”

“...”

Perhaps because there was nothing he could say in his defense, the aide didn’t argue back for once.

After a moment of thought, he spoke.

“You may use all of it.”

“...Huh?”

“However, I will trust you.”

“Your trust is well-placed.”

The contract was sealed.

As always, it was a deal with the devil.

“Squeaker!”

Han Simin called out casually toward the vault entrance.

Screee!

Squeaker, who had been waiting, hurried in.

The vault was hidden so deep it would be safe even if a nuclear bomb fell, but Squeaker, who had caught the scent of gold, was more terrifying than any nuclear weapon.

“Eat.”

Perched on his shoulder in the form of a small bird, Squeaker’s eyes gleamed as Han Simin spoke with the benevolence of a truly excellent master.

Anyone watching would have thought it was a cool scene.

“Hey! You little—! You crazy overgrown lizard! What the hell are you doing eating all of that?!”

If only the aide hadn’t watched to the very end, it would have been a perfect ending.

*

The amount of Gold bars taken from the vault was enormous.

There were about a hundred of them, each a 1,000-Gold bar worth $100,000.

In cash terms, that was $15,000,000.

No, if he found the right buyer, he could probably get $16,000,000.

Of course, thanks to him striking a pose and not explaining anything properly, Squeaker had eaten them all, so turning them into cash was now a distant dream.

In any case, it was a full 100,000 Gold.

It wasn’t an amount he had never handled before, but it was undeniably a huge sum.

This was different from the time he had lucked into raiding a gold mine and obtained an amount of Gold that humans normally couldn’t touch.

This was the profit left over from the Rich Territory and Casino, saved up over the course of a year.

If used well, it was enough to raise Squeaker’s level by about four.

But Han Simin didn’t do that.

It was a lot of Gold, but it was also laughably insufficient to annihilate the army marching on the kingdom.

And these weren’t the kind of people who would turn tail and run just because he dropped a few Meteors for show.

Don’t they say humans are the scariest of all?

Humans blinded by greed would keep advancing as long as they weren’t the ones dying.

Engaging in a war of attrition like that against an army of over a million wouldn’t be a good development for Han Simin either.

So he stuck to his original intention.

“I’m going to focus solely on defending the Rich Territory, no matter what.”

What did he need to accomplish that?

He had a limited amount of Gold, but it was enough to cast any powerful spell at least once.

He racked his brain.

A way to protect the territory, rather than win the war.

The deliberation didn’t take long.

No matter how many spells existed, there were only a few with a high probability of working.

And, as expected, they were extremely expensive.

“Man. Why is my life always in the red?”

He stroked Squeaker’s head and moved on to the practical planning.

2.

The Liberation Army attacking the Rich Territory advanced without hesitation.

They were already buzzing with excitement at the sight of the two massive dragons blocking their path. When the fierce attack they expected never came, that excitement only drove them to push forward harder—a natural reaction.

With morale that high, they couldn’t help but steamroll ahead.

There was no resistance.

The only thing they had to break through was a newly built outer wall.

For some reason, all the troops that should have been defending the wall had retreated.

The small and large territories within the kingdom, when faced with the oncoming Liberation Army, all laid down their arms and declared surrender.

In that chaos and frenzy, one might have expected meaningless slaughter to break out, but the Holy Knights of the Temple, who were part of the army, prevented it.

Not a single person on the continent participating in the war was unaware that the true villain here was Han Simin.

On top of that, the territories belonging to the kingdom had only reluctantly joined not long ago.

Because of this, the sky-high excitement gradually cooled, and anger slowly began to build in its place.

He had been so full of himself, fronting with dragons and declaring war on the people of the continent, and now he was throwing innocent territories under the bus to buy time?

An army that had suffered virtually no casualties marched toward a single destination.

The Rich Territory.

Where Han Simin was.

And, according to reconnaissance, the final battleground.

The walls of the Rich Kingdom had fallen, and the territories under it had been divided up among other kingdoms.

The Rich Casino was no exception. The army might have been a pack of crazed thugs before, but at the casino they were surprisingly calm, and they took it over so cleanly it was hard to believe anyone had ever set foot there.

The final destination.

By the time they reached the Rich Territory, the army had grown even larger.

It had already been huge, but unlike when they had surrounded the kingdom, which was several times wider, the Rich Territory was far too small a space for millions to encircle.

It felt like they could erase it from the map just by walking forward and pushing.

Yet the army did not approach easily.

Because of the enormous magic circle installed there?

No, in the face of an army of millions, that was just a scrap of a magic circle.

Even a +15 magic circle had its limits.

The reason they couldn’t bring themselves to advance was because of the beings in the sky.

The two dragons they had seen at the beginning.

And Han Simin, sitting on top of them.

Their sheer presence was on a completely different level from some magic circle on the ground.

No one wanted to rush in recklessly.

There was no need to advance until they had prepared a way to attack the dragons in the sky directly. Such was the power of a dragon.

That was the only reason a standoff could exist despite such an absurd power imbalance.

Waiting.

Silence.

Words that didn’t fit a place with millions of people hung quietly in the air.

The one who broke that silence first was Han Simin.

Two days.

When the number of people had doubled from the initial count, Han Simin finally brought it out.

His trump card.

“I don’t care anymore. Screw it. You’re the ones who made me do this.”

Squeaker’s body began to glow.

Golden.

Brighter than ever before.

The consumption of Gold.

The magic generated by that consumption was absorbed by Aria, who was clinging to his side.

And then—

A hole opened in the sky.

A glance was enough to know it was filled with every ominous thing in the world.

From that hole, they poured out.

The Demons.