The carriage rolled to a stop, and I pushed myself upright off the cushioned seat and hopped down onto the gravel path outside.

And the moment I did, every muscle in my back filed an immediate and comprehensive complaint about the previous forty-five minutes.

[Carriages are bumpy…] I thought, working my shoulder in a slow rotation, [… no matter which one you get.]

-Ding!

{The Shop has a substantial catalogue of carriages specifically designed for a smooth riding experience.}

[Huh...] I looked at the estate gate ahead of us, at the stone wall and the curved tile and the mana lamps already lit inside. [Maybe I should invest in one. Get a horse, a driver, the whole young master starter kit...]

The evening air was clean here in a way that New Shinkotsu's air generally was not.

Old Shinkotsu was less charcoal smoke and pressed people, and more old wood and pine and whatever it was Kisho had blooming in his gardens behind the wall.

[On second thought…Nahh. Let's see what I can do about getting the Cloak of Flight back from the General first.]

The Chief landed beside me with considerably less theatrical vertebral noise and looked at the gate for a moment before turning to me.

"Would you like me to lead the conversation?"

"Nope," I said, waving my hand in the direction of the front entrance. "I can handle it."

He studied me for one beat, which was the Chief's version of a lengthy deliberation, and then nodded.

"Very well. Let's go."

The gate was open and attended, and we walked through it without ceremony.

The estate on the other side was exactly what you would expect from a man who had gotten rich enough to stop caring about the price tags.

The gravel path between the garden sections was maintained but not manicured into anxious perfection.

The main building was timber, tile, and sliding screens, all of it lit by mana lamps in their rice paper casings casting amber glows.

I noted the dwarven-crafted lantern bracket on the wall beside the entrance.

I noted the elven artistry in the carved wooden lintel above the first corridor.

I noted the demon-folk ceramics arranged in the alcove near the receiving hall, and the beastkin lacquerwork on the display shelf below.

Everything in this house was the best of something, and none of it was arranged to impress.

Things in this house were arranged as though the man who owned them liked things that were excellent and did not feel the need to scream about his collection to the world.

And I was beginning to like Kisho Hikaru before I had even met him.

The demon-folk butler waiting at the front entrance was very tall, immaculately dressed. His obsidian-black horns curved backward from his temples, and his eyes had the blood-red sclera and shimmering golden irises that I had seen on exactly one other demon-folk in Shinkotsu and found just as striking the second time.

"Greetings," he said, with a bow. "Master Kisho has been expecting you."

We followed him inside.

The interior continued what the exterior had started. Tatami flooring, polished timber, sliding paper doors with late evening light coming through the panels in long warm streaks.

A garden courtyard was visible through the open corridor to the left, a small reflecting pool with a maple at one end, with the evening sky mirroring quietly in the water.

Old money, as a design philosophy, essentially meant: spend the money, hide the spending, let the quality speak without you needing to clear your throat.

Which was honestly impressive, considering the man had only been absurdly wealthy for a couple of years. Most people needed generations before they learned the difference between having money and advertising it.

The butler stopped before a pair of sliding doors, announced us with a quiet word, and the doors opened.

Kisho rose from his floor cushion with the easy movement of a man who never had back trouble in his life and probably never would. Unlike me.

And the first thing I caught was the warm uncle impression radiating off of him.

Fox beast-folk, middle-aged, deep red hair going grey at the temples, traditional dark kimono without emblem, fox ears angled forward communicating genuine interest rather than reflexive alertness, and a tail the color of deep auburn.

He looked like a man who laughed easily and remembered names and never raised his voice, which in my experience probably meant he never needed to.

His eyes landed on me and brightened almost instantly.

"So this is the brave young man who protected all my people from those horrors until the bitter end," he said, covering the distance between us and extending his hand. "Well met, well met."

I shook it. His grip was firm, and his hands calloused.

"Likewise," I smiled politely. "It's good to finally put a face to the name."

"You flatter an old fox," he said, with an entirely genuine chuckle, and then turned toward the Chief and greeted him with the respect of a man who knew the difference between social warmth and institutional deference and applied each correctly.

Then he gestured toward the seating and said, "Please…"

And we sat, tea arrived, and the part of the evening where everyone figured out what everyone else was actually doing began.

Kisho asked about my recovery, and I answered honestly, which was to say I told him I was managing well and left the details of what managing well actually involved in my back pocket.

He asked how I found Shinkotsu and I told him the food in New Shinkotsu was genuinely excellent, which was not a deflection because the food here genuinely was excellent.

He asked whether I would continue adventuring, and I told him absolutely.

And he laughed.

From what little I could gather, I knew Kisho Hikaru noticed things.

He noticed the pauses before my answers, and which questions I redirected, and where I chose warmth over substance.

And I noticed him noticing me a little too much.

We had our tea very pleasantly on top of all of that too.

At some points the Chief contributed a sentence or two, but mostly he sat with the patience of company rather than principal, and watched us conduct our subtle inventory of each other over ceramic cups.

Eventually I set mine down.

"Now…" I said as I looked at Kisho with the small smile. "About what you wanted to speak to me about…. I'm sorry, but the curious cat in my head just won't stop."

Kisho blinked at the directness, and then laughed.

"Oh, it's nothing too big," he said, waving a hand. "I simply wanted to host the young man responsible for saving my people. And reward him properly."

I raised an eyebrow.

"How are you planning to reward me?"

Kisho tilted his head slightly, brow furrowed.

"I just gave you the reward."

Chief and I both blinked in unison.

"I shook your hand, didn't I?" Kisho smiled pleasantly.

"Quite firmly too."

…

…

I slowly looked down at my hand.

Then back up.

The Chief's expression remained perfectly blank.

"You serious?" I asked.

Kisho held it together for approximately three seconds before bursting into laughter.

"Okay, okay. I was joking. I was joking."

The laugh came out of even me despite itself.

"You had me for a second there…" I chuckled.

"A man must have his small pleasures, Nico," he said, still chuckling before the laughter settled and his expression changed into something that was still warm but was no longer performing anything.

"But I was serious about the reward, kid…" he said. "What you did…. What you lost doing it."

His eyes moved briefly to my missing arm and the eyepatch. "I am unsure if I can repay it. But I will do my best."

I searched his face for a good second, detecting no jokes or merchant charm, just sincerity while The Chief remained silent beside me.

Then I leaned forward and put one finger on the table.

"Then how about a deal?"

Kisho's head tilted slightly.

"…A deal?"

"One that'd make you a lot of money," I continued, letting a small smile come to my face. "Who knows... You might even recover the losses from the Hollow Cinder Mine collapse."

Kisho's warm smile froze in a way I found extremely satisfying.

Even the Chief had gone still beside me.

"Oh?" Kisho said, and his ears had come fully forward now, both of them."Now you have certainly managed to get my utmost attention."

"Good," I said, resting my elbow on the table. "Then allow me to show you a little something."

I placed my open palm flat on the table and activated Metal Manifestation at full 65 MP/s bandwidth.

And almost immediately, tiny green threads emerged beneath my skin.

At first, they looked almost like green veins illuminated beneath translucent flesh.

And then, green liquid became solid in the space of a breath, turning a pale jade-green as it spread outward from the center of my palm.

Being a Mage himself, the Chief instantly recognized what I was doing, and that sharp inhale all but confirmed it.

Kisho's eyes widened a heartbeat later.

Because what I was growing out of my palm was not ore.

Not the raw chunks pulled from a vein underground.

What I made out of thin air was refined, immediately usable Orichalcum. The same thing Hollow Cinder Mine was digging out.

Except what I had was the end product of an entire industrial chain of digging, hauling, smelting, checking purity, and then checking again.

The chunk kept growing, wider and heavier, and within seconds it began groaning under its weight.

-Creeak-!

But I kept my palm open and let it keep coming until the table had made its structural concerns known to everyone in the room and was one step away from throwing the towel.

That's when I stopped, not because I had to, but because the table would've genuinely collapsed.

The room simply… Stopped.

The Chief's expression had abandoned all attempts at neutrality.

Kisho Hikaru's composure finally had cracks in it.

He was looking at the Orichalcum, eyes wide, and what was visible in the cracks was the mind of a man rapidly calculating Mining costs, transportation costs, smelting costs, refinery costs, labour infrastructure, and everything in between.

I could see his mind rapidly churning out what each of those bottlenecks produces in terms of timeline, loss and variance, and what the absence of every single one of those bottlenecks simultaneously implied about the offer currently sitting on his table in refined jade-green form.

I leaned back into my seat.

[Now…]

I looked between the merchant fox and the Union Head.

[Let the games begin.]