"What?!" Her eyes went wide, and for a split second, she thought she saw an opening. Of course, she thought, her mind racing. He wants to use . He’ll give a mission, send out of this world, and then I’ll escape. He’s careless!
"Oh, of course," she purred, bowing low. "I’ll do anything for you, my mighty human lord."
Hye raised an eyebrow at the "mighty lord" title. He realised it was likely the influence of Lucas and the others.
Before they had dispersed to their posts, his generals had saluted him with their usual, fanatical devotion. He made a ntal note to have a very stern talk with Lucas about the image they were projecting to outsiders.
Olana’s thoughts were already miles away. I’ll play the submissive servant, let him send on a courier mission, and the mont I hit a neutral sector, I’m gone! Hehe!
Then, Hye dropped the hamr.
"I want you to head out to the training fields. I need soone with an objective eye to monitor the efficiency of the new warrior batches and the monster-cull rates. You’ll report directly to ."
Olana stood motionless for several minutes, her jaw dropping. Then, she exploded. "What do you take for?! I am a princess of the rchant guilds! I am not your servant to go and count heads in a muddy training camp out there!"
"That’s the mission," Hye said with a shrug, his attention already drifting back to his resource lists.
"I think you misunderstand. I’m not letting you leave this world to perform tasks in the universe. You stay here, under my eye, until I decide otherwise. If you want to eat and have a bed in this palace, you’ll earn it by counting warriors. Now, go."
He didn’t even look up to see her reaction. He had already moved on to the next problem, leaving Olana to realise that her "prison" now had a job description.
Hye had read the flicker of calculation in Olana’s eyes as easily as an open book. He watched the realisation of her captivity sink in, effectively shattering her fantasies of a quick escape with a few well-placed words.
"It’s simple," he stated, his voice flat and devoid of emotion. "Either you remain here, seated and silent in this hall, or you go and perform the task I’ve assigned. Choice is yours, but idling is no longer an option."
He dismissed her presence entirely after that, turning his focus back to the staggering inventory screens floating before him.
As he began to categorise the mountains of goods he had extracted from the Hescos, even he had to suck in a cold breath of air.
The sheer volu was almost incomprehensible. He had effectively ripped the Hescos clean, securing a deal that he doubted would ever be replicated in his lifeti.
He had traded for the accumulated "trash" of a sovereign race and turned it into the bedrock of a new human era.
The only sting was the cost. As he looked at his bone reserves, he saw that he had exhausted nearly half of his total treasury. His stock of high-grade Dark Realm bones had been depleted to a concerning level.
If he hadn’t possessed the foresight to pivot toward paying with billions of normal-grade bones halfway through the negotiation, the financial blow would have been catastrophic.
"Yet, it’s all worth it," he whispered to the empty hall, a mantra to steady his pulse. "Every bone spent is a seed planted. First things first—I’ll distribute the specific requests before I dive into the blueprints and secret technologies."
"What are you talking about?" Olana muttered, her confusion finally overriding her pride. She watched him move his hands through the air, shifting invisible icons with the practised ease of a god.
She couldn’t see his interface, but she could sense the massive displacent of energy every ti he "sent" an item.
She realised, with a sinking feeling of regret, that she had missed the deal of the century. If only she hadn’t been so focused on her own vanity back at the resort, she might have overheard the specifics of what he and Moth had bartered.
While Olana was left to her spiralling thoughts, Hye’s digital presence was screaming across his kingdom.
He began flooding the private channels of his inner circle with the goods they had requested, but he didn’t stop there. He accompanied every shipnt with a rigorous set of orders.
He laid out the tiline with brutal clarity: they had exactly one month.
In that window, they were racing against a clock that didn’t care for their exhaustion.
Hye summarised the pact with the Hescos, making it clear that they were no longer just a local power—they were about to beco a cosmic player.
He demanded that every departnt head—Karoline, Lily, Legend, and the others—draft a comprehensive plan for the next thirty days and the subsequent years of his absence.
He sent tens of thousands of artificial planets to Karoline. It was a logistical nightmare that would have broken any other administrator.
He tasked her with the imdiate terraforming of their barren sectors, asking her to lay these worlds in a strategic defensive web that would transform their territory from a series of outposts into a true interstellar fortress.
For the military, he turned to Lily and Legend. He flooded their inventories with hundreds of billions of warrior tokens, an army so vast it could occupy entire star systems. But he didn’t want raw numbers; he wanted elites.
"Train them on cultivation," his orders read. "No exceptions."
He sent mountains of U.stat crystals to facilitate this growth, ensuring his officers had the resources to push their soldiers toward the "Level 1 Cap."
From his conversations with Moth, Hye knew the terrifying truth: many of the system’s automated features—the "training wheels" of the apocalypse—would be stripped away once they reached the Outer Battlefield.
If his warriors weren’t at peak physical and spiritual condition before the jump, they wouldn’t survive the first hour.
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