By the time the first full day ended, Lucien was in an excellent mood.

That was putting it mildly.

He had estimated the numbers and nearly laughed aloud.

Lootwell was rich.

Very rich.

And what pleased him even more was that the wealth did not stop at him. The people of Lootwell were earning well too. Their district specialties were selling, their services were in demand, their inns were full, and their confidence had risen alongside their profits.

They had earned nearly a billion in value in a single day.

That was not exaggeration.

That was simply what happened when an entire continent was allowed to discover, all at once, that opportunity had finally developed a physical address.

Lucien leaned back in his chair, looking altogether too pleased with life.

Vivian, who stood nearby reviewing the same set of reports, did not even try to hide her own amazement.

"We made that much in a day," she said.

Lucien folded his hands and smiled like a noble villain who had just been told the treasury itself had fallen in love with him.

"Yes."

Vivian stared at him.

"You look insufferably happy, brother."

"I am insufferably happy."

Vivian was happy seeing him like that.

..

One of the first things Lucien had been glad for was the safety system he placed in the Ascension Spire.

Without it, the first days would have been a disaster of overconfident idiots dying in expensive numbers.

Instead, when participants reached a lethal threshold, the Spire expelled them safely back to the ground floor.

And if they wanted to try again—

they paid again.

Battle enthusiasts loved it.

They came out injured, exhilarated, half-offended by the monsters, and disturbingly eager to throw themselves back into danger for another run. Even those who grumbled at the cost still lined up again with the unmistakable expression of people who had already lost the argument with their own bad decisions.

Lucien had priced outsider entry at ten high-grade spirit crystals.

To major factions, that was tolerable. To independent practitioners and smaller factions, it hurt just enough to remain meaningful.

That was exactly where he wanted it.

Not cheap enough to become mindless. Not so expensive that only powerful factions could afford the chance.

He wanted ambition to have access. He also wanted ambition to pay.

To keep the Spire regulated, he capped daily outsider access at fifty thousand entries.

Lootwell’s own people still entered under internal rules, of course. The structure was vast enough that even under that volume, it did not feel crowded. Teams could still climb, fighters could still experiment, and ambitious fools could still discover that "I think I can take one more floor" remained one of the most dangerous sentences ever invented.

The Doors proved even more absurd.

Skillpedia had become a beautiful little machine for emptying wallets in exchange for power:

One-Star Skill Door: 100 high-grade spirit crystals

Two-Star Skill Door: 1,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Three-Star Skill Door: 10,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Four-Star Skill Door: 100,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Five-Star Skill Door: 1,000,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Magic Book was no gentler:

Basic Magic: 10 high-grade spirit crystals

Intermediate Magic: 100 high-grade spirit crystals

Advanced Magic: 1,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Runes and Magic Circles: 10,000 high-grade spirit crystals

Ancient Spells: 100,000 high-grade spirit crystals

And Monsterdex, perhaps the most deceptively dangerous of the three, charged ten high-grade spirit crystals per hour.

That last one had seemed modest to many visitors.

Then they stepped inside, discovered just how much information was actually there, and lost all sense of time, personal dignity, and future budgeting.

Lucien had seen one scholar come out from the Monsterdex hall looking like he had just met the meaning of life and been financially punished for it.

The man clutched his forehead, looked up at the sky, and whispered, "I have learned too much and not enough."

His companion asked, "How much did you spend?"

The scholar stared at him with bloodshot eyes.

"Everything that mattered."

Then he went back in.

Lucien approved very much.

Still, the most profitable thing in Lootwell remained the communication devices.

That part had only intensified once people could buy them at the source.

Factions bought in batches. Merchant associations bought in bulk. Some sects bought so many at once that even Kael had briefly gone quiet.

One sect representative purchased a hundred thousand devices in a single transaction.

That alone produced enough profit to make several market supervisors stand straighter for the rest of the day out of sheer patriotic joy.

And it was not only the communication halls.

The whole market earned.

Everywhere, Lootwell’s people sold something the world had not realized it needed until it saw it displayed properly.

The inns were especially offensive in their success.

They filled quickly.

The large ones first, then the medium halls, then the premium district lodgings, then the scenic-view rooms, then the high-class suites.

Each lodging offered a meditation area of its own. The better the lodging, the better the meditation room attached to it.

Lucien had also placed energy-gathering arrays in every room and layered them with clauses that improved comprehension.

It was no wonder people found the experience so irresistible.

Lucien immediately made a note to speak with Lilith later.

They needed more high-rise dwellings. More ways for rich people to politely bankrupt themselves in comfort.

•••

Over the next few days, the rhythm settled further.

People kept coming.

Lootwell was vast, and it absorbed the flow without losing shape. That alone unsettled many of the visitors. A lesser place would have buckled under that kind of early pressure. Lootwell, by contrast, made their arrival look like expected weather.

Many also left.

Some left because they had seen enough to report home.

Some left because they had bought what they came for.

And many left for a much simpler reason.

They were broke.

Utterly, spiritually, and financially ruined.

Some walked out smiling like lunatics because they had learned something priceless. Some walked out crying because the thing they learned was, unfortunately, how little money they truly had. Some left with newly acquired skills and empty storage rings. Some left with communication devices, burned budgets, and a vow to return richer.

One merchant from a medium clan left muttering, "This place is wonderful. This place is evil. I will return in ten days."

His steward sighed and wrote that down, presumably for accounting purposes.

Still, no one could honestly complain.

Lootwell had done exactly what it promised.

It offered lawful opportunity.

If one had the resources, one could leave stronger, smarter, better connected, better trained, or at the very least far more aware of what one lacked.

That kind of place did not need to beg people to return.

They would come back on their own.

And then Lucien improved the trap.

A few days into the opening period, he assigned the chapel a new role.

Lucien had the chapel establish a formal quest structure.

At first, many outsiders thought that sounded charming.

Then they saw the actual tasks and stopped underestimating Lootwell again.

The first category of quests involved energy contribution.

Visitors could voluntarily channel their energy into designated Covenant Items and support structures under chapel supervision. The more they contributed, the more they were paid.

The exchange was structured by purity, stability, density, and compatibility. Reckless energy was worth less. Refined energy was worth more.

To many practitioners, this felt almost absurdly favorable.

They were being paid to sit in a controlled sacred space and pour power into unknown items they did not fully understand.

It sounded, in the words of one cheerful spear practitioner, "like a free lunch blessed by heaven."

It was not, of course, free at all.

The chapel knew exactly what it was doing.

The energy fed Lootwell’s deeper systems. The practitioners gained money. That money would mostly cycle back into Lootwell through Doors, transport, inns, food, Spire access, market purchases, and future plans ruined by visible temptation.

Lucien found the whole loop elegant.

The chapel also issued other quests.

Survey and specimen collection. Resource-harvest contracts. Training matches and tactical demonstration sparring for the public arenas. Scholarly cataloging help in the public research halls for literate visitors with proper discipline.

All of them paid.

All of them were fair.

People felt involved. People earned money. People respected the chapel more. And all of it strengthened Lootwell.

The outsiders loved the system.

Many of them genuinely did not expect a place this rich in opportunities to also hand them lawful ways to keep earning once they had spent too much too quickly.

One exhausted swordsman, fresh out of the Spire and poorer than he had ever been in his adult life, stared at the chapel quest board and whispered, "It feeds us so it can charge us again."

The woman beside him nodded solemnly.

"It is a perfect civilization."

That feeling spread.

And with it came another realization.

The chapel was terrifying.

The outsiders quickly noticed just how many people inside it used divine energy. The whole place felt washed in a pressure that made desecration seem not merely criminal, but stupid beyond survival.

Respect for Lootwell deepened because of that.

The chapel was not just a useful institution.

It was proof that Lootwell’s order had a spiritual spine.

Clara, meanwhile, used the growing chapel traffic for another purpose.

Lucien had quietly tasked her with identifying more allied sects and future supply partners. The Lunareth Sect and Dawnbinder were good beginnings, but not enough for the scale Lootwell would eventually require. They needed more suppliers of ores, specialty woods, herbs, strange minerals, monster materials, and difficult-to-obtain ingredients.

And Clara remained the perfect judge for that work. 𝑓𝓇𝘦ℯ𝘸𝘦𝑏𝓃𝑜𝘷ℯ𝑙.𝑐𝑜𝓂

She listened, watched, tested, smiled, and, when needed... frightened people into honesty so gently that many of them only realized afterward that they had been spiritually dissected.

Lucien had long since decided not to question how she did that.

If it worked, then reality was free to keep its little secrets.

•••

The days passed.

The money flowed.

The visitors kept coming.

Lootwell’s people grew richer. Lootwell’s stores grew deeper. Its material reserves increased. Its influence expanded.

And most importantly of all, the territory no longer felt like a hidden wonder being cautiously sampled by the outside world.

It felt rooted.

Lootwell had entered the world’s habits.

People now planned around it. Saved for it. Returned to it. Adjusted travel routes because of it. Measured sect prestige against access to it. Judged opportunities in terms of whether they might one day lead back to it.

Lucien saw all of that from the Stillness Palace and could not stop smiling.

The territory was growing. Its resources were increasing. Its people were thriving. Its systems were working. And the outsiders, whether they admitted it or not, were already being changed by contact with it.

Lootwell had rooted itself in the world.

And roots, once deep enough, were very difficult to remove.