Since the trait quest Seo Ye-in had received this time was the kind she had to clear alone, we decided she would train separately for a while.

Dang Gyu-ri promptly came over and filled the vacancy that left behind.

After bickering in the training room for quite a while, we headed to the campus store to take a break and change the mood.

Then we bought a cup of coffee each and sat side by side on a nearby bench.

As we leisurely watched the students passing by, a familiar silhouette caught my eye in the distance.

The other person must have recognized me too, because they came striding over at a brisk pace, and their identity was none other than Song Cheonhye.

The moment she arrived, she threw a question at us.

“What are you doing here?”

“Drinking coffee with them.”

When I answered while pointing at Dang Gyu-ri, Song Cheonhye’s gaze naturally shifted that way.

Then her brows rose as if she found it unexpected.

“A freshman... right.”

“Hello, senior.”

Dang Gyu-ri bowed politely.

At that, Song Cheonhye introduced herself and then asked exactly the same questions everyone else had.

Naturally, the answers she got back were exactly the same too.

Q: What is your relationship with Dang Gyu-young, and how did you get close to him?

A: We’re cousins, and we got close over winter break.

Then Song Cheonhye looked back at me and narrowed her brow.

“How many more are you going to keep adding? Now you’re even making moves on underclassmen.”

“I don’t know about that, but isn’t whether we get along more important than whether we’re upperclassmen and underclassmen?”

“How do you know whether you get along? Winter break wasn’t even that long.”

“You find out quickly when you spend time together.”

“In that case...”

Song Cheonhye trailed off mid-sentence, then shut her mouth as if some thought had just occurred to her.

I pressed her.

“In that case?”

“...Never mind. More importantly, there’s something I want to confirm.”

Song Cheonhye switched the subject at once.

She looked at me with an extremely suspicious stare.

“The messages you sent over the last few days.”

“Yeah, what about them?”

“The timing was awfully convenient. Exactly lined up with when I was on patrol.”

“I just had a feeling you were working.”

“And you even sent one right after [Black Serpent Fang] was cleared.”

“Did I? That is pretty convenient.”

I answered as though I were hearing it for the first time in my life.

Even so, Song Cheonhye didn’t let go of her suspicion and kept pressing.

“And the day before yesterday, you replied much later.”

“It was night. Replies can be late at night.”

“And then [Descent of the Feathered Serpent] was cleared at a very similar time too.”

“That’s convenient too. The problem is that it really feels like you’re forcing the pieces to fit.”

I slipped past it as smoothly as a snake crossing a wall and even counterattacked, and for a moment Song Cheonhye looked as though she had run out of words.

Then, with an expression like the frustration was going to kill her, she asked,

“Be honest. You did it, didn’t you?”

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t. But there’s one thing that’s certain.”

“...What is it?”

“The moment you asked that question, you lost.”

If she had clear evidence from the start, she wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of trying to lead me into a confession.

She would have dragged me straight to the Discipline Committee room long ago.

A vein popped on Song Cheonhye’s forehead.

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again, probably because she realized that anything she said at this point would only hurt her side.

She let out a low sigh and forced down her anger.

“...Fine. This time, I’ll say I lost.”

“You didn’t lose. It’s not like we even went down into the deep layers.”

“Anyway! They say if a tail gets too long, it gets caught.”

Just as Dang Gyu-ri’s stealth was better than Gwak Seungjae’s detection, yet still got caught two or three times out of ten, Song Cheonhye might be able to catch us once or twice out of ten as well.

Though whether that’ll actually mean anything is something we’ll have to see.

Gwak Seungjae had said they would provide a certain amount of convenience.

I couldn’t be blindly optimistic, but the odds were high.

Looks like they still haven’t told her.

Well, from Gwak Seungjae’s perspective, bringing in a third party probably wouldn’t feel particularly honorable.

And besides, all I had said was that I would consider it positively. I hadn’t definitively agreed.

Then I won’t say anything either.

That seemed like it would be more fun.

Before long, Song Cheonhye left behind what amounted to a declaration of war and stormed off in a huff.

But just when she seemed to have gotten fairly far away, she stopped short, then came scurrying back over and asked,

“By the way, when are we training again?”

Separate from the underground-floor game of tag, it looked like she still wanted to keep receiving private lessons.

Judging by the flow of the conversation, even she seemed aware that it was a bit shameless to ask, because her cheeks had gone slightly pink.

From my perspective, a customer is a customer.

I had a promise with the Song father-daughter duo, so at least until I received Thunder Lord’s item, continuing the tutoring was the right move.

To begin with, it wasn’t like I held that much hostility toward her, and there was always the possibility that she could become a powerful ally someday.

So I answered calmly.

“Let’s decide after I see your next PvP match. I think that’ll make the direction clearer.”

“That makes sense too. Understood.”

After that, Song Cheonhye hurried off for real.

Peace returned once more, so we went back to sipping our coffee and watching the people passing by.

After doing that for quite a while, this time a group of freshmen caught my eye, and if I were being kind I’d say they looked refined, while if I were being unkind I’d say they looked like flowers raised in a greenhouse.

So I casually asked Dang Gyu-ri,

“Promising ones?”

“Yeah.”

It seemed they had already gotten fairly close since the start of the semester.

Or maybe they had known each other from before.

Meanwhile, among them was a girl who looked strangely familiar.

After searching through my memory for a moment,

“She looks like Senior Han Gyeoul.”

“Look at you being sharp. That’s Han Gaeul.”

A Sapphire Mage Tower prospect.

Right then, Han Gaeul must have felt our gaze, because just as she was about to enter the campus store, she stopped and looked at Dang Gyu-ri.

It was the kind of look I’d received more times than I could count.

“She’s full of suspicion.”

“Damn, was it obvious? I thought I’d hidden it well.”

During the placement test, Dang Gyu-ri had faced Han Gaeul in the final match.

So to hide their identity and control their score at the same time, they had thrown the match, but from Han Gaeul’s perspective, apparently something about it hadn’t sat right.

“......”

Han Gaeul kept looking this way for a while longer, then led her group into the campus store.

Watching that, Dang Gyu-ri asked,

“...She’s not just going to let it go, is she?”

“One hundred percent.”

“It’ll be annoying if she picks a fight for no reason.”

“That doesn’t mean you need to worry about it already.”

“Well, true. At the end of the day, she’s still just a freshman.”

Dang Gyu-ri took it easy, figuring they could think about it when the time came.

Then, as though another thought had suddenly struck them, they raised their brows.

“Speaking of freshmen, haven’t we not seen Eunbi much lately?”

“Now that you mention it, yeah.”

Up until the start of the semester, the two of them had practically been attached at the hip, but recently the number of times we ran into her had dropped sharply.

When I thought back on when that had started, something came to mind.

“She joined a club.”

“Oh, that could be it. Alchemy has a ridiculous amount to do.”

“She’ll probably show up again once she’s settled in to a degree.”

“Yeah, yeah. We should wait for her.”

******

Somewhere in the entertainment district.

The Thief Club had acquired the place for several “legal businesses.”

But it was still in the construction phase right now, and they had taken advantage of that gap to use it in secret as a laboratory and workshop.

“......”

Shin Byeongcheol looked down at the table with utterly satisfied eyes.

Lined up across it were finger-sized potion bottles, each filled with a sloshing liquid of dreamlike color.

He picked up one of them and held it up in front of his eyes.

Then, after examining it from various angles for a while, he let out an exclamation of admiration.

“Man... this is seriously the only word for it—genius. How does someone even make something like this?”

“It’s thanks to the support you gave me, senior.”

Dang Eunbi answered in a deliberately humble tone.

After entering Dragonslayer Academy, she had thrown herself into alchemy in earnest and joined the club as well.

But since she was only a first-year, the materials she could use were extremely limited, and while she was feeling frustrated by that, Shin Byeongcheol had made her an offer.

— I’ll let you use as much as you want, as freely as you want. In return, just work with me on one thing.

In other words, they had become a sort of business partnership.

Shin Byeongcheol procured all kinds of alchemical materials and paid the costs himself.

In return, Dang Eunbi used part of those materials for her own experiments while also producing potions that “fit the requested specifications.”

And the result was the potions now sitting in front of them.

At Dang Eunbi’s humility, Shin Byeongcheol waved both hands dismissively.

“No, no. Just because someone hands over materials doesn’t mean this kind of thing comes out easily. If you ask me, even if the Alchemy Club captain or vice captain came over, they couldn’t do it.”

If it had been possible, something like this would have been circulating on the market ages ago, yet nothing even remotely similar had ever been made until now.

Shin Byeongcheol slowly shook the potion bottle in his hand.

“You made it, so you know it too, right? The performance is just insane. I guarantee it—once this gets out, all hell’s going to break loose.”

“Thank you for thinking so highly of it.”

At the repeated praise, Dang Eunbi’s lips curled upward slightly.

But she only had time to look proud for a moment before asking, with a somewhat worried expression,

“But... will the side effects be okay?”

Over winter break, the ‘Special Dang Eunbi Potion No. 1’ and ‘Special Dang Eunbi Potion No. 2’ had caused Seo Ye-in a mountain of trouble, and this time too, it seemed a similar kind of effect was appearing.

If she had to guess at the cause, it was probably that the ranks of her alchemy-related skills and traits were still low.

Or maybe it was because she had thrown ingredients in half by instinct.

Dang Eunbi herself wanted more than anyone to eliminate the side effects.

But rank was not something that rose overnight, and if she changed the formula, the performance fell off a cliff.

In the end, she had given up and left a little of it in.

At that, Shin Byeongcheol answered like it was no big deal.

“It’s fine, it’s fine. You don’t need to worry.”

“Really?”

“I’m telling you, it’s fine. It’s not like anyone’s getting hurt.”

If it had been something truly serious—serious enough to get registered as a prohibited item—he would have stopped her himself.

Because if you got caught “trading,” it would end with disciplinary action or demerits at worst, but “manufacturing” was much heavier in nature and could even get her expelled.

Fortunately, the side effects of the Special Dang Eunbi Potions weren’t even close to the level of prohibited items.

That didn’t mean they could simply be ignored, but compared to the overwhelming performance, they were minor issues.

Nine out of ten customers—no, all ten out of ten—would let it slide as something cute.

Shin Byeongcheol thumped his chest and declared confidently,

“Just trust me and leave it to me! I’ll sell every last one of them~”

“Yes, I’ll trust you.”

Dang Eunbi nodded slowly, but worry still lingered on her face.

Rather than trying to reassure her any further with words, Shin Byeongcheol decided he would prove it through results.

This is guaranteed to succeed. Guaranteed.

The only difference was whether it would be a huge jackpot or an even bigger jackpot.

Either way, he would recover the investment several times over.

And then he planned to pour all of that right back into gathering even more alchemical materials.

From here on, all that’s left is to grow it and grow it again.

The Special Dang Eunbi Potion had only just taken its first step.

She had already pulled off this much with comparatively lacking skills and traits, so once she grew, the results she produced would be incomparably better.

She would keep walking uphill from here on out, and the same was true for him as well.

It felt like someone’s narration was ringing in his ears.

— The success story of ‘CEO Shin Byeongcheol’ was beginning right here! Right now!

CEO Shin Byeongcheol...

That sounded absolutely, perfectly cool.

He nodded to himself and repeated it in his mind over and over.

CEO Shin Byeongcheol. President Shin. Chairman Shin.