Chương 1: My Parents Are Too Powerful to Pay Taxes

Thirty-six night-pearls, each the size of a child's fist, studded the bedroom ceiling, casting the soft glow of a fortune that could buy out two border towns outright. The cradle Lucian lay in had been carved from a thousand-year-old cedar, its rim inlaid with solid gold and etched with ninth-tier defensive wards strong enough to shrug off a long-range demonic artillery barrage. But the only sound reaching his ears wasn't music, and it certainly wasn't a lullaby.

It was the clack of a magic abacus, fast and frantic and going nowhere. Clack. Clack. Clack. Lucian opened his newborn eyes, stared up at the glittering ceiling, and blinked. In his last life, he'd given twenty-eight years to spreadsheets, to nine o'clock strategy meetings that went nowhere, to financial reports thick with jargon nobody read — until his heart gave out face-down on the keyboard.

The moment he understood he'd been reborn into the wealthiest merchant house in the empire, Lucian made himself one promise: this time, he was going to be a leech. He'd eat, sleep, live off passive income, admire the flowers and the moon, and never — not for one single second — work overtime again. It was a solid plan for retiring before he could even walk, if only his parents weren't both catastrophically bad at managing money.

"Five hundred thousand taels of tainted gold." The voice was low, carrying an edge sharp enough to shave skin. It belonged to Regulus Garrick von Vance — the man the world feared and called the Sword Emperor of the Ninefold Heavens, who had once split a sacred mountain in half with a single stroke just to prove a point about swordsmanship.

Right now, the great sword saint was wearing a loose silk robe, a quill in one hand and a jade abacus in the other, his face set with the grim focus of a man walking into a duel to the death.

"Every last coin was minted under the Third Demon King," Regulus muttered, raking a hand through his hair as he ran the numbers.

"Every ingot's got a skull sigil stamped on it and an eternal curse baked in. If we walk this into a bank and try to change it for imperial notes, the Inquisition's hounds and the Royal Tax Bureau will be at our front door inside fifteen minutes."

"Then let me handle them." Another voice, smooth and elegant, cold as a winter night's frost. Valeria Lilith von Vance — the woman who had once wiped out seven legions of holy knights back when she served as the Fourth Knight under the Demon King — sat with her legs crossed in an armchair upholstered in dragon hide. She wore an elegant black evening gown and held a steaming cup of herbal tea.

"I could bend the spatial meridians around the Tax Bureau's headquarters in the capital," Valeria said, taking a calm sip of her tea, her tone as light as if she were discussing tomorrow's weather.

"Compress the whole building — audit files included — down to the size of a grain of sand, then toss it into the Endless Void. Three minutes, done. No witnesses, no paperwork, no administrative headaches." Regulus froze, then looked up at his wife with an expression of pure helplessness.

"Dear, we agreed we were going to live as model citizens, remember?" He rubbed his temples.

"That'd be the fourth tax official assassinated this month. Our trade guild insurance premiums would double. The rival merchant houses are already whispering that the Vances only know how to settle economic disputes with violence."

"But it is the fastest way to balance the books, isn't it?" Valeria tilted her head, blinking her deep red eyes with an air of pure innocence. Lying in his cradle, Lucian listened to this earth-shattering conversation in silence. This was the great tragedy of House Vance. His family wasn't poor. Quite the opposite — counting the demon-race treasure hoards, the spoils looted from dragon nests, and the unregistered ore mines, House Vance held no less than five percent of the entire continent's wealth.

The problem was that over eighty-five percent of it was dirty. So dirty that spending a single coin on a loaf of bread at the market would bring three divisions of holy knights down to purify the entire street on suspicion of heresy. A household with a Sword Emperor and a catastrophe-class Demon Lord under one roof, sitting on enough wealth to buy out several territories outright — and yet dying by inches because they didn't have enough legal cash to pay this quarter's income tax.

"It's a little cold today, isn't it?" Valeria murmured suddenly, her eyes drifting to the magic hearth, its firewood running low. Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit. She reached over and picked up a jeweled mithril sword resting on a nearby weapon rack — a masterwork a dwarven smith had forged specifically for Regulus. Without so much as drawing on her mana, her slender hand gave a single twist. Crack. The three-thousand-gold-piece blade snapped clean in half.

Valeria calmly tossed both halves into the fire. The magic flames flared, swallowing the precious metal with a pleasant crackle. Regulus watched, his eye twitching twice, and said absolutely nothing. He just bowed his head and worked the abacus a little faster, trying to make up for the three thousand gold that had just turned into heating fuel. Valeria rose and walked, unhurried, toward the cradle. She bent down, her beautiful face melting into a smile of pure warmth as she looked at her small son.

She began to sing him a lullaby — an old demon-race folk song, once used to guide the souls of fallen warriors into eternity. The melody was eerie and dark, echoing through the room until the furniture's shadows on the wall began to twist and warp into the shapes of ghosts kneeling in supplication. From the cradle, Lucian glanced toward an ancient bronze urn in the corner of the room. It was an unappraised demon-race burial artifact, its surface covered in ancient script that twisted like tree roots.

The moment his eyes settled on the characters, a strange sound rose somewhere deep in his mind. Static. Static. A faint hum brushed across his mind, like some intricate machine searching for a compatible signal, and it vanished the instant he looked away. Lucian didn't think much of it. What was actually giving him a headache was the situation right in front of him. He studied the flow of natural mana circulating through the room.

His infant body couldn't channel magic yet, but with a fully formed adult soul, his senses were already adapting to their new biology.

"The war's flared up on the northern border again," Regulus said, flipping through the ledgers with a long, heavy sigh.

"Iron ore's up forty percent. The wool trade route through the demihuman territories is completely blocked. That hundred thousand gold of clean money we sunk into the capital's forges is dead weight until winter's over."

"Should I make a trip north?" Valeria offered with a smile, still rocking the cradle in a steady rhythm.

"I'll just show up at the front for ten minutes and tell them to hold their fire long enough for our caravan to pass through. Anyone who says no, I'll turn into fertilizer for the cedar trees."

"Absolutely not!" Regulus waved his hands in alarm.

"If you so much as show your face at that border, all three great empires will sign a truce on the spot just to turn every last soldier against our family! We're trying to blend in, remember?" Two people standing at the very peak of the world's power — one who could cleave mountains, one who could strangle reality itself — stared at each other, utterly defeated by a single thin sheet of a tax notice. Watching the whole family farce unfold, the baby in the cradle couldn't take it anymore.

Lucian closed his eyes, his small chest rising, and let out a long sigh. Fwoooo... It was the sigh of a former finance employee watching two CEOs seriously discuss burning down company headquarters to solve a tax evasion problem. The moment the sigh faded, the entire bedroom fell into dead silence. The magic abacus in Regulus's hands went still. Valeria's lullaby cut off mid-note.

Without meaning to, the Sword Emperor's blade-intent — sharp enough to tear space itself — erupted at the same instant as the former Demon King's Knight's killing intent, rolling out like a sea of blood. The two forces collided in midair, and the pressure that followed was terrifying. The air in the room thickened. Gravity itself seemed to multiply tenfold.

Any newborn on the face of the earth — royal blood or warrior stock, it wouldn't matter — caught in the collision of two beings at this level would have had its heart burst on the spot, or at the very least, would have screamed itself hoarse in terror. But not Lucian. He just rolled over, calm as anything, tugged the silk blanket up to his chin, and shut his eyes, his round little face showing open, undisguised boredom. What was there to cry about? Crying didn't launder money.

Regulus and Valeria froze at their son's unnervingly calm reaction. The killing intent and blade-intent vanished as if they'd never existed. The two of them looked at each other, then both turned to stare at their son, sleeping peacefully in his cradle. The Sword Emperor's eyes went red, brimming with emotion.

"Valeria... did you see that?" Regulus whispered, his voice thick, trembling with wonder.

"He didn't cry. He looked at the ledgers, listened to us talk about the tax debt... and he sighed." Valeria pressed a hand to her mouth, her deep red eyes bright with fierce pride.

"He's only three months and ten days old, and already he understands the hardship of cash flow and the weight of carrying this family's fortune!"

"He carries the bearing of a born merchant-emperor!" Regulus slammed his hand on the table, sending the jade abacus bouncing into the air.

"A child with the composure of solid stone in the face of a financial storm! Mark my words — one day he'll find a way to launder every last one of those five hundred thousand taels without cutting off a single official's head!" In the cradle, the corner of Lucian's mouth twitched. He pulled the blanket over his head and silently prayed these two dangerous people would leave the room soon so he could get some sleep.

Regulus sank back into his armchair, looked at the mess of business documents scattered across the table, and let out a long, bitter breath. He rubbed his hands together — rough hands that had once been soaked in the blood of ten thousand enemies — and spoke, weary to the bone:"If only there were some kind of business that was clean. No blood, no blades. Something society actually respected — where people would line up on their own to hand us real, legitimate money..."

The magic fire in the hearth flared with a thread of silver light, catching on the blank sheets of white vellum sitting quietly on the small desk in the corner — waiting, patiently, for their fate to begin.