Chương 6: The Sword Emperor's Vision for Money Laundering

Early that morning, while mist still clung to the cedar trees in the yard and Lucian was busy with breakfast downstairs, Sword Emperor Regulus slipped quietly into his son's room. The continent's most feared Sword Emperor, a man who had once single-handedly held off three demihuman legions at the border, was now down on both knees on the stone floor, rear in the air, head shoved deep under a six-year-old's bed.

The cause of all this was Boris's suspiciously loaded report from the night before: "The young master's been secretly hiding something very important at the bottom of his ledger." With the instincts of a father who'd had his own wild teenage years, Regulus's suspicions had flared instantly. He was terrified his son had picked up bad habits — sneaking mercenaries' magic-laced cigarettes, or worse, some high-proof bootleg liquor the dwarves brewed.

Regulus's rough hand groped through the dark, shoved aside a few broken wooden swords, and closed around something heavy buried deep in the old toy chest.

"Gotcha, kid..." Regulus smirked to himself, triumphant, and dragged the thing out into the light. But it wasn't liquor. It wasn't cigarettes either. Resting in his hands was a thick, neatly bound stack of vellum, tied with a leather cord. Handwritten lines glimmered on the surface in deep-sea beast ink, catching the dawn light — elegant, aristocratic script in High Elvish, the kind Regulus had only ever seen carved into thousand-year-old holy relics.

"The ancient script?" Regulus frowned, curiosity pulling him in.

"Is the boy copying scripture as punishment?" He untied the cord and flipped open the first page, meaning to skim a few lines just to make sure his son hadn't been brainwashed by some heretical cult. But the moment he finished the opening passage, the Sword Emperor's pupils contracted. Wind howled across the peak of Snow Mountain. The Knight in Black stood with his back to a ten-thousand-foot drop... The rhythm hit hard and fast. A mood of bleak, tragic weight crashed straight into the reader's mind.

In this world, traditional literature always opened with fifty pages listing three generations of a protagonist's family tree, their titles, and their ancestors' accomplishments. This book didn't. It threw the reader straight into a life-or-death battle, where a nameless knight — cast out by the whole world, slandered by hypocritical nobles — carried the burden of the world's salvation alone, in silence. Regulus sank down onto the fur rug. One page. Five pages. Ten. Time slipped by without him noticing.

Dawn's light gave way to the blazing sun of noon, then faded into the deep red of dusk. The Sword Emperor who had once stood unblinking against a hundred-thousand-strong horde of magical beasts now sat frozen in his son's room, eyes red, nose running, wiping his tears on the sleeve of his expensive velvet coat as he read. Thwack! Regulus slammed a hand down on his own thigh, hard enough to hurt, his chest heaving with overwhelming emotion.

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"A saint! This — this is the true heart of the ultimate master of the sword! Humiliated by the whole world and refusing to draw his blade to defend himself... wearing darkness as armor, keeping solitude as his only companion! Every worthless noble in this city who dares open their mouth about a knight's honor should get down on their knees and read this book!"

When he flipped to the final page and saw the plain, empty circle ⭕ standing in for an author's name, Regulus set the manuscript down, stunned, and took a deep breath. His merchant's instincts, sharpened by a lifetime running a great house, snapped every piece together at once: Six-year-old Lucian... always slipping off to the library... quietly keeping records and hiding documents... I understand now! Regulus smacked a palm to his forehead, a revelation blazing to life in his mind.

There's no way the boy wrote this towering work of philosophy himself! He must have run into some down-on-his-luck elvish scholar wandering the old quarter during one of his little outings! My son's been secretly funding this wise man with his own allowance, and bringing the manuscript home to protect it! A six-year-old who not only recognized true art, but quietly patronized talent without ever seeking credit for it!

"Genius. My son is a patron of the arts with the eyes of a prophet!" Regulus shot to his feet, tucked the manuscript under his arm, and blew out of the room like a gale. He tore through three hallways and slammed straight into the office of Hermann, House Vance's Chief Financial Officer and resident expert at making numbers disappear. Bang! The heavy oak door nearly split in two. Hermann, who'd been hunched over a pile of mineral-smuggling paperwork tearing his hair out, jumped so hard he dropped his quill.

"My lord! What are you doing? I'm in the middle of a migraine trying to legitimize fifty thousand gold from last month's dragon-nest raid! The Tax Bureau's been crawling all over the forges — we can't fake iron ore invoices anymore!"

"Forget those worthless invoices!" Regulus slammed the manuscript down on the desk, sending Hermann's ledgers flying everywhere.

"We're opening a publishing house! This week!" Hermann stared, dumbfounded, at the stack of vellum in front of him.

"A publishing house? My lord, have you caught a mana fever? Books earn you loose change from a handful of poor scholars. How does that launder fifty thousand gold?"

"What would you know!" Regulus glared, grabbing the finance director by the collar and yanking him closer.

"What are the Empire's censorship rules for publications?" Hermann blinked, scrambling to recall the law.

"The royal nobility only censors religious scripture and knight-house genealogies. Popular fiction for commoners... they consider it beneath contempt. Pay a five percent revenue tax and you get a license, no content review required."

"That's it!" Regulus roared with laughter, the sound rattling the whole room.

"We print ten thousand copies of this book! Price it at ten silver a copy! Then we take the fifty thousand gold of dirty money sitting in the vault and... buy back our own book, through a dozen small trading houses scattered across the continent!" Hermann's tired, sunken eyes went wide. The finance director stared at Regulus as if a god of wealth had just descended from the heavens.

"Buying our own book back through independent retailers... turning dirty money into documented retail revenue and royalty income..." Hermann muttered, his hands trembling with excitement.

"Once the sales are booked and taxed, the money comes back with a clean commercial paper trail!"

"That's not even the best part," Regulus said, stroking the manuscript's cover with something close to reverence.

"I have a feeling we won't even need to buy back our own stock. This book on its own... it's going to be a monster that swallows this whole continent's starved entertainment market whole." Regulus picked up a quill and carefully inked the official title he'd just come up with onto the cover page: Elegy of the Nameless Knight — Volume One: Wanderer.

"Hermann, fire up the underground magic printing press," Regulus commanded, his voice taking on the cold precision of a general launching a campaign.

"Run it at full capacity. I want ten thousand copies in every major and minor bookshop across all thirty trade cities before the end of this month!" That night, deep in the reinforced basement beneath House Vance's estate, the enormous ancient magic printing press groaned back to life after years buried under dust. Magical gears ground against each other with a screeching rhythm, ink tubes drawn from beast-hide reservoirs spraying fresh ink across tens of thousands of pristine vellum pages.

The first printed copies rolled out in a flood, still reeking of fresh ink, carrying Lucian's melodramatic, cheap-thrills swordplay tale — a story about to land a devastating blow against a continent that had been culturally asleep for ten thousand years.