What did I do? He was used to being in the centre of drama within the group, so he didn’t pay it much mind. Even now, as he stood there on his flying sword as the centre of focus for well over a thousand people, he didn’t care in the least for outside eyes.

Sean and the others appeared a moment later, Esteban unceremoniously patting down the dead cultivators and fishing out their spatial bags.

Stowing away his flying sword after adjusting his position by a few dozen metres, Nolan landed at Ian’s side without a sound and turned his gaze upon the chamberlains. “So about that billion spirit stones you owe me.”

“M—my apologies,” stuttered Daren, who held out his spatial bag with shaking hands. “I…I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were an esteemed master. Please forgive me.”

Nolan accepted the spatial bag and then snapped his fingers at Connick, who followed suit. “All your shit, let’s go.”

Ian scratched at his head, thinking. “They’re chamberlains, so the merchant lords they serve definitely won’t ignore this, right? I see no benefits in sparing them.”

“I beg you, please forgive me!” Connick was kowtowing to the two of them, his face a portrait of fright. “If you let me live, I swear that I’ll join the king’s faction. I own a lot of—”

The chamberlain’s head snapped back as if he’d just been shot from a distance, the knife that had punctured his head stopping in midair before it could harm any of the guests beyond. At the behest of an annoyed Nyla, it calmly fell to the ground.

“I was going to stop it, you know,” said Lyra, who turned from Nyla to Nolan and said, “I don’t get why you like to talk to people if you’re just going to kill them.”

Daren looked at the distant crowds for support, though when everyone avoided his gaze he let out a desperate cry and tried to flee.

“She’s right, you know.” Ian killed Daren without blinking, a task as simple as cutting off his path of escape with a rapid dash, grasping his neck and squeezing until a loud snapping sound rang out over the now eerily silent grounds.

In front of thousands of their supporters and at Chamberlain Daren’s own home, two prominent members of Merchant Lord Angram’s recently swelled faction were killed in a one-sided manner.

Nolan strengthened his voice with inner essence and addressed the crowd from an elevated standpoint. “This villa now belongs to Welson, the Consul of Tallgate. I hope you’ll all show him his due respect in the future. When nobody moved let alone said anything, he added, “Feel free to keep the party going. There’s no need to let this little…distraction take away from your fun.”

Even though they were allowed to stay, virtually all of the guests made it a point to leave the property as quickly as possible, which created a large mass of moving people that made it seem as if there were a grand parade leading away from the estate. Once all was said and done, only Nolan, his friends and his new acquaintances remained behind. Welson was in a stunned state of shock, responding with bewildered nods and stuttered sentences whenever he was addressed by someone else in the group. Ava, the girl from the auction, had fled the scene along with the girl that Katerina had bid for as well as all of the other participants in that event.

Rather than show a similar state of bewilderment as Welson, Melissa was endlessly swooning over him and his friends. She had nothing but words of the highest praise for his and Nyla’s displays of arrayment mastery in the earlier conflict, as well as Esteban’s easygoing victory in the competition from earlier. She had been a bit at a loss at first, wondering with worry over how to explain the night’s events to her father. For a time she had wondered, what sort of repercussions would her family and relatives face for openly associating with the ones that had murdered two chamberlains from the current most powerful faction in the entire Continental Merchant Association? Her anxieties had been alleviated quite quickly, however, when Welson had suggested that her family switch factions, promising to bequeath them with a larger town to oversee within Merchant Lord Kam’s territories.

Katerina also worked out a deal with Welson to move her base of operations to a city within Kam’s territories as well, and she also managed to convince Nolan to sell her a crate of heavenly dew for 130,000,000 spirit stones, which was apparently the limit of her finances. Even so, she didn’t hesitate to hand over her entire life savings in exchange for the precious liquid, a trade that it seemed she would have made a million times over.

After conversing for a while, Nolan got the sense that Katerina exerted modest influence within the CMA, and yet she was still able to take out such a vast sum of money. While this was only feasible because she had been forced to pull her entire fortune out of the Easterly Kingdoms and thus currently had it on her person, it still spoke to the monumental wealth of the CMA, which boasted tens of millions of members and employees along with hundreds of millions of citizens living within their territories.

With the massive estate all to themselves, Nolan created a large hot tub area where he and his friends sat for the rest of the evening, helping themselves to the massive amounts of food and drink that were still laid out all across the courtyard. The group made a game out of checking the contents of the chamberlains’ spatial bags, which contained an incredible amount of wealth. When all was said and done, Nolan now had over 410,000,000 spirit stones in his spatial bag, along with so much star gold that the true amount of wealth that he now possessed was closer to double that amount.

Drunk and generous, Nolan gave a million spirit stones to each person present, which raised the merriment of the others and made for a more raucous time. It wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that they returned to the inn to retire for the night, the final night that they would be staying there as they had all agreed to occupy Daren’s vacant property for the rest of their time in the city.

Later that morning after he had sobered up and rested for a few hours, Nolan knocked on the door to Delia’s room and then entered after a ten second pause. Oddly enough, all of the furniture was missing save for the bed, with nothing else in the room aside from a crate of heavenly dew within which Delia was currently cultivating. With most of her hair submerged beneath the surface of glimmering gold, only her head was visible, white brows level as she fixed him with a flat stare.

“Do you need something?”

There was a strong presence of anger in her tone, which further confused him. Unlike before, she had returned to the appearance of a stunning young woman.

“Just wanted to talk a bit.” Closing the door behind him, he made his way over to the crate and stopped about two metres away from it. “You seem mad at me for some reason. Why?”

“Can you not guess?”

“I wouldn’t be asking if I could.”

Quiet for a moment, her pretty, pale lips formed a light frown as she averted her gaze to his feet. It seemed she was so annoyed that she couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Events like that are a waste of time. I never liked them when I was younger, and I’ve made it a point to avoid them since then for obvious reasons. I’ve told you about my past, so you should understand why.”

“You didn’t have to come.”

“Oh? Because in case you forgot, I’m still bound by the master-slave contract between us. You ordered me to obey your every command or else hold my breath until I die, or do you not recall?”

“I didn’t order you though.”

“May told me exactly what you said to her. That I was to take on a younger appearance, wear a…wear a dress and then attend that big party.” For the first time since he’d met her, she looked utterly ashamed, as if she had suffered a terrible grievance and could do nothing about it.

Thinking of how Lyra had laughed when asked about why Delia and the other girls had been keeping to a discreet area of the property, he wanted to click his tongue. That girl was quite mischievous, a bit unnecessarily so, and so too was May.

“I never ordered her to do that. I just told her to tell everyone else where I was and to come along if they wanted to.” He gave her a moment to digest his words, her eyes unreadable as she sat there unmoving. “You really didn’t have to come, but I’m glad you did. It really made dealing with things a lot easier, so thanks for that.”