The next morning was bright and sunny.
An unmarked flatbed wagon, drawn by exceptionally sturdy draft horses, pulled up before the closed gates of the Luke Estate on Rhaenys’ Hill.
Two plainly dressed men with razor-sharp eyes leapt down from the wagon, and one of them knocked on the door ring.
They were Petyr Baelish’s men.
They had brought an unassuming yet extraordinarily heavy wooden chest.
Accompanied by Arthur, Luke received them in the front hall.
Without unnecessary chatter, the visitors inspected the goods Luke had prepared in custom wooden crates.
Once satisfied, one of them gestured toward the chest they had brought.
“My lord, here is the payment from Lord Baelish: twenty thousand Gold Dragons.
Please inspect it.”
The chest was unlatched and opened, revealing glittering Gold Dragons piled to the brim.
The dazzling golden gleam was nearly blinding, radiating the heavy, imposing presence unique to precious metals.
Twenty thousand Gold Dragons!
At roughly eight grams each, that was a full one hundred sixty kilograms!
A single person had no hope of moving it alone.
“Bronn!” Luke called out behind him.
Bronn, who was busy supervising the training of the guards and recruits, hurried over at the call.
Catching sight of the overflowing chest of gold coins, he sucked in a sharp breath, his eyes bulging wide.
“Seven hells…
Did we rob a Lannister gold mine?”
“Cut the chatter and haul it to the storehouse,” Luke instructed.
Bronn rubbed his hands together with a dry chuckle and called over two of the burliest guards.
Only by combining the strength of all three men could they hoist the heavy coin chest, huffing and puffing as they hauled it toward the reinforced storehouse that had been improvised in the backyard.
Watching their retreating backs, Bronn brushed the dust from his hands, leaned in close to Luke, and lowered his voice with his usual world-weary banter:
“I bet a hundred Gold Dragons that old fox Petyr Baelish turns around and sells it to the crown or some other gullible lords for at least double the price!”
Hearing this, Luke let a meaningful curve rise at the corner of his lips.
He gave a slight shake of his head, his tone calm yet certain.
“Bronn, your vision is too small.
I’d bet a million Gold Dragons that the price he charges King Robert will be at least…
ten times what he paid me.”
The grin on Bronn’s face froze, giving way to incredulous shock.
He parted his lips as if to speak, but in the end merely clicked his tongue and muttered, “Fuck me…
Is everyone trying to out-swindle the other?”
Petyr’s men took their leave, thoroughly satisfied with their goods.
However, this was merely the opening salvo of the storm.
Come afternoon, the gates of the estate barely stayed shut for a moment.
Wave after wave of merchants—bearing diverse attire, varied accents, and universally sharp, eager eyes—arrived with letters of introduction or simply announced their names at the door.
Fur merchants from The North, ore traders from the Westerlands, spice mongers from The Reach, fruit and wine vintners from Dorne, grain merchants from the Vale, cloth merchants from the Riverlands, and even shipmasters and trade representatives from Free Cities like Braavos, Pentos, and Myr…
Like sharks scenting blood in the water, they rushed in from every corner of King’s Landing, some heading straight to the estate the moment their merchant galleys docked.
They all shared a single goal:
To establish a connection and trade with the mysterious “Mr.
Jackeneen,” the man who could supply “Mithril Salt,” “Velvet Snow,” and all manner of wondrous perfumes and wares.
Luke turned no one away.
With Arthur’s assistance, he met each merchant in the reception room temporarily arranged in the front hall.
His demeanor was placid, yet his terms were uncompromising:
He accepted only gold or high-grade gemstones—uncut rough stones or simple facets were both fine!
He refused all forms of credit and bartering.
As for the prices?
Fixed rates across the board, no haggling permitted.
One pound of fine white sugar or refined table salt: thirty Gold Dragons.
One one-hundred-milliliter bottle of perfume in an exquisite glass flacon: fifty Gold Dragons.
Other goods, such as Florida Water and Essential Balm, were also clearly priced.
These prices seemed exorbitant, but compared to the sky-high rates on the black market—and taking into account the unrivaled quality and extreme scarcity of the goods—most merchants gritted their teeth and accepted after brief hesitation.
After all, they were the very ones driving up the black market prices!
What they sought was the colossal profit upon resale, particularly the immense markup they could command in their homelands or specific regional markets.
For three consecutive days, wagons and horses crowded before the estate gates without pause.
On average, six or seven groups of merchants arrived each day, with transaction values ranging from two to three thousand to nearly ten thousand Gold Dragons per group. This story is hosted at novelping dot com.
Over three days, more than twenty batches of merchants completed their deals, leaving behind stacked chests of coin and pouch after pouch of assorted gemstones.
A rough tally placed the gold income at well over one hundred thousand Gold Dragons!
Combined with Petyr’s twenty thousand, the total number of Gold Dragons in Luke’s hands had reached a staggering one hundred thirty thousand!
That was over a metric ton in weight!
And amidst these three days of intense trading, just as another group of merchants from The Reach departed with reverence and satisfaction, a system notification quietly surfaced:
[Free Attribute Points +2]
Luke’s heart stirred.
Just as he thought!
Acquiring attribute points was not only tied to interacting with key figures; it was also linked to his own actions and influence!
Gaining renown could also grant attribute points!
This gave him a clearer understanding of the system’s mechanics.
Without hesitation, he allocated the newly gained two attribute points straight into [Constitution].
The number on his status shifted from 9 to 11.
A warm current, deeper and richer than ever before, surged throughout his entire body.
This time, the transformation was far more restrained.
Yet Luke could distinctly feel that his vitality, regenerative capacity, and latent resistance to external harm—including illness, fatigue, and likely toxins—had reached an entirely new plane.
It felt as though his body were wrapped in a faint, invisible, yet resilient energy field, brimming with formidable vigor.
He even had the sensation that if he were accidentally cut by an ordinary blade, his healing speed would far surpass that of ordinary men.
Constitution at 11!
He had broken past the threshold of 10!
Although there was no explicit prompt indicating he was entirely immune to all poisons, he believed his resistance to common toxins had drastically improved, which put his mind considerably at ease.
Looking upon the mountain of gold coins and the pouches filled with assorted gemstones resting in the corners of the storehouse, Luke set aside only ten thousand Gold Dragons for the estate’s daily operations, the guards’ wages, and potential future expansions.
The remaining one hundred twenty thousand Gold Dragons were swept entirely into his dimensional storage.
His storage space had expanded once more, its dimensions increasing to ten meters along each side!
That meant a capacity of one thousand cubic meters!
Watching Luke make chests of heavy gold coins vanish into thin air like a stage magician, and seeing the storehouse shelves replenished with fresh goods at an impossible speed, Bronn had grown somewhat numb to the shock over the past few days.
Yet the curiosity and scrutiny in his eyes only deepened.
“Seven hells, Luke, where in the world are you getting all this stuff?”
Unable to hold back any longer, Bronn leaned in and asked in a low whisper after watching Luke finish restocking another shelf, “I’ve been keeping watch here every single day, and I haven’t seen a single cartload of goods come through the gate!
Don’t tell me…
you’re pulling them out of thin air?
Or do you actually know bloody magic?”
Luke turned his head, looked at Bronn’s face that practically screamed his thirst for answers, and gave an enigmatic, profoundly mysterious smile before uttering two quiet words:
“You guess.”
Bronn choked on his words and rolled his eyes, but the deep-seated impression that his employer was anything but ordinary was now firmly etched into his mind.
As the frenzied trading went on, the balance in Luke’s Blue Star bank account plummeted rapidly.
He made massive purchases of bamboo jars, custom labels, wholesale sugar and salt, perfumes, and Florida Water, and eventually added new products to the lineup:
Scented soap priced at 10 Gold Dragons,
Ten sheets of A4 paper for 1 Gold Dragon,
Pencils for 1 Gold Dragon,
Ballpoint pens for 10 Gold Dragons,
Fountain pens for 50 Gold Dragons,
Ceramic mugs for 10 Gold Dragons,
Glass goblets for 10 Gold Dragons,
And even cheap costume jewelry sourced from Yiwu priced at 100 Gold Dragons…
These items, which cost negligible amounts on the Blue Star, flowed endlessly from his dimensional storage into Westeros, returning a mountain of gold in exchange.
In a short span, his Blue Star account had spent over fifty thousand yuan, dropping his balance below one hundred thousand.
Yet looking at the more than five hundred kilograms of gold sitting in his storage space, alongside natural gemstones of incalculable value, Luke nearly laughed himself mad with joy.
Turning an investment of a few tens of thousands of RMB into such a monstrous return was practically highway robbery!
Bronn, meanwhile, had his worldview shattered anew every single day.
He held a crystal-clear glass goblet filled with cloudy ale, took a cautious sip, and set it down with utmost care, terrified of shattering this “ten-Gold-Dragon treasure.”
He gave Luke a bizarre look and probed, “Luke, tell me the truth…
You wouldn’t happen to be some kind of magic-wielding elf, would you?
Or a descendant of those mystical races like the Children of the Forest?
How else do you explain all these things?”
Luke was fiddling with a pigeon-egg-sized raw aquamarine gem he had traded for a bottle of “Dragon’s Blood” perfume.
Without looking up, he replied in the same tone he had used several times before—a tone no one ever took seriously:
Nearby, Anne was meticulously wiping down a rhinestone-encrusted fountain pen case “worth fifty Gold Dragons.” Hearing this, she lifted her head, her large azure eyes shining with little stars of pure adoration as she looked at Luke as if gazing upon a living legend.
This master of hers was mysterious, wealthy, and generous, treating her and her sister extraordinarily well…
He possessed countless miraculous treasures and held the noble status of a “Celestial Dragon”!
Though she had no idea what a Celestial Dragon was, it sounded immensely powerful!
That afternoon, Luke felt the commercial footprint around the estate could be optimized.
He intended to acquire a nearby tavern that boasted a decent location but lackluster business, using it as a potential future outpost or intelligence gathering spot.
He took Bronn and two guards along to negotiate the purchase.
Everything went smoothly; the tavern’s owner had been fretting over the dismal trade anyway.
Luke secured the land deed and transfer papers with ease by offering twenty percent above market price—a total of three thousand Gold Dragons.
With the deal finalized, the sun was already dipping toward dusk as they stepped out of the rather quiet tavern.
Just as they stepped onto the street, a commotion across the way at a brightly lit brothel with a prominent signboard caught their attention.
Two knights clad in splendid armor and draped in snow-white cloaks stood vigil at the brothel’s entrance, their sharp gazes sweeping over the street.
The sigils upon their plate and those unmistakable white cloaks proclaimed their exalted status: the Kingsguard!
“White cloaks?” Luke raised an eyebrow.
“Barristan Selmy,” Bronn murmured beside him, his voice tinged with the amusement of a spectator watching a show.
“Lord Commander of the Kingsguard, Barristan the Bold.
If he’s standing guard out here…
the man inside is pretty obvious.”
Sure enough, a racket soon broke out at the brothel entrance.
A crowd escorted a massive, hulking figure—sporting a prominent beer belly, dressed in lavish finery, and crowned with a gem-encrusted gold circlet—as he stumbled out.
The fat man’s face was flushed red, burping with drunken breath.
One of his arms was slung around a disheveled, busty, giggling whore, and he boomed something loudly into the evening air.
It was none other than the master of the Iron Throne, King of the Seven Kingdoms, Robert Baratheon, the First of His Name.
Luke watched the legendary king from afar, taking in the rough, indulgent figure that matched the descriptions from television and books to the letter, clicking his tongue in his thoughts.
So this was the man who ruled Westeros?
A contradictory soul drowning in wine and lust, weighed down by debt and cuckoldry, yet still capable of unleashing terrifying martial might on the battlefield.
A thought suddenly struck Luke, and he turned to Bronn with a touch of curiosity, asking softly, “Bronn, earlier you said…
the king goes back to catch Cersei off guard to see if she’s carrying on an affair?
How did you know Cersei was having an affair?”
Bronn had been thoroughly enjoying the king’s shameful display when Luke’s question caught him off guard.
He turned his head, a look of genuine bewilderment washing over his face as his eyes went blank.
“Eh?
I knew?
When did I say I knew?”
“I was just spouting off!
The king leaves a brothel in broad daylight—if he’s not heading home to see his queen, where else would he go?
I was just guessing blindly!”
Looking at Luke’s pensive expression, which seemed to suggest he had grasped some critical secret, Bronn grew even more confused.
“Wait…
Luke, why are you giving me that ‘I knew you knew’ look?”
“Don’t tell me…
Queen Cersei really is cheating?
With who?
Holy shit, that’s huge news!”
Luke merely smiled without explaining further.
He tore his gaze away, no longer watching the royal retinue as it moved into the distance, and patted Bronn on the shoulder, his tone returning to normal.
“Let’s go.
We’ve bought the tavern; now we need to figure out how to run it.
And mind your tongue—it’s best not to pry into royal gossip.”
Bronn scratched his head, muttering, “You’re the one who brought it up first,” but he obediently followed in Luke’s footsteps.
Still, his eyes darted between the direction the king had left and Luke, the questions in his mind multiplying like wild weeds.
This employer of his was not only wealthy and mysterious, but seemed…
Extraordinarily attuned to the secrets of the Red Keep?
The night deepened, and the lanterns of King’s Landing flickered to life one by one, cloaking countless desires, transactions, and secrets in shadow.
And Luke, having just acquired a tavern while holding vast wealth and hidden truths, was weaving his own web, step by step, across this city of power and intrigue.