That may be so, but idle talk is meaningless; everything must ultimately come down to a detailed plan.
After all, what he would face in the future was more than a decade of life on the continent of Essos across the Narrow Sea.
That certainly would not be a pleasant trip, but a true test of survival.
Everything had to be prepared beforehand in order to handle it with ease.
First, and most fundamentally, was money.
This was of the utmost importance.
He could never be like Viserys in the original plot, wandering among the Free Cities with Daenerys and living at the mercy of others like a beggar; that kind of exposed-to-the-wind-and-rain, precarious-day-to-day life was something he did not want to experience even in the slightest.
Yet making money happened to be the trickiest problem—how could a little brat residing in the Red Keep, lacking any real power, accumulate a fortune under the watchful eyes of everyone sufficient to support the next dozen years or even longer?
After all, he was not like those omnipotent transmigrator seniors who were proficient in making soap, glass, or gunpowder, or modern techniques of making something out of nothing to conjure wealth out of thin air; he was merely an ordinary NPC who knew nothing.
It seemed this matter could only be considered in the long run and plotted slowly.
The most direct and tempting option was still to find a way to empty the royal treasury of House Targaryen when leaving King’s Landing.
As the royal family that had ruled Westeros for nearly three hundred years, they surely possessed some treasures accumulated by their ancestors.
One must know that the one currently sitting on the Iron Throne was not yet the extravagant and unrestrained Robert Baratheon.
A single tournament held by him, with forty thousand gold dragons awarded to the jousting champion, was enough to drag down a noble house.
Moreover, it was precisely because of his future profligacy that he left behind a mountain of debts for the Iron Throne.
However, his current cheap father, “The Mad King” Aerys, though rather mad, seemed to have ordinary expenses aside from the rather costly hobby of producing “wildfire”.
Therefore, tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of gold dragons should exist in the treasury.
If most of this money could be taken away, along with a few precious dragon bones to be sold on the continent of Essos at that time, then even if he brought a few more people to Essos, the gold dragons should be enough to support them until the day the dragons hatched.
Speaking of debts, he vaguely remembered that the Baratheon dynasty later owed a huge sum to the Iron Bank, but this was likely because the Iron Bank had backed Robert from behind the scenes during the War of the Usurper.
Then, in the future when Viserys prepared to counterattack Westeros, perhaps he could also consider paying a “visit” to the Iron Bank to reclaim their “investment” in funding the traitors with interest.
Money was the foundation of standing firm, but talent was the key to success or failure.
For the remainder of this time, he had to make good use of his identity as Prince Viserys to befriend and win over a few formidable and relatively reliable members of the Kingsguard.
After all, he was also a true Targaryen prince, and his bloodline was his greatest appeal; after all, when Robert sat on the Iron Throne in the future, it was also because he possessed a quarter of Targaryen blood.
His primary target was “Sword of the Morning” Arthur Dayne.
Having this universally acknowledged strongest swordsman in the world follow Viserys was far better than having him go to the Tower of Joy in the future to protect Lyanna Stark, only to be ambushed by Howland Reed and die an obscure death at the hands of Eddard Stark.
Looking back, the matter of protecting Lyanna itself seemed entirely superfluous.
Eddard Stark, that Warden of the North renowned for his honor, how could he possibly kill his own sister?
Even less likely that after her dying request to protect the child, he would instead turn against Jon Snow.
Of course, he did not want to protect that potential core of “A Song of Ice and Fire”—Jon Snow.
On the contrary, in the future he must watch him draw his last breath with his own eyes, and then completely cremate his corpse with the most blazing Dragonfire, reducing it to ashes.
Viserys wanted to see whether, by that time, he could still resurrect from a pile of ashes and stage those sickening heroic dramas all over again.
“The Bold” Barristan—he did not particularly want to take this man away; let him follow the original work.
He just needed to learn swordsmanship from him.
Because Barristan seemed to like Ashara Dayne’s sister, Ashara Dayne, but this person was pre-ordered by himself; after all, those other female leads were quite a bit younger than him, so he still couldn’t do beastly things too early.
And Ashara was a good choice; she could also have her tragic ending changed.
Viserys guessed that in the original plot, her child should have been Brandon’s.
It must have been after the Tourney at Harrenhal that Brandon Stark got together with her, because there were accounts that back then Brandon and Catelyn’s relationship soured because of Ashara.
Coupled with the fact that Brandon was a notorious rake at the time.
He must change this ending; a dead Brandon was a good Brandon.
As for the others, such as Lord Commander Gerold Hightower, he would likely closely protect “The Mad King”.
Lewyn Martell would probably protect his niece Elia Martell.
As for “The White Bull” Gerold Hightower and Oswell Whent, he would decide depending on the circumstances after first testing their loyalty; after all, by then he would frequently face assassinations and the temptations of the Baratheon dynasty.
Another person who could be won over was Jonothor Darry, who in the original work took Viserys and the newborn Daenerys to flee to Essos.
As for Jaime Lannister, he was not yet a member of the Kingsguard; he joined while “The White Bull” Gerold Hightower was Lord Commander.
He was designated by The Mad King specifically to disgust Tywin Lannister.
Apart from winning over the strong, one’s own strength was equally important.
With two years left before the outbreak of the war, this precious growth time must never be wasted.
He must begin diligently learning swordsmanship from now on.
The Valyrian steel sword passed down in House Targaryen, Dark Sister, was currently in the hands of Bloodraven Brynden Rivers, and he must personally go and retrieve it in the future.
As for the other famous sword, Blackfyre, although everyone thought it had long been lost, the memory fragments of Viserys’s original self told him that it was hidden right in the King’s bedchamber.
It must be taken away when the time came.
As for why Rhaegar did not wear this divine weapon at the Battle of The Trident, the reason was probably only one: Aerys II, whose paranoia had grown beyond all measure.
He trusted no one, including his heir Rhaegar.
He preferred to hide this sword deep away while commanding the Alchemists to produce more wildfire, secretly burying it beneath every street of King’s Landing, preparing to drag the entire city’s populace down to their graves with him in the event of defeat.
This was also one of the reasons why Viserys did not want to save these members of House Targaryen in the slightest—the madness genes in their bones were far too unstable.
In the original plot, had it not been for “Kingslayer” Jaime Lannister, all of King’s Landing along with its hundreds of thousands of residents would have long been reduced to scorched earth in the flames of green wildfire.
To return to Rhaegar Targaryen, this cheap older brother of mine was likewise a poor wretch plagued by prophetic nightmares.
He stubbornly believed that “the dragon has three heads” and persistently thought this prophecy pointed to the necessity of him having three children.
After Elia Martell gave birth to Aegon and was physically damaged so she could no longer bear children, he actually snatched away Lyanna Stark—who was already Robert Baratheon’s fiancée—right after winning the crown of the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Tourney at Harrenhal.
He completely disregarded what kind of political tsunami this action would trigger, solely to give birth to a prophesied child.
However, fairly speaking, Lyanna Stark was probably not entirely coerced.
Rhaegar possessed the purest Targaryen bloodline, with silver hair and purple eyes, handsome and elegant, carrying a natural melancholic royal temperament.
As for Lyanna, as the “Flower of the North”, she had the “Blood of the Wolf” flowing in her veins, naturally loving freedom and being unruly.
Conversely, Robert Baratheon, though tall, mighty, and exceptionally valiant, had a rugged appearance, and more fatally, he frequented brothels in his youth and already had an illegitimate daughter during his time as a ward in the Vale.
For a woman as proud and longing for romance as Lyanna to look down upon someone like Robert and instead become enamored with Rhaegar was quite reasonable.
It was only a pity that this brief romance ignited the fuse for the war of the Seven Kingdoms.
However, “Littlefinger” Petyr was not wrong about the phrase “chaos is a ladder”; if all these Targaryens died, then Viserys would instead become the first-in-line heir.
Therefore, his plan was very clear: when the War of the Usurper broke out fully and King’s Landing fell into chaos, that would be the best opportunity to return to Dragonstone and seize the opportunity to take away the Blackfyre sword.
Besides money and swords, there was another thing crucial to his future hegemony—dragon eggs.
With two years remaining until the outbreak of the war, Viserys had to use this time to search for possible dragon eggs across the continent of Westeros as much as possible.
Although in the future that Pentos magistrate Illyrio would present Daenerys with three dragon eggs as a wedding gift after she married Khal Drogo.
Rumor had it that those were three lost ones laid back then by the Targaryen family’s “Dreamfyre”, but he deeply doubted it.
Because the dragon eggs given by Illyrio had completely petrified, which matched more closely with the ancient artifact characteristics of “coming from the Shadow Lands of Asshai” as he himself claimed.
Thus, those three truly lost dragon eggs of “Dreamfyre” very likely had not left King’s Landing.
A strong intuition told him that they might be hidden beneath the ruins of the Dragonpit once destroyed by the mob.
He must find an opportunity to go there and investigate personally.
In addition, there was another place where the possibility of dragon eggs existing was even more worthy of exploration than the Dragonpit—Summerhall.
That was the ultimate intersection of the glory and tragedy of House Targaryen.
“The King Who Should Not Have Been King”, Aegon V, in order to hatch dragons to consolidate his tottering royal power and to express piety to the Seven, collected a full seven dragon eggs and held a ceremony at Summerhall on that fateful day.
As a result, the wildfire got out of control, and earth-shaking flames devoured everything, claiming the lives of the king himself and countless noble members, and completely incinerating House Targaryen’s hope of resurrecting dragons.
But according to speculations pieced together from past-life forum analyses and fragment information from the original work, beneath the ruins of Summerhall, unburned dragon eggs were highly likely still buried!
True Dragons fear no fire; this was an iron law.
As the origin of True Dragons, how could dragon eggs be easily destroyed by fire (even wildfire)?
In Viserys’s memory, within official Targaryen records, the whereabouts of those dragon eggs were never explicitly stated either; they seemed to have vanished into thin air.
This in itself was extremely suspicious.
Seven dragon eggs!
If they could all be found, just thinking about it was exciting enough.
It would be enough for Viserys to seize an absolute preemptive advantage in future contentions for supremacy.
Thoughts surged like a tide, until Viserys sorted out the threads of the future one by one.
A clear and grand blueprint was gradually taking shape in his mind.
He could no longer engage in idle fantasies; he had to start taking action immediately.
Viserys took a deep breath, suppressing the agitation in his heart, and in a slightly spoiled tone befitting his age and identity at the moment, loudly summoned the maids waiting outside to instruct them to attend to his washing and dressing.
A new day, and the day he took his first step to change his destiny, had begun.