"Uh, what’s going on?" Avery asked in surprise. She had never heard her friend apologize before. Even when she was clearly in the wrong, Avery could always count on her to argue her way out of it.
"Mr. Chase, I don’t have the experience in this field or the authority to promise you anything. I will speak with my superiors and get back to you," Mabel continued, completely ignoring Avery.
After all, Avery had repeatedly told her that her friend was a poor orphan and had asked her to handle his case pro bono through her firm if possible. Yet, it turned out that her friend wasn’t merely well-off. He was loaded, a hunter, and from what Mabel had seen and heard so far, with a better job he would be quite the catch.
"Mr. Chase, Avery has given me your number. I will look into your matter first thing when I get to the office and contact you with the details," Mabel added.
Mabel even mistook Avery’s excessive guilt and strange behavior for an attempt to keep the good stuff for herself. She couldn’t help giving her friend a stern look before getting up to leave.
If not for the misunderstanding earlier, Mabel would have happily stayed a little longer and gotten to know her potential client better. But now, she was far too embarrassed to overstay her welcome.
I nodded at Mabel and chuckled inwardly as I watched her leave, awkwardly clutching her unfinished coffee. I couldn’t help wondering how she would have reacted if I had shown her the balance in my digital wallet.
I had nothing against her. After all, it was her job. No lawyer could risk their career over a friend of a friend. Besides, she had already advised me more than most lawyers from high-tier firms would have been willing to do for free.
"Crispin, you must be loaded if you managed to get Mabel to apologize, even scare her away. How good were your investments? Come on, share some good tips," Avery asked the moment Mabel closed the door behind her. "And don’t mind Mabel, that’s the hazard of her profession."
Her guilt seemed to ease once she saw that Mabel had been of some use to me. Still, this girl’s mood changed faster than the hands of a clock.
"Aren’t you leaving too?" I asked, gathering our empty disposable coffee cups. I crushed them and tossed them into the bin by the kitchen bar.
"Nobody likes a mean grump, Crispin," Avery remarked before adding, "Besides, I’m here to share a great investment tip, so watch your attitude."
"And what would that be?" I asked, rolling my eyes as I sat across from her on a folding chair.
"I’m pretty certain the government plans to turn the A-rank monster gate in my neighborhood into a monster field," Avery revealed confidently. "Those who own property in my neighborhood are going to make a killing."
"How do you know something this confidential?" I asked skeptically. "Besides, you rent, remember? So not only will you make nothing from it, you’ll probably be homeless soon."
Turning a monster gate into a monster field meant deliberately stopping all raids on the gate and allowing its monster population to grow unchecked. As the monsters multiplied, they would gradually spread beyond the gate’s immediate surroundings, while the area itself began producing various resources associated with the gate.
The real danger came when a boss monster eventually spawned. Once that happened, the accumulated monsters could trigger a full-scale monster outbreak.
Because of that, monster fields were usually created around resource-rich, low-rank gates where the monsters were relatively easy to control. High-rank gates were rarely converted into monster fields. The risk was simply too great unless someone had already developed a quick and reliable method of eliminating the specific monsters that spawned from that particular gate.
The higher the rank of a monster gate, the larger its monster-spawning range. That meant the government couldn’t simply fence off the immediate area around the gate. To safely turn an A-rank gate into a monster field, they would need to control a considerable amount of surrounding land, including roads, buildings, and other properties that might fall within the spawning range.
And that was where things got interesting for property owners.
The government would have to purchase the affected land before converting the area into a controlled monster field. Since compulsory acquisition of privately owned land could be politically messy, the government generally offered well above the market price to encourage owners to sell willingly. Depending on the location and how badly the government needed the land, compensation could reach one and a half times, or even three times, the normal market value.
In other words, if Avery was right about the A-rank gate in her neighborhood, the people who owned property there were sitting on a very profitable piece of land.
Unfortunately for Avery, she was a tenant.
"Tsk, tsk. I pooled all my savings and even took out a personal loan to buy an independent villa not far from the A-rank monster gate. I got it for cents on the denars," Avery answered smugly, leaning forward, dropping her voice to a hushed whisper, "As for how I know? I live there, remember?"
"Two years ago, I noticed Chimera Chemicals had set up a facility nearby and was working with members of the Valorant Guild to raid the dungeon regularly. Naturally, I got curious and started looking into it. After months of digging, I found out that Chimera Chemicals and the Valorant Guild were working together on something big, and being an archivist at the city library helped."
"They were developing a chemical compound specifically designed to deal with the monsters spawning from that A-rank gate. Apparently, they needed something that could kill those monsters efficiently while still meeting our nation’s environmental standards, since they planned to use it within the Archipelagos."
"And I think they finally succeeded. I went through the patents Chimera Chemicals and the Valorant Guild had filed together over the past two years. Most of them were either unrelated or looked like deliberate smoke screens. But one caught my attention."
"A chemical compound designed to react with sulfur and produce an extremely corrosive acid, strong enough to eat through mana-blended bricks and cement. For applications, they filed it as construction."
Avery paused, clearly enjoying herself while I raised an eyebrow having an inkling of where this was going. "But guess which monster is made of clay and contains a significant amount of sulfur?"
"Torcano!" I blurted out, finally realizing that Avery might actually be onto something.
"Ding, ding, ding!" Avery grinned smugly. "Now you get to make it up to me."
"Wait, how long have you been sitting on this information?" I asked suspiciously, as she avoided my eyes. "If not for the Kobold incident, what were the chances you would have shared this information with me? And here I thought we were best of friends."
We were never more than colleagues, Avery knew it, yet she innocently remarked, "Aww, if it helps, you’re the only person I’ve shared this intel with. Besides, the fewer people who know about it, the less likely I am to get caught."