"Kierra, can we let this go?"
"No. You have no idea how dangerous it is. You can do whatever you like but you are not entering the labyrinths, let alone the dungeon."
"I will not go alone. Veyra will be with me."
"Still no."
"Kierra, you are being unreasonable. You know what a mana core means to an adventurer. Do you think she would agree to my treatment if she had no way to pay for it? Do you think she has the kind of money something like this costs?"
"I understand that but the danger is real. You cannot fight properly."
"I am not going in to fight monsters. I enter, I look around, I leave."
"Then why do you need a fake identity?"
Because I do not have any identity in this world at all. This would be my first real one.
"I want to become a merchant. I have the skills for it. I just have not had the time to do anything about it."
She smiled despite herself. "What kind of merchant? What would you sell?"
"I am not sure yet. Luxury goods for royalty, maybe. Or something more accessible."
"You should tell the princess. She could arrange a proper store for you in the capital as a reward for healing her."
"We will see."
It was not a bad proposition. If I could exchange monster cores for coins and use those to buy from the store, a steady flow of resources became possible. The conversion rates I had were S-rank at 2500 coins, A-rank at 1000, B-rank at 500. I was currently holding one A-rank core and two B-rank cores. The princess had taken the S-rank before I could think of an argument for keeping it. She was not willing to leave something that valuable in my hands.
The ledgers from the treasury were something else entirely. They documented every illegal transaction Valthor had run through his network. Slave trading, assassination contracts, trafficking of prohibited items, arrangements with nobles who should have known better. All of it recorded in careful detail. It was not useful now, but it will be later.
Something else was sitting heavier than all of that though. Removing the emotion suppressor had been the right call, but I had not anticipated the weight of what came back with it. I was having a minor crisis about the whole situation and I had not even fully processed being in another world yet. I needed something to hold onto, some direction that felt like mine.
–-_—
It was midnight.
I sat in my room reading, waiting for Maren to arrive. I had only told her to come and to bring two glasses. Nothing else. I wanted to talk before I did anything about the bracelet. Joseph was now under contract and prevented from any form of self-harm. I had quietly added the same clause to a separate contract with Maren, just in case. I did not know if she would ever consider it, but I was not willing to find out the hard way.
A knock came at the door.
"Come in."
Maren entered carrying two glasses in one hand and something to eat in the other, a small shy expression on her face. "Why did you call me?"
"Just to talk. Relax."
I pulled out a bottle of Prosecco and gestured for her to sit. She settled onto the edge of the bed while I poured. The more comfortable she felt, the more she would be willing to say.
I handed her a glass. "Your brother has been captured. He will be punished for what he did. You are free now."
She stared at the glass for a long moment, weighing something. Then she drank it in one swallow.
"We were never royalty to begin with," she said. "My grandfathers were labyrinth researchers. That was what they were known for, mapping formations, tracing origins, trying to understand why labyrinths existed at all. During one expedition into a forbidden labyrinth, they found a book. Dark arts, written in a language most people would not recognize. They studied it, mastered enough of it to clear the labyrinth, and came out the other side with a reputation that had only grown larger. The king of Arkenfall took notice. He granted them a small territory, not as a reward exactly, more as an arrangement. They would continue their research, and the crown would benefit from what they found."
She turned the glass slowly in her hands.
"My father was a different kind of man. The talent my grandfather had, the patience for research, the discipline, none of it passed down to him. After my grandfather died, knowledge became a tool for shortcuts. He was not careful and he was not clever, and he was caught before he had built anything worth protecting. My brother and I were still at the academy when the house was taken apart around us. That is the only reason we were left standing. We were young enough to be considered uninvolved."
"I know your family history."
"That is not the real reason my brother enslaved me." Her expression went flat. Her iris color shifted to violet, just slightly, in a way I was not sure I had actually seen. "He did it to find the original location of the book. The one my grandfather had hidden before he died."
She shifted on the bed and extended her left foot forward, the one with the bracelet. She touched it with one finger, said something quietly, and the bracelet reduced to ash.
I stared at it.
"The book also contains the method to break a labyrinth core," she continued, in a voice that no longer sounded quite like Maren. "And how to locate a new dungeon."
I slowly reached for the taser under the pillow. "Maren, are you trying to kill me?"
"If I harm you, Maren will be sad. She is fond of you. Treat her well."
"Then who exactly are you?"
"I am her, but not her. Two people sharing one body."
Had she built an alter ego to protect herself from everything Joseph had put her through?
"Have you always been with her?"
"I am not a person in the way you mean. She called me, and she gave me space in her body."
"A spirit then. Some kind of entity. You fulfill her wishes, protect her, something like that?"
"No. Now it is my turn." Her eyes were steady and unreadable. "How did you break the bracelet's effect on yourself? Joseph only knows how to create and activate the bracelet. He holds an incomplete copy of the book, the method to make it and use it, nothing more."
I pulled out the potion vials I had commissioned from Joseph's recipe. "He described a method. Applying this in a specific sequence was supposed to release the binding."
Her expression did not change. "No. That sequence activates the curse. The moment you use that on her, she dies instantly."