Chapter 332 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio  Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Syndicate was a robber. He sometimes acted as a thief, sometimes as a pirate, sometimes as a smuggler, and sometimes as a helper who did something unsuitable for important men who didn’t want to reveal their identities.

He didn’t care what he was doing on earth. As long as he could make money, whatever he was asked to do was acceptable.

In private, he called himself a “Cost-free Gentleman.” The former implied his identity, and the latter flaunted his style of doing things.

Among his peers, he was indeed quite a gentleman. Every time he was doing business, as long as the opposite side was willing to surrender, even if they had still been fighting at the last moment, he would constrain his subordinates to let go of the argument the next moment. At the beginning, his subordinates had been very dissatisfied, but as their reputation had spread gradually, fewer and fewer people were willing to fight with them. More than once, other companies took the initiative to give them the money for passage as soon as they saw their logo.

For those who were willing to give money for passage, he also had a standard. As long as the money was enough to let his buddies go eat and drink together, it wasn’t worth fighting for more money, because he always believed that money could be earned endlessly, but reliable brothers were not so easy to find.

As a result, his “business” had grown bigger and bigger, gradually becoming the largest group in the border area between the Kingdom of the Blue Moon and the Kingdom of Thousands of Springs. Some people had even begun to call him the Mountain King.

To be honest, Syndicate didn’t like this title at all. He’d had the privilege of entering the the Old Fairy Temple in the Ancient Forest, and had received the advice of the undead elder. At that time, the elder had warned him that he shouldn’t be greedy, show off, or make a fortune silently. He had been deeply impressed and had always held this as his motto.

His ideal was to be an unnamed robber and earn enough money to find opportunities to clean his reputation. Then, as a small aristocrat in the mainland, he would steadily spend the rest of his life, leaving enough descendants to continue the family from generation to generation. After many, many years, the descendants of future generations who would be keen to study the history of their ancestors would finally find out his origin at that time from the few words of dusty records, and they would be stunned…

Now, it seemed that this ideal would mostly be ruined, so he was depressed.

Recently, he had received news from an old acquaintance who had cooperated with him in the past, saying that in the future, the robber business, especially the business of the big robbers, would be more difficult to do. A sales channel would become a vital part of the business. This made him a bit puzzled, and he didn’t understand why it had to be.

Most robbers didn’t like to steal physical goods. One reason was that escaping with the goods would be slow, and it was easy to leave too many traces, which made it easy to be caught or found. The second reason was that the goods had to be sold in some way. When they sold them, goods worth a gold coin couldn’t be sold for more than a silver coin, which was a loss of money.

In contrast, it was much more convenient to take money directly. Even if it was a precious gem, it wouldn’t be more reliable than money.

Of course, if he could grab precious magic items, it would be more cost-effective than grabbing money. Magic items were easier to sell, and often the prices would not be deliberately pressed down when they were sold, making them the best hard currency.

Syndicate, naturally, couldn’t be excused from this, since when he had received passage money, the price was calculated according to three times the price of the goods—in other words, if the consumer gave him goods instead of money, they had to give three times the value of the goods, which was equal to the price. If he could have, he would have rather taken money than goods, even though he had a good sales record.

For example, this time.

He had taken a dozen people to an ambush in a pit they had dug on purpose on the hillside, wearing a grass clothes covered with turf that looked like common grasslands. As long as they didn’t use magic, no one could find them.

The location he was ambushing was quite spacious, not dangerously steep at all. No spellcaster would go crazy to use detecting magic in such a place.

For this mission, he had prepared for five days in advance. The manpower and material resources that he had used were worth hundreds of gold coins, at least under his estimation.

But it had been worthwhile. As far as he had known, the Dragon Tail Commercial Firm had just shipped a large quantity of goods to Buie City, but it hadn’t bought many goods from the city. This meant that they were either carrying a large amount of cash or high-value gems or magic items. Any of these were worth paying attention and even taking action personally.