Chapter 38 - The One Reward

At Limon's anguished shout, Li Qingyu answered with what looked almost like a bashful smile.

"I wouldn't go so far as to call it fraud. It was just a rather sophisticated form of creative economics."

"What part of that colossal shell game is creative economics?!"

Limon ground his teeth. Her answer was that absurd.

If everyone believed stones were worth more than gold, you could buy gold with stones picked up from the roadside. In the same way, the Seven Dragons Society had inflated the value of dungeon loot hundreds or thousands of times over, creating a limited inflation that cleared its debts.

In short?

"You deliberately created a bubble!"

Just as a single tulip bulb had once cost tens of thousands of dollars during tulip mania, and shares in anything internet-related had soared tens or hundreds of times during the dot-com bubble, the Seven Dragons Society had artificially driven up the value of dungeon loot.

Call it the dungeon bubble.

'Shit. No wonder a single item cost tens of billions...'

The players might seem to be the biggest beneficiaries. They were the ones extracting and selling dungeon loot, after all. But look at it objectively, and even high-level players were only primary producers. Miners, in other words.

And because players were always chasing the next level, however much they earned, they spent most of it on more expensive items. Some even went deep into debt.

Whether miners dug up gold or diamonds, it was the mine owners who got rich. Likewise, the real beneficiaries of the dungeon bubble in this Iron Age were the Association and the Seven Dragon Group. Simply being able to control the bubble gave them countless ways to make a fortune.

In that sense, the common claim that the Seven Dragon Group possessed all the wealth in the world was surprisingly close to the truth.

Not that any of it was legal. Accounting fraud, stock manipulation, hoarding, monopolistic practices... It would have been harder to find a crime they hadn't committed.

Yet even after confessing to this unprecedented fraud, Li Qingyu showed no sign of shame. She merely offered an unruffled excuse.

"In any case, it kept the world economy from collapsing."

"Wasn't it about to collapse because of all the stupid shit you pulled trying to keep world peace?"

"Yes. But if we hadn't poured every bit of profit we made back into that same stupid endeavor, the world wouldn't be as peaceful as it is now."

"..."

Li Qingyu said it with a bright smile, and Limon couldn't bring himself to deny it.

Without the Seven Dragons Society working behind the scenes, wars would undoubtedly have broken out several times over the past few decades. A clash between the established powers and the players might even have escalated into a world-spanning war.

Honestly, preventing all that with money was an extraordinary feat. It was the way they'd made that money that was ridiculous.

Creating a bubble deliberately was difficult enough. Controlling one for decades, earning a steady profit without seriously disrupting society at large, was something else entirely.

Wealth amassed over ages. The organizational strength of a group that had once ruled the world. Expertise gained as a criminal organization. Only the Seven Dragons Society, with all three, could have pulled it off.

"Even then, it wasn't enough. We had to get through several crises," Li Qingyu admitted frankly. Maintaining the world economy while preserving peace was possible even for the Seven Dragons Society, but barely manageable.

Every time they prevented a major incident, they had to scramble to find the money for it. Sometimes they lost enormous sums when they failed to control the bubble. Sometimes missed intelligence nearly led to war. Unexpectedly powerful enemies had also forced them to make sacrifices.

The hardships had been beyond counting.

"Most of the clans began to wonder how much longer we had to keep doing something so absurd."

"Of course they did..." Limon muttered with a groan.

It might have been different if they had protected world peace openly. But with the dungeon bubble, bribes, assassinations, and all the other illegal methods the Society used, they couldn't boast of their achievements. They bore all the losses and got nothing for it.

Even an organization that dreamed of a utopia wouldn't welcome that state of affairs. Least of all its current leadership: now that the Society had come into the open and become a corporation, they were more inclined than ever to weigh profit and loss alongside religious conviction.

"But our Black Dragon Clan alone refused to give up, right to the end."

There was just one exception: the Black Dragon Clan, which had proposed the plan in the first place.

"To keep it going despite the other clans' opposition, we had to pay a considerable price."

"A price?"

"Yes."

Limon's expression turned complicated, as though he dreaded whatever she might say next. Unfortunately, his instincts were right. The price Li Qingyu revealed with a smile left his head reeling all over again.

"Our clan agreed to cover every loss incurred in keeping world peace."

"Wh..."

So this was what it meant to be speechless. Limon opened and closed his mouth for a moment like a goldfish gasping for air. At last, recovering from the shock, he asked in disbelief, "The others agreed to a condition that ridiculous?"

"I persuaded them to."

"How?"

Limon was baffled. The world-peace plan had strained the resources of the entire Seven Dragons Society. To make a single clan shoulder all its losses? No one in their right mind would accept such a proposal. Just as a bank wouldn't lend to someone who couldn't repay it, the other clans must have known the Black Dragon Clan had no way to cover those losses.

So how had she won them over? Li Qingyu revealed the secret.

"I put up our stake in the Leviathan Hotel as collateral."

* * *

Seven holding companies represented the Seven Dragons Society. Li Qingyu said, almost as a joke, that once the Black Dragon Clan put up its stake in the Leviathan Hotel—the very foundation of the clan—as security, the other clans, previously staunch opponents, had suddenly become fervent supporters of the world-peace plan.

She smiled at Limon, who stood frozen with his jaw hanging open.

"Fortunately, every time we put up more shares, the other clans competed to lend us money. That's how we kept the plan going."

Of course they had. A stake in the Leviathan meant control of the Seven Dragons Society. It was a prize the other clans could not help coveting—especially because they belonged to the same Society.

"We lost the support of our own people after giving up so many shares, though."

From prestigious families that had produced inheritors of the Seventy-Two Martial Schools for generations to those that had only joined the clan in this generation, many had already turned their backs on them. Plenty had even transferred their allegiance to other clans, Li Qingyu said with a cheerful smile.

Limon listened in a daze for a moment. Then something occurred to him, and he blurted out, "You've already lost a lot of shares?"

"Yes."

"... Didn't you tell me you'd give me forty-nine percent of the Leviathan Hotel as a dowry?"

"I did."

"Then how much will you have left?"

If families loyal for centuries had turned their backs, she couldn't have lost a mere one or two percent. How much could possibly remain after she gave away another forty-nine percent? Limon asked, fearing the answer.

It was clear and simple.

"One point one percent."

"..."

"You heard me correctly. Don't look at me like that."

Limon blinked at her, dumbfounded and unable to trust his ears. Li Qingyu smiled.

"The forty-nine percent I'll give you, Sword Lord, plus the one point one percent I'll keep: fifty point one percent. That's all the property our clan has left."

Roughly half the shares in the Leviathan Hotel. To be clear, that was an immense fortune. The combined market capitalization of three or four major corporations wouldn't come close to a quarter of it.

But seen the other way, it meant the Black Dragon Clan had already lost an equally immense amount.

"Yes. Our clan has already fallen," Li Qingyu admitted. It simply hadn't become public knowledge. For all practical purposes, the Black Dragon Clan was half ruined.

"No one believes we can recover, and the elders are only making plans to sell me off to another clan for a high price."

She spoke of her clan's downfall lightly, as though telling an amusing joke, then calmly asked the stunned Limon a question.

"Sword Lord, you said you might never have fought the Infinite Monarch if you hadn't met me, didn't you?"

"..."

"You're right, but you're also wrong."

Li Qingyu was affirming the possibility Limon had raised before she confessed to her scheme—and denying it at the same time.

"My visit was only the trigger. Once the Black Dragon Clan had fallen, something like that was bound to happen eventually."

The fact that he had never had cause to fight a Monarch was itself an achievement the Seven Dragons Society had poured money and personnel into securing. If Limon obliterated a Monarch after all their efforts to preserve peace, those efforts would have been for nothing.

But having already lost nearly half its shares, the Black Dragon Clan no longer had the resources to sustain the world-peace plan. That was why the fight with the Monarch had happened. The Society hadn't engineered the friction. It had simply failed to prevent it.

Li Qingyu explained all this as calmly as though presenting research findings at a conference.

"..."

Limon looked at her and said nothing. He remained silent, and silent, and silent again. After gazing steadily into her eyes, which gleamed as beautifully as obsidian, he finally spoke.

"Why?"

He had turned it over in his mind again and again, but he still couldn't find an answer. With a bewilderment he had rarely felt in all his long life, Limon asked once more, "Why go that far?"

She had twisted their doctrine as she pleased. The Seven Dragons Society had nearly gone bankrupt. She had changed the very structure of the world's economy. Her clan had fallen and lost its standing.

A wise person would have made a show of helping at the beginning and left it at that. Even an ordinary person would have given up once they understood the hardships involved. Even an utter idiot would have backed down when their clan fell.

"Knowing you wouldn't gain a thing from it?"

Why had she defied everyone and kept up this absurd balancing act for thirty-two years to preserve world peace? Limon's voice was grave.

"I did gain something."

Looking into his somber golden eyes, Li Qingyu smiled. Then she cheerfully revealed why she had pushed herself so hard—the one benefit she had gained by all but selling off half her clan, losing everyone's support, and becoming the other clans' laughingstock, yet stubbornly preserving world peace.

"You accepted my marriage proposal, didn't you?"

Even with the Seven Dragons Society's full resources, they had only managed to preserve world peace for a few decades. Limon was an absolute being who had preserved it for centuries with nothing but a sword.

Li Qingyu declared with a beaming smile that acquiring him would be a bargain even if she had to sell off the entire Seven Dragons Society, not just the Black Dragon Clan. Limon could only stare at her, dumbfounded.

"... All that for me?"

"You're not just anyone."

Li Qingyu shook her head slightly.

Then she glanced at the sky, where the stars had been gone since Limon's arrival. For the first time, she confessed the reason she had never been able to tell anyone—the reason she had gone so far as to propose marriage to secure the most powerful human weapon in history.

"With the Sword Tower gone and the line of Sword Masters ended, Sword Lord, you are the only person in this age who can stand against the constellations."