Lord of the Myriad Worlds

Chapter 371: Money Is No Object

The convoy drove through the night, jolting over rough terrain for hours on end.

Li Wei jolted along with it — but felt no fatigue.

When morning came, he began drawing maps — charting everything from the journey so far. Hathaway sat beside him, chin resting in her hand, watching with genuine attention, occasionally adding a detail. When Li Wei asked, she answered — recounting the changes and events of the past year.

"My starting location was a bit unusual — an oil town. The chaotic magic particles caused most of the gasoline and diesel to decompose and evaporate, but the crude oil deep underground was fine. Some survivors figured out the pattern and kept up small-scale extraction and refining. So even without a small nuclear power plant, power isn't a problem — diesel generators do the job."

"Of course, the shortage of food and clean water was always a noose hanging over my head, threatening to tighten at any moment. In the first few months, I had to wrack my brain and use every trick I had just to carve out a foothold. Through that process, my knowledge of the surrounding terrain kept growing. At my furthest, I crossed the entire desert to its northern edge — and there I saw the sea, and far more survivors and Ability Users."

"There was a Black Mountain Duke up there. I'd scouted him out by the third month. But the distance was too great — over a thousand li — so I spent a full year planning and preparing before I finally took him down. I'd only just started developing properly when things on your end had already entered the late game. Then there was the matter with Lady Night Owl, which weighed on me heavily. I even started thinking about finding a way to see you."

"For that reason, I spent nearly a month exploring eastward. I followed the river east for two thousand li — saw countless ruined villages and towns, abandoned cities and wilderness. In the end I came back with nothing but a few magical materials and some Clearance Tokens."

"Actually, Lu Ziming had been urging me for months to relocate my territory to Black Mountain Fortress. That was his parting advice before he left. He said: the south of Black Mountain Fortress is desert, the east is mountains — Frost Duke won't bother spending the effort to attack you there. By the time he finishes off Li Wei, three years will already have passed, the pioneering cards will become shields, and after that, Frost Duke will have the next generation of pioneers to deal with. Your territory, at least, will stay above the bankruptcy line."

"I knew he meant every word, and sometimes I thought he was right. With a three-star territory, I'd still be a core member of the Internal Affairs Department. But Li Wei — you know me. I wasn't willing to accept that. Watching you rack up territory-wide announcements one after another was enough to shake my resolve to its core."

"So I went to find Ron — and immediately noticed something was wrong with him. I tested him a few times, got nothing concrete, but I was certain: this wasn't the Ron I knew. He'd been compromised.""That was the moment I snapped out of my fantasies, out of my ambition and my refusal to accept defeat."

"I realized, deeply, that Frost Duke could not be treated as an NPC. This man might genuinely be a once-in-a-generation ruler — the kind who could outmaneuver all of us. He was playing the long game. I knew because the year before, I'd actually encountered some of his Ability Users. They looked strange, but they spoke clearly, with real structure and hierarchy. And what they described was genuinely tempting."

"But at the time I was in the middle of planning my long-range campaign against Black Mountain Duke, so I never went to see Frost Duke's territory for myself. I remember thinking — what a shame. I wonder now if you've had a similar experience. You probably have. And that's exactly Frost Duke's scheme — if we'd gone, we might well have been compromised too. Then we'd have stopped being aggressive, and stubbornly convinced ourselves that Frost Duke was perfectly reasonable, that as long as we didn't build cities, he'd never attack us."

"When I realized that, I broke into a cold sweat. So I rushed to find Socrates to talk it over. He hadn't been compromised — but his demand was that while Frost Duke was besieging Zhao Kewu and fighting you, we should jointly mobilize, sail downstream, divert the river with dams, and take out Ron first, splitting the gains fifty-fifty."

"Honestly, that wasn't an unreasonable demand. But at the time I was convinced Frost Duke was far more dangerous than that calculation assumed. And besides, the plan was time-consuming and risky — even with excavators, it wasn't reliable. If something went wrong, there'd be no time to recover."

"So we parted on bad terms. And then, barely half a month later — who could have predicted that Frost Duke would sweep from east to west and catch Socrates completely off guard? His whole formation collapsed."

"Honestly, Li Wei — if you hadn't come within this month, I was going to pull out within the next few days."

"Fortunately, we made it in time."

At that point, Li Wei suddenly asked: "After you merged with your pioneering card — did you use the territory relocation opportunity?"

"No. I wasn't certain enough about the future to dare use it. And because of that, I never built a mana well either."

"There's also the cost — building a mana well requires fifty thousand gold coins. Other special structures cost money too. It all has to be done step by step. Speaking of which — did you build a mana well? That widow and that Scorpion woman — are they really that rich? According to Socrates, they've been keeping you."

Hathaway finally couldn't hold back the question she'd been sitting on — and thanks to the vast distance and poor information flow, she'd twisted the situation into something rather different from reality.

Li Wei understood. It just needed to be set straight.

"Don't talk nonsense. One of them is my Second Aunt, the other is my Aunt Yue. They're elders. Show some respect."

"Second Aunt? Aunt Yue?"

Hathaway heard this, and something shifted in her expression — a slow, strange light coming into her eyes. After a long pause, she muttered, "You really are something else."

"What?"

"Nothing. I said, Li Wei, you're quite the beast."

"Stop being cryptic. Look at the map. This is my Riverside Fortress. This is my territory's main base. I want to know — if Frost Duke takes Socrates' territory and comes downstream by boat, or tries a flood attack, what's our response?"

Li Wei steered to business. Hathaway straightened up. "You still haven't told me how you plan to settle me. I know you're not the type to be kept, but I need to understand what stake that widow and that Scorpion woman hold in your territory. That matters. I've essentially come empty-handed — you can't expect me to bow and scrape in front of them."

Li Wei laughed despite himself, but this wasn't something he could explain in a few sentences.

"All right. My thinking is this: I'll carve out a stretch of the hill country on the opposite bank from the Riverside Fortress and let you relocate your territory there. I don't know the exact terms of an alliance, but I'll give you a high degree of autonomy. The river in that area runs south-high north-low — the north is vulnerable to flooding, and if the south isn't held, it can be taken easily. That's my thinking."

"Also — Lady Night Owl asked me to pass along a message: she wants you to come serve as my advisor. But honestly, I don't want that. Because of Second Aunt and Aunt Yue, I'll be joining them on a cross-border mission in three years and ten months. I don't want to drag you into that. You're young — you should have more time to develop."

"And as for Second Aunt and Aunt Yue — I treat them as family, but our relationship isn't held together by... convenience. It's held together by shared interests, shared hopes for the future, and genuine mutual respect. That's the best way I can put it."

"Right now, both of them are advisors in my territory. Then there's Thomas and Zhao Xuanxuan — the five of us are a team. My team."

"As for you, Hathaway — you're an extraordinarily intelligent person. You and Lady Night Owl are cut from the same cloth. Your ceiling is limitless. So don't measure yourself against others. You might lose to me once, or twice — but not a third time. I genuinely look forward to the day you beat me."

When Hathaway heard this — especially the mention of Night Owl's message — a flash of anger passed through her eyes. Brief, well-concealed, but meaningless against Li Wei's Perception.

As expected. No one willingly accepts the role of puppet.

Hathaway was willing to relocate, willing to form an alliance, because she was smart enough to see the problem clearly and read the shifting situation — not because of her relationship with Li Wei. Without that clarity, even Night Owl's message probably wouldn't have moved her.

This was a highly intelligent, highly capable woman with a strong sense of her own will. Not easy to manage — Li Wei knew that from personal experience.

After a long silence, Hathaway let out a soft sigh. "Li Wei, you think too highly of me — as if you're not exceptional yourself. I lost to you once, and I'll lose again, perhaps many more times. And besides — why should there be a winner and loser between us? I apologize for what I said earlier. I hope Second Aunt and Aunt Yue won't hold it against me. As for the territory — I still want to be your advisor. We can't afford to slight Lady Night Owl."

"No. I need an ally, not an advisor. I'll explain things to Lady Night Owl myself. Keep going."

Li Wei refused without hesitation.

Hathaway could be a partner, could be an ally — either would be excellent, the best possible. But she could not be an advisor. And certainly not a teammate.

Hathaway gave him a slightly wounded look, then, seeing his resolve, let it go.

"Fine. Back to the main point. Socrates' territory won't fall quickly — he's a second-generation player with substantial mana reserves. And Frost Duke can't just throw his Ability Users at the walls to die — it'll be a slow grind. But I'm confident: before this year's Radiation Storm hits, Socrates' territory will fall. No question."

"By then it'll be close to winter anyway, so a flood attack won't be practical. And besides — I'm an ice witch. I'm not about to let floodwaters drown your Riverside Fortress."

"None of that is the real problem right now. What we need to deal with is my Black Mountain Fortress. I've already established the Black Mountain Knights there. I need to relocate them — but that comes with penalties. Simply put, it costs twenty thousand Standard Gold Coins to move the Black Mountain Knights."

Hathaway's voice carried a slight hesitation. A penny can stop a hero in their tracks — and without Night Owl's backing, she probably couldn't even scrape together the fifty thousand coins needed to build a mana well.

Because all the mutants she'd hunted had likely been converted into magical materials.

A caster who doesn't want to build a Mage Tower isn't a proper caster. It was a kind of obsession with them.

Li Wei understood immediately. And he wasn't about to be stingy — never mind the ambiguous closeness between them, this was a strategic-level partner. Any price for this alliance was worth paying.

So he transferred a hundred thousand gold coins without a second thought.

One gesture. Everything settled.

Money was no object.