Chương 202: Psilocybin Fourteen

It was funny how things could sometimes just line themselves up so easily. The day after I returned from my first scouting mission around the Wendell-Smith Dungeon I started to put our feelers. It wasn't that difficult to find out which companies did the materials extraction from the dungeon itself. There were three major companies. One of them was the Smith Corporation of City Nineteen. Unsurprisingly owned by the Smith noble family.

They had been working on material extraction for four decades now, and were considered the gold-standard within the dungeon. Learning about them was relatively easy. A few questions at the local Delver's guild and I had a list of materials they frequently extracted.

That did require that I pose myself as the little cousin of someone working at one of the nearby factories who was sent to secretly undermine a rival middle-manager, but picking out a suitable outfit for that role and acting the part wasn't hard, and it turned out that no one really cared enough to poke at the false identity. So, I now had a small booklet with a list of frequently extracted materials. The Smith Corporation of City Nineteen was well-organized and professional.

They had a headquarters not far from the dungeon itself and when I asked around, they had a pretty alright reputation. The company had had a big economic downturn about ten, maybe twelve years ago, and the director at the time was canned and replaced by some old noble cousin from another city. He had come in, increased the pay for the average worker and then poached a few experts from elsewhere. It had caused a kerfuffle, but the company was now considered a nice place to work.

Getting a job there was tough, especially now that Ditz was out of business and a lot of the contractors from Ditz were on the job market. The other two companies were the Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors and Brasslight Ventures, Limited. Whitmore & Hale Cavern Surveyors were a company from City Sixteen, which had a dungeon or two which were similar to the one they were diving now. They'd come in with their own experts, bought a headquarters nearby, then staffed it with locals.

They were on the cheaper side for a few years, but now were priced pretty competitively with the Smith Corporation. Basically, foreign investors coming in and trying to grab a bite of the local market. Apparently they were pretty much the only game in town in their own city. Whitmore was a Ducal family, and Hale a barony. They had cash to spend and were trying to expand.

The arrival of a second big game had pushed out another couple of smaller companies from the business since they could undercut the locals with foreign capital. Four or five years of that had been enough to kill most of the other small companies. With the exception of Brasslight Ventures Ltd. Brasslight was started by a trio of former Smith Corporation delvers and extraction experts. They pooled their cash and started a small company, and it had survived for almost ten years now. It was a bit of a shitshow.

Constant fines. Lots of trouble with the bullies and others, and while they had a pretty good rep in the past, that had eroded over time. Still, they were the only surviving company that wasn't noble-owned, and at the moment they were hiring anyone that came asking for a job. They paid differently. Instead of paying per dive, with a minimum extraction level required to get paid in the first place, they paid by pound-extracted.

It was probably not much more than what a delver working for the Smith Corporation or Whitmore and Hale made, only someone really busting their ass and rushing to work hard could earn twice the pay for twice the work. That appealed to some guys. It also meant that of the three options, Brasslight Ventures was the easiest one to sneak into. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Gathering all that information, which could have been condensed to a single page's worth of bullet-points, had taken me three days, with a couple of days in between where I didn't work on information gathering but instead on upkeep and maintenance. It was information that I'd need if I wanted to carry out my plan. For now, it was quite barebones, and I wasn't sure exactly how I wanted to do it. There were a few ways.

I could sneak in, could replace a Brasslight's person or impersonate them, I could join as an underaged worker myself and do a few days of menial work to scout out the dungeon. Or, I could get a visit from some members of the Union one fine morning. They were three. Two tough-looking men, wearing rough clothes and not even trying to pretend that the pipes they were carrying weren't weapons. The third was a smaller, weedier man with the build and look of an out-of-work accountant.

I was on guard, obviously, but didn't pull out anything lethal just yet. The accountant-type was quite polite with me, said that it was the end of the month, and that I was due my shares. Then he gave me a piece of paper and an envelope before asking if I could make it to a safe place alone. I assured him that I could, then watched the trio leave. The letter was a detailed list of work that I had done for the Union, and it was all bullshit. Cleaning work? Providing foodstuffs for their kitchens? It was...

plausible, but fake. The numbers were real, however, and I could read between the lines. It was surprising that they were even this thorough, but I supposed one didn't become a city-spanning gang without some amount of good bureaucracy, and even managers sometimes joined the Union. The envelope had cash. I ran back to the farm before counting it behind closed doors. It was the proceeds from the first month's sale of [Dreamveil Fungus].

The bills were old, creased, and in some cases slightly ripped, but it didn't matter. I'd made in one month what would normally take me... about two? So, not exactly swimming in riches, but it was certainly better than nothing. And it meant that sales were happening. The Union had politely asked me to keep supplying them, so I knew that stock was at least moving a little. I'd take it.

I wasn't selling that much yet, however, and even if I did sell an imperial tonne of highly-addictive drugs, that might not be enough to cripple an entire city. If I wanted to collapse society, I needed to break more than just one leg. Anyway, I continued over the next couple of days to plot my plots. Mostly, I returned to the dungeon and spied from afar one more time, and that led me to discovering something rather unfortunate.

The younger members of the working groups that worked in the dungeon were all scrawny, but strong. I saw them carrying sacks that had to weigh half again as much as they did. They moved fast, too. I was pretty sure that I was in better health than most of them, at least in terms of nutrition and such. My healing mushrooms covered many ills, and since I had money to burn, I occasionally bought real food to share with my mom and the girls that worked for me. But when it came to muscles?

I was probably far from strong, even for my age and size. I actually stopped one of the boys leaving the dungeon and asked him what it took to work. He'd shrugged and said that it wasn't too hard, but when I pressed for what skills came in handy, he rattled off a short list. Lifting, Manual Labour, Strength, Running, Endurance, Tool Handling, Pain Tolerance. He didn't have all of those himself. But having two or three was almost a must. I had Running {Common}, and that was it.

It was at a decent level, but I couldn't claim to have put too much practice into it. In the last year the most I got to push that skill was a few physical activities at the Academy. Unfortunately, there was no way for me to gain more General skills. My total level was four hundred levels short of a new class, and I wasn't going to pick a labourer class as my third, though picking up a few more {Common} skills might not be a bad move.

Doubly unfortunately, there was a way to make yourself stronger and to gain more stamina. I started exercising in the mornings, and I hated every minute of it. It felt so wasteful when I had so many other things to do, but even a couple of weeks of working out might be enough to get the job. At least I'd have access to protein and such to help. More so than the average little twerp showing up begging for work.

I almost felt bad about stealing the job of someone desperate for it, only to use that job to get into a place where I'd be removing the entire line of work from the equation, but it was what it was. Feronie had better appreciate everything I was doing. At the rate I was moving, I think it would only be another six to nine months before I had the city suffering through a new crisis. 🍄︎🍄️🍄︎