Dual Realm Exchange System

Damian woke to the unpleasant realization that his mouth was open.

For several confused seconds, he remained slumped inside the expensive chair behind his new office desk, staring blankly at the ceiling while his brain struggled to explain why his neck felt as though somebody had tried twisting it off during the night.

Then he noticed the faint dampness at the corner of his mouth.

Damian slowly wiped it away.

"...Wonderful."

Apparently, Baron Damian Baines, Journeyman Mage, Otherworlder, Guest Elder, cultivator and owner of two businesses across separate universes had spent his first night inside his new commercial property snoring with drool on his face.

Truly, nobility suited him!

Ptui!!

He tried standing, but his lower back immediately protested.

"Ow!"

Sleeping half-reclined in a single office chair had done absolutely nothing good for his newly strengthened body.

His back ached, his shoulders were tight, and several joints felt stiff enough that Damian briefly wondered whether Body Tempering had somehow aged him forty years overnight.

Fortunately, he did feel rested... mostly.

Damian stepped away from the desk and began stretching, slowly bending backward until several vertebrae cracked in rapid succession.

"AWOOOOOO—fuck, fuck, fuck!"

His howl echoed through the empty second floor like an elderly wolf being pursued by tax collectors.

Damian straightened with watering eyes before rotating one shoulder, then the other.

Another crack followed.

"Goddamn..."

Several minutes of increasingly embarrassing stretching finally loosened his body, leaving Damian lightly sweating but considerably more awake.

He pulled out a Cleansing Talisman and activated it.

A gentle wave passed over him, removing sweat, dried saliva, dust and the general unpleasantness produced by sleeping in yesterday’s clothes.

Damian looked down at himself afterward and nodded.

"Peak civilization."

With personal dignity partially restored, he sat on the edge of his desk and considered what needed doing today.

The store would open, inventory needed arranging, Kellan had started cultivating, and the seven children needed enrollment at Rosewood Academy.

Those were all important.

Yet a much larger problem had become increasingly obvious.

Damian had goods, power, and potential, yes.

He even possessed eight trustworthy wards who had formally come beneath his name.

What he did not possess was people, actual people.

Kellan was promising, but Kellan was also a teenager who had completed his first cultivation cycle only after Damian spent several hours discovering previously unknown depths of human stupidity.

The seven children were even less useful from an organizational perspective.

Damian was responsible for raising them, not throwing swords into their hands and informing them that childhood had been canceled.

Even with cultivation accelerating Kellan’s path, it would probably take the young man a month or two to reach Body Tempering Level 2 and satisfy the Attribute requirements for Fighter.

Then he would still be a Level 1 Fighter.

At Damian’s current growth rate, that was almost comedic.

"By the time he gets Fighter Level 1, I might be some Divine Spirit sitting on a cloud somewhere." Damian muttered to himself sullenly.

Hahaha, that was obviously an exaggeration!

...probably.

The fact that Damian had crossed three Body Tempering levels yesterday made it slightly less ridiculous than it should have been.

Either way, his conclusion remained the same.

He needed competent adults who could become useful now, people capable of handling money, inventory, customers, records, deliveries, security and administration.

Eventually, people strong enough to accompany him into dangerous places without requiring him to spend years raising them first.

Naturally, that thought walked Damian directly back into the reason he had hesitated to create an organization in the first place.

Trust.

Obviously, Damian was no Aizen.

He could not arrange events twenty years in advance, smile mysteriously and reveal that everything had proceeded according to a plan nobody else knew existed.

He was not Light Yagami either.

He could barely keep track of whether he had eaten recently without Grain Avoidance Pills, so calculating thirty-seven psychological contingencies while pretending to be an innocent honors student was safely outside his skill set.

Nor was he some Hachiman or Keima who could examine a stranger for twenty seconds and somehow reconstruct their childhood trauma, romantic preferences and hidden motivations from the angle at which they held a spoon.

Damian felt he understood people reasonably well, but that was different from reading souls.

If he advertised recruitment, applicants would surely come.

Some would be competent, some hardworking, some greedy, some lazy, some ambitious and some honest until a better offer appeared.

So how the heck was he supposed to know which was which?

Contracts only solved part of that.

An ordinary employment agreement was paper supported by law.

Indentured service was stronger, but the principle remained similar.

If Damian empowered someone until they became vastly stronger than the institution responsible for enforcing the agreement, what good was the contract?

He could potentially officiate important agreements through the Church of Caurelia, as the Coinmaiden governed wealth, commerce, negotiation and contracts, after all.

However, Damian immediately found another problem with that solution.

"What if the goddess herself becomes interested in screwing with me?"

He frowned at that thought.

Frankly speaking, Caurelia had done absolutely nothing to earn that suspicion.

Her church had treated him well, her bank had loaned him fifty Gold while he possessed essentially no credit history, and every interaction Damian had experienced with her institutions had been professional.

Still, the point was structural rather than personal.

If Damian built his entire organization upon divine contracts, then his security ultimately relied upon the deity enforcing them.

If that same deity ever became hostile, compromised, disinterested or simply decided Damian’s growing influence threatened some larger divine arrangement, his supposedly perfect contracts could become expensive toilet paper overnight.

Damian sighed.

He was not naturally paranoid.

Like most ordinary modern adults, his default assumption was that strangers were probably decent enough until they provided evidence otherwise.

But there was a significant difference between lending somebody twenty dollars and handing them supernatural resources capable of transforming their existence.

The latter required something better than optimism.

Damian mentally searched through the Feats he had seen from both Valoria and Shengyuan.

There were solutions, though unfortunately most were horrifying.

Domination-type Feats could suppress resistance, soul-binding techniques existed, certain contracts directly damaged or killed oathbreakers, some methods could rewrite memories, and others erased individual will entirely and transformed living beings into obedient puppets.

Damian’s expression twisted.

"Nope."

If he was willing to go that far, he could have visited a slave market during his first few days in Valoria, purchased desperate people and proceeded down the distinguished path of every morally questionable isekai protagonist before him.

He had deliberately avoided doing that.

There was little point preserving someone’s freedom only to later install magical spyware inside their soul.

For now, Damian would simply need ordinary vetting.

That would not solve the long-term problem of trustworthy core subordinates, but it could solve today’s much simpler problem.

His shop needed employees.

......

The Trade and Commerce Guild was already busy by the time Damian arrived.

Unlike the Adventurer’s Guild, which attracted armored lunatics searching for increasingly creative ways to die for money, the Trade and Commerce Guild catered to a different breed of predator.

Job seekers filled one section of the ground floor, many sitting beneath large boards containing commercial vacancies and apprenticeship postings.

Damian stopped after seeing them.

There were dozens.

Some applicants carried folders containing references, while others wore their best clothing and waited with the grim patience of people who had already spent weeks searching for stable work.

Rosewood Town was expanding quickly, but that did not mean every newcomer immediately found employment.

Frontier development attracted opportunity, but it also attracted more people than existing businesses could absorb.

Damian approached the recruitment counter, registered his requirements and paid the small listing fee.

The response was immediate.

He had expected to wait perhaps an hour.

Instead, employees began directing candidates toward an available interview room within minutes.

Apparently, plenty of people literally spent their days waiting inside the Guild for employers to appear.

Damian suddenly felt like someone who had opened a bag of bread in front of pigeons.

He interviewed applicants one after another.

The first person he selected was Tana.

Tana was twenty-one, slim and dark-haired, with brown eyes and the careful posture of someone trying very hard to look more confident than she felt.

Her Character Sheet held a Level 1 Variant Class called <Scribe>.

She had grown up as the eldest daughter of a bookbinder and learned reading, writing, document preparation and basic correspondence through helping her father’s business.

Unfortunately, the bookbinder had died the previous winter, leaving the family workshop heavily indebted.

Tana had sold most of the equipment, paid what she could, moved to Rosewood Town with her younger brother and had been searching for stable clerical work ever since.

Her handwriting was excellent.

More importantly, when Damian deliberately gave her a sample inventory sheet containing three obvious inconsistencies, she caught all three.

"You’ll act as my secretary and general administrative clerk. Records, correspondence, scheduling and whatever paperwork I decide I hate enough to put on your desk," Damian explained.

Tana’s lips twitched. "That sounds remarkably honest, Baron Baines."

"I’m an honest employer."

"We shall see."

Damian hired her immediately.

The second specialist was Kevin.

Kevin was twenty-two and possessed the Level 1 Variant Class <Auditor>.

He came from a family of caravan merchants who had gone bankrupt after two consecutive monster attacks destroyed much of their transport stock.

Unlike his relatives, Kevin had never enjoyed traveling.

He liked numbers, ledgers, receipts and finding exactly where money had disappeared.

Damian liked him already.

During the interview, Kevin spent more time questioning Damian’s inventory-control procedures than trying to impress him.

"What process do you currently use for reconciling physical stock against recorded sales?"

Damian stared at him. "I currently use the advanced method known as remembering approximately how much stuff I own."

Kevin’s expression became faintly horrified.

The fellow was hired as Damian’s bookkeeper, cashier supervisor and inventory auditor.

After those two came the general staff.

Damian selected four young women between eighteen and twenty-one to serve primarily as sales attendants and customer-service clerks.

All four remained within the Commoner Preparatory Class, but each was literate, numerate and presented herself well.

Lisa had previously helped her aunt sell vegetables and possessed the loudest voice of the group.

Elsie was painfully polite and had worked briefly inside a bakery.

Getty came from a family of hunters but disliked blood enough that nobody had any idea how she survived childhood.

The youngest, Kat, had recently arrived from a smaller settlement hoping to earn enough money to qualify for professional Mage tutoring someday.

Seven young men filled the more physical positions.

They would handle stock movement, shelving, deliveries, cleaning, loading and unloading, while two of the larger fellows would rotate near the entrance during business hours as visible attendants until Damian hired actual security.

None possessed Standard combat Classes yet, but that did not bother Damian.

These were merely shop employees, not his future elite guard.

At least, not yet.

If one of them proved exceptional over time, that could change.

Damian deliberately favored applicants between eighteen and twenty-two.

They were young enough to adapt to an unusual business but old enough to work independently.

More importantly, nearly everyone he selected carried the same subtle expression.

Determination mixed with uncertainty.

They were not polished professionals with powerful families behind them.

They were young people standing at the beginning of their lives, struggling to gain a foothold and willing to work for it.

Damian understood that feeling extremely well.

Then came salaries.

Ordinary entry-level shop attendants in Rosewood Town commonly earned around three to four Copper per 12-hour working day, while physically demanding commercial labor might reach four or five at most.

Basic trained clerical workers could expect roughly fifteen to twenty Copper depending upon skill, and young Variant Class specialists sometimes pushed somewhat higher.

Damian paid substantially above that.

The four sales attendants would receive ten Copper per day whereas the seven general workers received twelve Copper because of the physical demands and occasional delivery work.

Tana received thirty-five Copper per day while Kevin received forty.

There would also be performance bonuses once the store became profitable.

The room became silent when Damian announced the terms.

Tana stared at him suspiciously.

"What exactly are you selling?"

Damian raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"Because either your profit margin is extraordinary, or you’ve accidentally doubled our wages."

"Close enough."

One of the young laborers actually raised his hand.

"Baron Baines, is there some dangerous work involved?"

"Not unless shelving becomes unexpectedly violent."

Several people laughed nervously.

Damian’s expression became more serious.

"I pay well because I expect good work. I don’t want employees worrying about whether missing one shift means starving next week, and I don’t want someone accepting bribes because an extra five Copper feels life-changing. Do your jobs properly, don’t steal from me, treat customers decently and tell me when something is going wrong instead of hiding it."

That was simple enough.

Perhaps too simple for a corporate mission statement.

Damian preferred it anyway.

......

By the time the newly assembled staff followed Damian back toward Central Lane, barely three hours remained before noon.

The store looked even better in daylight.

Tana stopped outside and stared upward at the building with a look of disbelief.

"This... this is where we’re working?"

"Indeed." Damian affirmed with a nod.

Kevin immediately looked toward the Caurelian Continental Bank three buildings away, then back toward Damian.

"You actually rented commercial frontage here?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

"Five Gold per month."

Kevin physically recoiled.

Damian laughed. "This is why you’re in charge of making sure the business earns money."

"I have worked for you less than an hour and already feel pressure."

"Excellent. You’re adapting."

Inside, Damian divided responsibilities.

Tana claimed a workstation beside his upstairs office.

Kevin immediately began inspecting the storage room and requesting blank ledgers.

The four sales attendants cleaned and organized the counters while familiarizing themselves with the shelves.

The seven general workers inspected the rear entrance, delivery access, storage capacity and whatever small tasks remained after the contractors departed.

Within half an hour, the empty building began feeling like an actual business.

Naturally, somebody eventually noticed the obvious issue.

Mira looked across the pristine shelves.

"Baron Baines?"

"Yes?"

"What are we selling?"

Everyone stopped.

Damian glanced around.

The shelves were indeed completely empty, which was definitely an inconvenient detail.

"We’ll stock everything shortly." Damian revealed with a smile.

Kevin frowned. "Should we not know the merchandise before opening?"

"You absolutely should."

"Then perhaps we should begin immediately?"

Damian folded his arms in amusement. "Soon. I need to do something first."

The staff exchanged puzzled looks.

Tana carefully studied his expression before apparently deciding that questioning her new and mysterious employer on her first morning was unnecessary.

"As you wish, Baron Baines. What should we do meanwhile?"

"Learn the building. Decide where you think things should go, work out who handles which counter, inspect the storage space and make yourselves comfortable. We open at noon."

"Yes, Baron Baines." Tana acknowledged professionally.

The others dispersed.

Damian watched them for several seconds.

Thirteen employees, huh?

They were nothing like what he envisioned when he first got the system, but for the first time since arriving in Valoria, Damian had people working beneath him who had not come through circumstance, charity or institutional assignment.

He had hired them on his own, after vetting them.

That felt strangely significant.

Still, the larger problem remained.

A shop could survive on employment contracts, but his future faction could not.

Damian turned away from his new staff and headed out of the building.

Before noon arrived, he intended to do something about that.

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