The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

Adrian held up his hand. "Wait, I’m not done yet. You can keep the ones who have the highest talent. I will only take those who have lower-ranked mana veins since their potential is capped anyway. I just want low-circle mages to use for construction and city maintenance stuff."

Roderick looked a little confused by the request. He rapidly thought it over in his mind.

’What we need for the royal army are mages with high potential and destructive capabilities,’ Roderick reasoned with himself. ’If he only takes the lower-ranked ones who have limited potential, then I don’t think it’ll hurt us much. In fact, right now there are a lot of low-rank mages in the capital who don’t even do anything related to magic. They just work normal jobs, so this won’t make that big of a difference.’

Roderick slowly nodded in agreement.

Adrian smiled brightly. "Good job. I guess we can sign on this."

Adrian reached into his pocket, and pulled out a fresh piece of parchment from the dungeon instead. It was a Soul Contract like always and the system had been writing the specific clauses inside the dungeon while Adrian spoke to Roderick.

Adrian slid the contract across the wooden table.

Roderick picked it up and quickly read through it. Everything was written exactly as they had just discussed, but the very last line had an addition.

[Clause 6: The Crestwall Empire will pay 200,000 Gold Coins as compensation for the remaining value of the Mana Crystal Mine, and an additional 100,000 Gold Coins as a fee for the Oresfall Kingdom to take over Vaneira’s territory from the Avarice Kingdom.]

Roderick stared at the massive numbers.

He had already lost too much today.

’We already lost our best mages, our knights, and our dignity just coming here,’ Roderick thought bitterly. ’It is better to lose a little bit of gold compared to losing the rest of our soldiers in a war against the Avarice guys. It’ll be better to just let this man do it for us.’

He nodded in defeat and pushed the contract toward Maximilian.

"Sign it," Roderick ordered.

Maximilian clenched his fist and punched the wooden table out of sheer, boiling frustration. He glared across the table at Adrian.

"Give me a dagger or something," Maximilian snapped.

Adrian casually pulled a small throwing knife from his boot and tossed it across the table. It clattered to a stop in front of the Emperor.

Maximilian picked it up, angrily pricked his thumb, and pressed his bloody fingerprint onto the bottom of the Soul Contract.

Once it was done, Adrian reached across the table, grabbed the contract, and instantly sent it back into his dungeon storage. He smiled brightly at the two defeated men.

"Great," Adrian said cheerfully. "Now you are free to go. I hope we can continue this great alliance for quite a long time."

Adrian watched as Roderick and the rest of the Emperor’s group slowly stood up from the table.

Roderick nodded stiffly.

"Yes," Roderick said quietly. "Hopefully, this alliance does hold for a while."

He turned to walk away, leading the humiliated Emperor out of the camp. But after a few steps, Roderick paused. He slowly turned back around and looked at Adrian with a calculating gaze.

"You exceeded my expectations today," Roderick admitted. "I did not expect something like this at all. Would you be open to selling me those weapons of yours?"

He pointed a finger at the magic rifles still aimed at him and his men.

Adrian immediately shook his head.

"Nope. Not at all," Adrian said flatly. "I’m not selling them to anyone."

Roderick just nodded. "Okay, fine then. But my door is always open for this specific deal. If you’re willing to sell them at any time, feel free to contact me."

Adrian just nodded and watched in silence as the group finally left the camp.

But the kid called Leo stayed back.

Adrian looked at the guy and then glanced over at the bleeding S-rank knight still groaning on the ground.

He turned his head to look at Celeste, who was standing nearby.

"Patch him up," Adrian ordered, pointing at the knight. "I’ll have a talk with him later."

He turned his attention back to Leo.

"Head over to my tent," Adrian said simply. "We have something to talk about."

Leo nervously followed behind Adrian, but as they walked, the kid kept glancing over his shoulder at Wang Lei, who was trailing right behind them.

Once they were inside the quiet tent, Leo realized that Wang Lei was staying in the room with them.

Leo pointed at the quiet man. "Is this guy a hero too?"

"Well, I don’t think he’s officially called a ’hero’, but yeah. He was summoned to this world too," Adrian explained casually as he looked at Leo. "What about you? Are you someone from Earth as well?"

Leo shook his head.

"No, I’m from a planet called Solaris," Leo answered.

"Okay, tell me more about this world of yours," Adrian said, taking a seat on his cot.

The guy immediately began to talk.

Adrian listened to him for almost seven hours until it was dark outside. The tent finally fell completely silent as Leo ran out of things to talk about and awkwardly stopped speaking.

Adrian rubbed his chin.

"So it’s a planet with a star, but it is basically identical to Earth," Adrian concluded.

Leo nodded. "I guess so? But what exactly is this ’Earth’ that you keep talking about?"

Adrian pointed a thumb at Wang Lei. "This guy is from Earth."

Adrian let out a sigh. "Well, since your planet is extremely similar to Earth, there is nothing new you can give me when it comes to knowledge. The technologies are similar, and the social trends are basically the same. I mean, they are a little bit different in the details, but those things don’t really matter too much here. The economics, the government structures... all of those have the exact same patterns."

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