The Count's administrative office sat beside the main residence, a squat gray building that handled the boring, necessary business the manor itself didn't bother with. The guards out front carried themselves like real soldiers, not decoration, each one radiating an Aura Gareth put somewhere in the mid Tier-2 range.
The paperwork itself was almost anticlimactic. Pay the tax, get a stamp, walk out with a folded piece of parchment that said the land was his.
He tucked the deed away, into his storage space rather than a pocket, no reason to risk losing something that mattered this much.
"Let me see it," Nicole said, already reaching.
"You've seen parchment before."
"Not parchment that says our names on it!" She chased him a few steps, gave up when he sidestepped her twice, and settled for pouting at Luna instead, who watched the whole exchange with quiet amusement.
"So," Luna said once Nicole had calmed down. "What's the plan now?"
"Now we make money. A lot of it, fast." Gareth counted what was left in his head. Twenty-eight gold, give or take, against a build that would likely run five hundred before it was finished, more than the land itself had cost.
"We're not in a hurry," Nicole said, arms crossed. "Land's ours. House can go up slow."
"Slow, sure. But the faster we earn, the faster we move in." He did the math again. "Half a year, maybe less if we keep pace."
They looked at each other and something passed between the three of them, not quite triumph, something steadier than that. A month ago they'd been three strangers who'd happened to team up over a spider quest. Now they had a deed with their names on it and a plan.
The month that followed made the last one look easy.
They left before sunrise and came back after dark, most days stacking two or three quests back to back, subjugation in the morning, escort work in the afternoon, whatever herbs or bounties happened to line up along the same road on the way home. They'd worked out a system by then, cluster the quests by direction, clear a whole route in one pass instead of doubling back into the city between jobs.
It worked. It also wore on them.
Gareth held up fine, his Tier-3 body barely noticing the pace. Luna managed just as well, closing in on the edge of 9th Circle now, careful never to waste a drop of Mana she didn't have to spend. Nicole took the brunt of it, a Tier-2 body pushed to its limit day after day, always the first to flag by evening.
She never once complained out loud. Every morning, the second someone called out to move, she was through the gate before either of them.
By month's end all three of them had lost weight they didn't have to spare, but their eyes had a different kind of light in them, the kind that came from watching a coin pouch get heavier every single day.
On the last night of the month, they sat around the table in Gareth's room, counting through a small mountain of silver and gold.
"Two hundred thirty-seven gold, after what we already put toward the build," Gareth said, setting down the final total.
Nicole slammed both hands on the table hard enough to rattle the coins. "That's insane!"
Luna allowed herself a small, satisfied smile over her tea. "We're near the ceiling on quest volume, though. Past this point, growing the income means taking on harder work."
"I know." Gareth sorted the coins into their piles.
He hadn't kept the full month's earnings sitting idle either. Early on, he'd found a construction crew and worked out a staged payment plan, standard practice for a build this size, protection for both sides against getting cheated.
The crew he'd hired was the best Northwind had to offer, run by a man everyone called Old Adam, sixty-some years old, rumored to have once served the Count directly. Nearly a hundred hands under him, most of them cultivators in their own right, fast enough that even nobles competed for his schedule.
Out on the plot, the change was already visible. Foundations laid, walls climbing a little higher every time they rode past. The shape of a three-story main house had started to emerge, facing the road, stone and timber both. Behind it, a cleared stretch marked for dormitories once the main structure was done. Stables and storage to one side, open ground to the other, reserved for a training yard and whatever else the corps grew into needing.
Old Adam had recommended saving the outer wall for last, no point boxing in a construction site that still needed materials moving in and out daily.
Gareth had no argument with that. He didn't know the first thing about building, and he'd learned the value of staying out of an expert's way.
Two evenings after the month closed out, the three of them finished a pair of E-rank gathering quests out past the southwest valley, hunting down a flower called Sunset Bloom, a stubborn thing that only opened for a few hours each afternoon during a three-day window each season. Half a day of searching, most of it down to luck, but they'd hit the quota before the light gave out.
By the time they made it back into Northwind, dinner had already come and gone for most of the city. They found a small place off the main street, ordered more food than they probably needed, and settled in to actually enjoy a meal for once.