Epic Of The Demonic Sage

Seeing the large object on the back of Doyle, both Lucius and Kiana became curious. They could see that the object was a beast but in the darkness, it was hard to see. Only when Doyle came really close did they manage to get a proper look.

"Huh, a wolf?" Kiana said.

~thud~

Doyle put the bloodied body of the wolf on the ground to show his master. Lucius got closed and saw the multiple claws marks that had tore into the beast's body and drawn out the blood and organs.

After thinking for a bit, Lucius recognized the beast in question.

"A long Fang wolf," Lucius stated. "It's an E ranked Rune beast found in the forest here." He added.

"So it's that one… I remember their fur is used for coats by the nobles." Kiana replied.

"Indeed, they are mostly used for their fur. But…" Lucius took a pause and bent down to insert his hand into the cut open chest of the Long Fang wolf.

He didn't mind the blood that stained his cuffs or fingers. Lucius searched around the chest of the beast for a minute before pulling out a perfectly circular crystal from it.

"Ah, the rune crystal of the Long Fang Wolf. Their gift is called as Piercing Fangs. It allows them to increase the power of their bites allowing them to tear through flesh and bones alike." Lucius explained.

Kiana heard his words, feeling impressed by it. But she still took out a napkin from her pockets and gave it to Lucius to clean his hands. The maid uniforms of this world were rather functional than just looks.

They had plenty of pockets to store tools and small pieces of equipment that they might need like napkins, brushes, sponges, combs, scissors, cleaning rags, spoons, and many more. Though all maids didn't carry all this of course.

They only carried the things that they most needed depending on the duties that were assigned to them.

"This will do perfectly…" Lucius said while looking at the rune crystal.

"What are you going to do with it?" Kiana questioned.

"Well, make artifacts of course," Lucius answered with a smile.

Kiana raised her brows upon hearing this.

"Your ready to make them?" Kiana asked.

"I haven't made any till now, but this gives me a point to start from. The other materials such as the metals and wood are not really hard to get and are reusable. What is more problematic to get are Aether crystals and rune crystals.

We can still get Aether crystals due to our new income stream, but a steady supply of rune crystals still needs mercenaries or soldiers to hunt them down. If we do assign others to procure rune crystals for us, we will need to pay them as well which will increase the cost of production.

But… if we get them for free, our profit margin basically doubles." Lucius explained and looked at Doyle.

Kiana also understood what he was trying to say and her eyes went wide.

"This… if we can really do this…" Kiana muttered.

"We can make a really good business out of it. And this will be something we will be able to keep out in open, unlike the brewery." Lucius spoke.

"So, we just need to hunt more rune beasts?" Kiana questioned.

While rune beasts and rune beast crystals were indeed profitable, the problem was always in their procurement. Most of the beasts that were valuable were hard to hunt and were even dangerous to most people.

One would need to their trap or kill them which needed skill, strength and equipment. All of which varied the cost greatly. Then there was also the factor that something could always go wrong and the hunter could die.

This was the reason why even if there were many mercenaries hunting, the costs of rune crystal and other beast materials stayed high. Plus there were some rune beasts that could not be hunted the conventional way and needed special strategies to do so.

Only experienced mercenaries could do this which further increased their charges. But for Lucius, he now had a solution for that.

"Doyle, go and hunt down as many of these beasts or other kinds you can find and bring their corpses here." Lucius ordered.

"HNG!!!" Doyle was quite excited and sped away rather quickly.

Lucius knew of the innate nature of a lost and the penchant for death and destruction they had. They were after all born from the influence of Hell energy and that is what transformed them.

Him sending out Doyle to hunt down beasts was the same as asking a child to go and play with their favorite toys. Lucius was simply sending Doyle to do what he was supposed to be doing naturally.

He sat back down on the broken tree and looked up at the starry sky. The moon was in a full bloom and spread its light far across the land.

"Today is a rare night with no clouds at all." Kiana spoke.

"Indeed. I haven't seen such clear sky in months now." Lucius replied.

The two of them waited there for about thirty minutes, after which they could hear the sound of Doyle once again. His footsteps were easy to distinguish for them now and his large figure was also visible against the streaks of moonlight that shone through the gaps in the trees.

"Eng!" Doyle came to a stop in front of them and dropped two Long Fang wolves before running back into the forest.

"Looks like he had a little snack as well…" Lucius said upon seeing the bite marks on one of the Long Fang Wolf corpses. "Well… it doesn't matter anyways." 

Kiana took out a dagger from her uniform and used that to take out the rune crystals from the body of the wolves while Lucius watched on. By the time they were done with it, Doyle had returned once again.

This time though he had something else in his hands.

"Oh my… what have you got here Doyle? A human?"