The Author's POV - Chapter 217

“Come, Ren, Lunch is ready”

Whilst I Was conversing with Angelica, I suddenly heard my mother’s voice calling me from all the way down to the kitchen.

“Coming!”

With a smile on my face, I headed to the kitchen.

Arriving at the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table was my father reading the newspaper. Smiling at him, I greeted him who greeted me back with a warm smile. Following this, I sat down and ate lunch with my parents.

For the next few hours or so, we just talked and caught up.

…

Manticore building, Lock.

8:00 P.M.

“So you’re saying that he contacted you?”

Standing by the edge of my balcony, I held my phone in my ear. Smallsnake’s voice rang out from the phone’s speaker.

‘?Yes he did

“…and, what did he say?”

‘?He agreed

“Agreed to the terms we offered in the contract?”

‘?Pretty much

“I see, I guess the fact that I was all over the news helped out in a way”

Almost half a year had passed since I had last come into contact with Ryan. Finally, after patiently waiting for that long, he contacted us.

With my face all over the news, and after having ‘observed’ us for a while, Ryan had finally decided to accept the offer that I had proposed to him.

Ah, when I said ‘observe’ us, I meant what Smallsnake allowed him to observe. Despite Ryan’s genius, he was in no way capable of hacking our system.

The only reason he could hack into our system before was because I had told Smallsnake to go easy on him.

Plus, he didn’t really have the best equipment to work with. It wasn’t that hard for Smllsnake to stop him.

‘?But we’ve got a problem…

Unfortunately, right before I could rejoice, Smallsnake poured cold water over me. As a result, my eyes narrowed. After a bit of thought, I instantly understood what problem Smallsnake was referring to.

“It’s his age right?”

‘?Yeah, he’s a bit too young. Ashton city law says that he needs to be at least fourteen before he can work.

“Hmm, that indeed sounds like a problem”

I placed my hand on my chin and fell into thought.

His age was indeed going to be a problem since according to the law in Ashton city, kids below the age of 14 couldn’t legally work. With Ryan being 12, I knew that this was going to be a problem.

‘?I do have a solution though.

Fortunately, Smallsnake seems to have thought things through. My eyes lit up as a result.

“What do you suggest?”

‘?Why don’t we just take him in as a trainee.

“A trainee?”

‘?Yes, we can use the excuse of teaching him how mercenary businesses work to bypass the law. At least until he turns fourteen.

My brows knit.

Indeed. If we took Ryan as a trainee instead of an official member, taking him under our wing wouldn’t be a problem.

Furthermore, this worked in my favor since he still needed to learn a lot.

“I see, that makes sense”

‘?Ah! Regarding his payment, we can just set up a separate account with the money already inside. We can just give it to his mom, or let him have access to it.

Since we couldn’t directly give him the money, this was the most appropriate method. Super suspicious but with Smallsnake being the one who handled everything, there shouldn’t really be any problems.

After all, I’m sure he had his ways. I trusted him.

‘?Should I go ahead?

“Yes go ahead…ah, by the way, Smallsnake, how much money do we have left in our funds?”

Vaguely nodding my head, I suddenly recalled something and asked him about the money situation. In response, Smallsnake’s voice became slightly troubled.

‘?Right, I almost forgot. We’re almost out of money. Everything else aside, we’ve only got 5 million U left.

“I figured…”

‘?I presume you’ve got this problem solved no?

“Yeah, I in fact do have a solution to this problem…”

‘?Great, whilst you figure the money thing out, I’ll settle the things with Ryan.

“Sure”

‘?Tak!

Pressing the red button on my screen, I hung up the call with Smallsnake. Staring at the blue sky, I exhaled.

“Haaa…I’m poor again”

After the trip to Immorra and after spending my money on a couple of other things, my bank account was almost empty.

Just when I thought I had enough money it quickly ran out…

Suddenly I looked at my bracelet and sighed.

‘Right, I guess it’s about time I sold the items I got from Immorra’

Walking back towards my room, I made my way towards my desk. Tapping onto my bracelet, multiple objects quickly appeared on the table.

‘?Fwu!

“Let’s see…”

Overall, the number of items on my desk was quite a lot. I needed to carefully check the uses of each one of them through the status window before me.

‘?Clank! ‘?Clank!

“Useless…useless…hmm, this should be fine…useless”

Staring at the multiple items on the desk, I quickly separated the useful items from the useless items. Since some of the items could only be used by orcs, they were naturally useless for me.

“Pheww, this should be it”

After ten minutes of sorting, I wiped the sweat that had accumulated on my forehead. At the moment, there were three different piles before me.

The useful pile, the useless pile, and the ‘I don’t know pile’. With the ‘I don’t know pile’ being the one that contained items which I wasn’t sure whether they could be useful for me or not.

‘?Clank!

Quickly putting the useless and I don’t know pile back in my bracelet, I stared at the last

Surprisingly there were a lot more useful items than I had expected. However, despite this, they were still far less than the other two piles.

At the moment, there were twelve items, of which four especially stood out to me.

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Name : Hand of Malice

Rank : D

Description : A glove that enables the user to increase strength stat by two minor sub-ranks.

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Name : Mother’s kiss

Rank : N/A

Description : Powerful venom that is capable of dissolving the internal organs of the target upon ingestion. Can work on ranked creatures and below.