On the wooden platform in front of Shang sat a young woman with long blue hair.
Her eyes were closed, and her feet were dangling in the water below. She was the Keeper, the Territory Lord, and the one responsible for providing all the Water Mana to the Yellow Sunbreaker.
She had obviously overheard the conversation just now, but she didn't care what everyone was talking about.
Everyone was here to do a job, and she only cared about dealing with the missions this branch got.
What her employees did in their downtime didn't concern her.
This branch of the Temple of Blood was a very small and specialized one.
Other branches had thousands of employees with different specialties and powers.
But this branch only had ten, and all of the Agents here were Named Agents with powers inside the Archmage Realm.
The reason why this branch was still small was that there weren't many humans located in the surroundings.
This branch was responsible for everything in the surrounding 10,000 kilometers or so, but since there were no big cities in this place, there weren't that many missions.
However, this was a profitable wilderness, and many High Mages and Archmages were using this wilderness to build their wealth.
So, even though the missions were few, the money to be gained here was big.
Maybe this was an additional reason why the Territory Lord decided to stay here?
In the other branches, she might have been bothered more, while she didn't get bothered in this one.
"The mission is complete," Shang said.
"I've heard," the Keeper said without turning away from the lake. "News has already gotten out. Good job."
SHING!
After stretching out her left hand to the side, something appeared inside of it.
Five tiny dark blue crystals were in her hand.
When House Wife and Trapper saw the Mana Crystals, they took a deep breath.
They knew that this was the reward, but it was still impressive to see so much money appear in front of them.
If they got that, they wouldn't need to work for decades.
These five Mana Crystals were just a couple of meters away from them, but they knew that it was impossible for them to claim them.
Even if they could kill White Ghost, there would still be the Keeper.
Five Grade Six Mana Crystals!
One Grade Six Mana Crystal was the Mana an Initial Ancestral Mage could produce in one year.
That was a lot of Mana!
These five crystals represented an Ancestral Mage working for five years to condense and store Mana.
Mana Crystals counted as the general currency for High Mages and above.
The reason why they had been chosen as a currency was that every single Mana Crystal needed a lot of work to be created and that they could be used for nearly everything.
They could power Magic Circles, barriers, Foci, be converted into artificially grown natural treasures, be crushed to increase the density of Mana around someone, and so on.
Mana could be used for basically everything, and these Mana Crystals represented a fixed amount of Mana.
And five Grade Six Mana Crystals were a lot of money!
It was no surprise that House Wife and Trapper were that interested in Shang's reward.
House Wife's espionage missions and singular assassinations gave her some Grade Five Mana Crystals each, but it needed a thousand of those to create a Grade Six Mana Crystal.
An Initial Archmage would need to condense Mana for 1,000 years to create a single Grade Six Mana Crystal.
These five Grade Six Mana Crystals represented around 250 missions for House Wife, which came to several years of work.
Trapper could earn more money than House Wife since he targeted very powerful Archmages, but there weren't that many Mid and Late Archmages in this location, which meant that he didn't have that many missions.
These five Grade Six Mana Crystals represented around ten missions for him.
Yet, White Ghost got that much money from just a single mission.
However, House Wife and Trapper knew that this mission couldn't have been easy.
The mission had been to completely eliminate the Martis Family, one of the prolific gathering families in the surroundings.
Gatherers were powerful Mages that ventured into the wilderness to bring valuables back to civilization and sell them.
This wilderness this branch of the Temple of Blood was responsible for was only one wilderness amongst many in the Natural Selection Company's territory.
The Natural Selection Company was the renter of the surrounding 100,000 kilometers.
While all of the land for millions of kilometers around belonged to the illustrious Twilight Dusk Family, one of the ten rulers of the entire world, they couldn't be bothered with micromanaging every single centimeter of their territory.
Organizations of the Twilight Dusk Family's caliber were only interested in high-end Ancestral Mage materials and stronger.
Territories that didn't deliver such quality goods were rented out to companies specializing in making money out of these territories without damaging their profitability and longevity.
The Natural Selection Company was renting around a tenth of the Twilight Dusk Family's weaker territories, and they had three Mage Lords.
The Temple of Blood's Territory Lord was also responsible for that territory.
The Natural Selection Company was then contracting gatherers to harvest the territories according to the company's rules and methods.
Many of these gatherers operated solo normally, but there were also big groups of gatherers that could manage a vast territory effectively.
These big groups were called gatherer families, and the Martis Family had been one of them.
To summarize, the Twilight Dusk Family allowed the Natural Selection Company to harvest around a tenth of their lower territories in exchange for money, and the Natural Selection Company employed several gatherer families to harvest these territories.
And Shang's job had been to eliminate one of these gatherer families.
That was an insanely difficult mission!
House Wife and Trapper knew that they couldn't have done that.
Sure, they had the power to kill all the Mages, but that wasn't the problem.
The problem was to kill all of them without letting even one of them escape and to finish the deed before an Enforcer could arrive.
These were two different problems with contradicting solutions.
To solve the first problem, one needed a lot of time.
To solve the second problem, one couldn't use a lot of time.
Additionally, the chances of death if the Agent failed were very high.
Most of the time, the Agents could just retreat if they failed a mission, but not this time.
This time, failure meant that an Enforcer had arrived, and that could only end in the Agent's death.
Enforcers were the people responsible for managing all the different gatherer families and enforcing the Natural Selection Company's rules.
The gatherer families were supposed to work together, not against each other, and Enforcers acted as a form of police.
Enforcers were directly employed by the Natural Selection Company, and they were all Late Archmages, at least.
Trapper might be able to take down an Enforcer if he got the chance to follow one of them for several weeks and set up an ambush, but he would immediately die to one without preparation.
House Wife would also die.
And Shang?
Same thing.
Shang could take down an Early Archmage comfortably, but a Mid Archmage would pose a huge problem to him.
A Late Archmage would just kill him.
So, even though Shang had received a lot of money today, he had definitely earned it.
