I settled into a routine while living in the port city. I would wake up before dawn and practice forming magic rituals before having breakfast with the princess in the mess hall of the lodge. Followed by a stroll to the workshop I had hired nearby to craft some things. For lunch, I would go to a local fish restaurant that had mastered the art of grilling over an open flame before strolling into the adventurers guild to collect any materials gained during the day. Dinner was a random event where I tried the many varied foods from around the world, some were good and others horrible. Lastly, I would return to the lodge for a few beers with the locals and stumble into bed.
The princess was busy networking and almost never needed my attention as with her level and poison, she was more than capable of handling herself, honestly, she could kill this entire city with the toxicity her poison had reached. Her biggest gain was trading the second princesses heirloom weapon for a favour. The sword in question was far too ornate for it to ever be used without being recognised and was made from kinda crap materials. Even if I did want to wave the shiny beatstick around, its power was tied to consuming the royal families blood making it worse than what I could make. My complete lack of training in swordplay only further decreased its appeal.
I slowly found myself relaxing, crowing accustomed to living a mundane life. With my current strength, there was nothing to really threaten me unless I sought it out. Sure, I could get stronger on this world but I was currently an elite powerhouse. If it was not for the ticking time bomb in my chest I would have probably just spent a few years like that, lost in normality. Two weeks of living a mundane life had still produced results, I had managed to build a biochemical mutation pod.
The device looked like a two-metre tall one-metre high glass tube filled with a viscous green liquid that would not be out of place on a technologically advanced planet or in a science fiction story. The costs involved in its creation combined with the mass purchase of bioforms from the tower dungeon actually managed to put a dent into my gold supply. Using the device, I would be able to gestate a suit of living armour superior to anything available on this planet and sufficient to survive in space long enough to find a Void Tardigrade.
Throwing the dungeon materials into the liquid through a hatch located at the top along with some potions created by the princess, the planetary flame to act as a core until a better battery could be found and the liquid Mythril to act as a supporting agent, I watched as it dissolved into a grey soup. The process itself was as simple as it would be time-consuming. The device would first form a humanoid shell out of the Mythril threads around the planetary flame core. This would act as the nervous system and heart for the living armour. It would then force the living metal extracted from the bioforms to mutate around the main structure, essentially growing metallic muscle over a skeleton.
The process would normally take around ten years and even under the effects of my time dilation field would require more than a year. The hardest part was that living metal had instincts of its own, a desire to take a certain shape or refusal to interact with another piece. Every time something went wrong, it would need to reliquify the living metal and begin again. I can only explain it as trying to do a jigsaw puzzle while the pieces can change shape and some are magnetically repelled.
Like a kid on Christmas, I was overly excited when the princess asked to visit my workshop. She had been wondering what I was doing with all the potions I had her make. Her reaction was fantastic! Just like showing an alien technology to a commoner, she freaked out exclaiming, "What the hell is that?!" with a priceless look upon her face. The best part is she believed my technobabble about flux capacitors and resonance cascades. After she left, I spent a good half hour laughing my ass off.
Deciding to play it safe, I purchased the workshop at a ludicrous price before sealing it under multiple barriers, the outermost two being a mana sense shielding and a sensor perception illusion. People would see the building but forget it the moment they looked away. It was subtle mind magic that, instead of changing a persons memory simply prevented them from creating a memory of a place or object in the first place. With a six month pie in the oven, I had completed everything I needed to in this city and whatever request had not been completed by the adventurer guild would not be able to be done in short order.
While I might have finished my objectives, the princess had not. Who would have thought that setting up a globe-spanning intelligence and trade network would take more than a few weeks? Deciding to try and help, I asked her what I could do during our daily breakfast meeting. I swear she gave me the same look I gave her when she asked about my workshop.
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Pulling out a leather-bound ledger, the princess began to list a series of names. I knew from my own investigations that these people were underworld figures that required a little more punching and a little less talking to deal with. I came to the conclusion that she intended to use me like a hammer to force their cooperation. Oh, how wrong I was. While I was busy playing mad scientist, the princess had poisoned every major figure in the criminal underworld and was supplying them with the counter venom required to keep them alive. The list was not people to deal with, it was a list of slaves she wanted me to oversee.
I resolved never to piss off this little girl because she made was more gangster than a mob boss. Walking into an abandoned warehouse on the outside of the city, I met with the three underworld leaders. Originally there had been six but the ones responsible for child slave trading, drug trafficking and kidnapping had been buried. What remained was an old dracon woman who ran the cities brothels, an old dracon man who was involved in theft, money laundering and the like with the last member being a young elf that dealt with assassination.
Taking my human appearance, I began telling them the princesses orders as well as my own. The plan from her highness was to set up a trading system to allow those supporting her access to weapons and supplies. Mine was to abuse their connections to find any other humans. Turns out mine was as easy as it was depressing. After experimentation, everyone involved in the failed summoning event had been lobotomised and sold off as labour slaves, one of them was even working the fields in a town an hour away from the port. I couldn't help but think, "So much for my daring rescue. Yet again, I'm too late."
Dealing with the underworld was relatively easy since the princess had already killed the ones who would not follow orders and those she deemed as too sinful. The combination of poison and penance stare was enough to bring almost anyone to their knees. Alas, despite having the crime lords following orders, not every criminal was part of the underworld or under their control. It became apparent why the princess had passed the baton to me as I spent most of my time enforcing her will, chasing down those from other cities and fending off takeover attempts from other regional lords.
Meanwhile, the princess had been busy setting up several companies with a portion of the loot I had given her. She used an apothecary as cover and sold rare and expensive potions created through her class while creating trade pacts specifically designed to stop her kingdom haemorrhaging money. Surprisingly the best selling item was not an improved healing potion nor was it a temporary stat booster, it was the beautification pill.
These wonderful items actually used poison to force the skin to renew itself while using a potion to supplement the needed minerals and healing magic to generate fresh stem cells. While it only worked on the skin you could say it was literally de-ageing. Being the only one capable of making these pills opened a lot of doors to the rich and powerful through either their vanity or their wives. The fact it worked overnight and was immediately apparent made it a hot item and our master of assassins could only laugh at the number of fools who applied to have her eliminated or captured.
Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. I had become known as the 'high crime lord' and expanded into the neighbouring countries while the princess had become known as 'the miracle' able to return youth and heal almost any disease. It was comical to us as we were both disguised as different people and these reputations would collapse when we left. Neither of us had wasted our time though as the princess could now mix poisons or poisons on demand and I had memorised hundreds of spell rituals allowing for true instant casting.
Having set everything we could in motion, we performed a play. Having an angry dracon from the Narith empire kill 'the miracle' was the best way to stoke animosity towards them in high society so she was 'eliminated' shortly after publicly refusing a request from their king. The delegate unwittingly played along cursing her and yelling that, "She would regret this decision." The next day her 'body', which was that of a middle-aged dracon woman, was found floating in the port.
Rallying the princess on the same morning, we boarded a boat and began our trip back to the tower dungeon to hit level fifty and acquire the life pearl I had been unable to purchase. The change of plans was brought about after learning more about the wild lord. While normal people could enter the wild lands easily, anyone truly strong or with a unique class would be detected and hunted down by its monstrous master. With our hunting location being a bigger risk than reward due to us both falling into a targeted category, we decided to double back and grind the undead.
Unlike our other trips on the ocean, there was no attack or problems and without the oracle, I could once more pretend to be an elf. Drinking a nice wine and fishing while served by numerous waiters on a high-end cruise ship was an incredibly relaxing way to spend a few days of travel. We even managed to make good time due to a constant headwind, courtesy of yours truly.
After having lived the high life of a crime boss, I had become accustomed to having underlings. The best part was that these ones did not want to stab me in the back. Once more we pulled into the Isle of Mages dock, filling out their compulsory paperwork and renting the same house. We did have to pay extra to evict the residents but problems that could be settled with money could not be considered problems. The reason we selected the same house was to save time recalculating the dungeon coordinates as we could just dig up the buried gate.