It took a total of one year and four months for Apolo to finally finish furnishing his house, spending practically all the crystals he had obtained from his first sponsorship as a magician. The task was monumental because he had to furnish each of the 1555 rooms in the mansion with an interesting and appealing theme. However, with money available, anything was possible, and as long as money wasn't scarce, the task could progress. The real problem arose when crystals started running low, as unfortunately, Apolo found it impossible to complete the task using only the sponsorship he had received. But thanks to the Ministry of Urban Affairs showing great interest in Apolo's "research", the young noble managed to obtain some crystals to expand his budget by accepting various furniture items that for some reason, no one else wanted. For instance, when he solved the minor issue in the city's cemeteries dealing with the deceased from the blue plague epidemic that had been spreading for the past few decades in the Ring City. Sadly, his dungeon had become overcrowded with contaminated coffins, creating a rather unhealthy work environment for his servants. But in the noble's mind, these were mere details easily solved: Luckily, the Ring City never lacked people desperate for "easy" crystals!

This was what happened during the first ten months, when there were still proposals with the Minister of Urban Affairs, who had noticed that Apolo didn't mind filling his mansion with infected corpses, thus solving a rather serious problem for the empire with a very limited budget. In this way, the young noble managed to finish filling the rooms in the dungeon and a large part of the basement.

The truth was that as the months passed, Apolo became increasingly specialized in the field of "scrap" collecting, making it easier for him to obtain various types of furniture almost for free. And this specialization began to bear fruit from the first year of work in the mansion, inspiring Apolo to come up with great ideas that led to significant progress in his first major task. For example, he started taking furniture from houses that needed to be demolished due to the passage of time or "buying" furniture from a deceased person with no heirs who had left their house abandoned in the Ring City for a long time.

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These ideas allowed him to save his already scarce crystals for the first two months of the year. But Apolo flatly refused to use the sponsorship money for the second year, mainly because he was close to furnishing all the rooms. If he spent the second-year budget, he would end up with a furnished house but without the money to buy the expensive creatures, which was ultimately the reason he had spent so much on furnishing the house. Therefore, Apolo had never gone to collect the second sponsorship until today.

Instead, he found an incredibly good and cheap alternative to fill the house; unfortunately, he had discovered it too late, and that alternative was none other than: theft! While the young man had long accepted buying stolen furniture, it was only in the last two months that he had started organizing a group of thugs to steal what he specifically wanted. The modus operandi was quite complicated: first, the rogues had to find an old and not very active house, then gather information about the person living in that house. If that person met the condition of being an old person without children, then that was reason enough to mark them as interesting. Next, the thugs would enter the house and make the old person disappear. Then, an official-looking document would appear, attesting that the house had been inherited by a nobleman named Apolo from the Black Forest. With this scheme, Apolo had taken over no fewer than 100 houses in the last two months. The big secret for all of this to work were two major factors: money and connections. Money came from selling the houses, or rather, the precious furniture they held, and connections came from the only ministry responsible for managing the houses in the Ring City: the Ministry of Urban Affairs.

However, the minister was not involved in this scheme; Apolo only operated in the poor neighborhoods of the Ring City and didn't need someone as important, so only two people knew about this maneuver: one was the recently deceased from the blue plague, Narciso from the Red Seas, a young and unfortunate scribe who worked at the ministry, and the other person in charge was the recently disappeared Antonio from Distant Towns, a property seller from the main fourth street. The rest of the participants were the thugs, although they didn't know the complete scheme, and at this point in the plan, Apolo had kindly given them a new life away from crime by getting them jobs at the Ministry of Urban Affairs as assistants in the construction of the revamped cemeteries in the Ring City, which apparently always needed new personnel.