After leaving the real state office, she went to the Association to pick up the bounty for investigating her own home. The place was twice as big as the branch in Tambrill and crowded. There were separate doors for entering and leaving the building and a third one, only the frame and larger for injured people only. She wondered if too many people were dragged out of the Dungeon in a poor state and brought here for healing.

Once again prudence demanded she left her guild members hidden inside the golem-drawn wagon. She was hating it but the prejudice was immense. She was inclined to claim a Kingdom only to make it a place to all races to live alongside one another. Not happening in at least the next hundred levels, she chided herself. Cless drew a few glances as she moved inside but nobody tried to stop or talk to her. Everyone was too busy with quests to complete and monsters to slay. Not hers, she hoped.

Cless found herself in a line waiting for the five clerks working on their booths to finish serving an adventurer to call in the next. She stood in line for twenty minutes until it was her turn.

"Welcome to Glauchester's Delver Association, how may I help you, miss?"

"Cless. I am interested in taking a bounty to investigate one of the town's properties. I was told it was not publicly available."

The clerk raised his eyes to meet hers. He gasped at her appearance but it was a reaction she was used to seeing. She smiled and waited for him to recompose himself.

"You are new here, aren't you? What property are you talking about?"

"The graveyard manor." She winced internally at the name of the place. Not much to do to make it change now.

"Sorry, that bounty is classified. I cannot just hand it over to any..." He stopped when Cless handed him a scroll even before knowing what it was.

"I believe you'll see in this document that I have all the right to take on that bounty. And this is my guild charter," She added in a low voice to avoid any eavesdroppers.

Guild masters had status. Any idiot with a crown coin to his name could buy a guild charter, but one would need to be that idiot. And her charter had the official accomplishments of her guild. Like exterminating a horde of orcs two thousand strong. Or doing the exploratory delve of a twelve-floor Dungeon. Or being the owner of the lands with said Dungeon. It was not the kind of publicity she wanted right now but she was sure the Glauchester branch already knew of the new Dungeon.

She was just putting her face on the deed.

After studying the document and the charter carefully, the clerk sighed. "I'm sorry for my behavior, guild master."

Cless waved a hand to dismiss it and just narrowed her eyes and tapped her foot as a sign that her patience was running short. She didn't need words. The clerk took off and returned after a few minutes with a piece of parchment with the investigation bounty. Cless studied the bounty and signed it, retrieving her papers and storing them in their waterproof reinforced scroll cases.

"Do I need to make the deposit?" She asked. High-paying bounties usually required a deposit equivalent of a tenth of the bounty. It was not returned but counted against the taxes owed upon completion.

"No, guild master. As you are the owner of the place, we are basically paying you to clean your own land." He answered sarcastically.

Yes, that was right. She was being paid to investigate and clean up her own land. But the bounty was useless without her consent, as the Association could not force people to allow adventurers into their properties. What the clerk was hoping for and the reason he was expecting a stern scolding was that they would use that as grounds to void the bounty and pocket the money. Too bad for them.

Cless returned to the wagon and drove it to her new home. The tall walls were covered with creepers and moss. They drove their wagon to the front gate of the manor, a set of crisscrossed rusted metal bars that might've gleamed under the sunlight one day. No more. The lawn beyond the gate was overgrown and most of the building they could see had broken windows and holes in the ceiling.

"Vampires." Venaris breathed out the word.

"Here be Vampires," Cless replied the gnome's unasked question.

Cless tried to open the gate padlock with the key she was given but the thing was so rusted her only option was to break in. She was invading her own house.

"We still have most of the day ahead, as long as we remain in sunlight there won't be much problem," Cless warned her guild as they crossed the gate and entered the property.

The grass had grown to monstrous proportions. Cless could hide standing up between the long blades. And with [Druidwalk] that was exactly what she did. The undergrowth parted for her to pass, returning undisturbed to its original place. After a short jaunt, she returned.

"Yes, this is too bad. The first order of business is to get rid of this overgrown shrubbery." And she had just the spell for that.

"Terrakinesis!"

Cless took control of a portion of soil half-meter deep and four hundred square meters wide. That seemed to be the limit of her magic for one casting of the spell. She then churned the soil and gravel, moving the layers of soil and smashing them against one another, pulling down the grass and the bushes and kneading the vegetation together with the soil. Ten minutes later, what she had was a patch of upturned soft soil with bits of green from the destroyed vegetation. If left on its own, the biomass would compost and fertilize the ground.

But she was not looking forward to farming. The patch of land her magic worked on was now clear of vegetation. Doing a quick calculation, Cless found out that she would need an entire day to do the whole place. She could spare the trees if she wanted to. She worked around the path leading to the front porch, clearing the land and moving the stones to assemble like cobblestones on the path and using stone shape to set them in place and to smooth the path.

After two more uses of Terrakinessis, there was enough room for the wagon. She ordered the golem to enter, noticing a few curious bystanders looking at them. She waved at them, prompting the townsfolk to go on with their lives and closed the gate, shaping a small hook of stone to hold the thing in place. Taking a good look and with a desire for privacy, she raised a thin sheet of stone to block the gate entirely.

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"Ok, everyone out!" She clapped her hands. "This land is ours and we are free to roam here. I'll clear up the lawn while you explore the building."

With three more sessions of Terrakinesis and Stone shape, the path to the front porch of the manor was cleared of weeds and restored. There was a water feature in the middle of the ring but it was cracked and dry. Whatever source of water it used long gone.

Up close, the sorry state of the building was even worse than expected. Termite mud tubes crisscrossed the entire structure. The ground floor had stone supports but the walls were wattle and daub. The second and third floors were all made of timber with wattle and daub walls painted white.

"We are using the sunlight to explore and salvage whatever is useable from the aboveground floors. Don't go to very dark places and feel free to break the walls if you have to. I don't think there will be anything useful in there."

The hardwood floor was cracked. The furniture ruined, huge cobwebs hiding the tall roof. This was once a nice place, luxurious even. Now it was a ruin, a deathtrap waiting to collapse on whoever dared disturb it. After searching the place for two hours, they found nothing besides dismay.

"Everyone out. I'm going to demolish this whole place and rebuild it with stone."

One of the reasons she wanted to explore it first was to get a good idea of the layout so she could use it with her [Architectural Ingenuity] Skill. After her guild explored the manor, Cless used earth magic to make a circular firepit ten meters deep by twenty meters in diameter. She created a ten by ten by five meters box with door and windows facing away from the manor and moved the wagon inside.

Handing a huge stone maul to the golem, she ordered the construct to begin the demolition and move the rubble into the pit, sparing the stone foundation and pillars.

She hid in the stone box with her guild and hung a sheet of fabric over the openings as the golem started to bring down the house. The cloud of dust and debris washed over them but Cless was not too worried. She just kept using Purify spells to remove the cloud of dust that insisted on entering through the gaps in the fabric. One long half of an hour later, they went outside. The manor was no more, only the stone brick pillars and foundations standing. The golem broke even the hardwood flooring of the ground level.

She could hear shouts from the front gate of the property but decided to ignore it for now. She shared [Perfect Might] with Kate and Shad and set the orders.

"Kate, Shad, Silverfang, and golem, you will move the burnable debris to the pit. Venaris, Vic, and Kurt keep a watch over the basement access. I sense our unwanted tenants of the living kind are coming up to investigate. Capture them, don't kill. I will keep mowing the overgrown lawn."

They set to work. The golem and Kate now had oversized shovels to push the debris across into the pit. Shad was breaking down troublesome pieces and Silvefang would just pick up them and toss it over to the pit. The rats and other occupants of the catacombs were busy running back and forth. With a range of 442 meters, she could see them moving around and used them to update her mental map of the underground. She could also sense a crowd outside her gates but decided to ignore them for now.

They worked for three hours until the sun started to creep down in the sky and paint the west in shades of orange and red. Nobody came up from the catacombs but a few guards jumped over the wall. Cless cleaned her clothes and went down the path to meet them.

"Greetings, gentlemen. How may I help you?" She went forward with a smile.

"You! Identify yourself and tell us what are you doing here!" They set their hands on the hilt of their swords.

Cless thought what to do but she was tired of a day of honest work. And they were trespassing, guards or not. She activated her fear aura and stood her ground.

"I am cleaning up my property, that is what I'm doing. As you can see, the front lawn is shrubbery-free." She opened her arms wide. "I advise the fine guardsmen to keep their distance though. You are trespassing."

They spoke some rude words and crossed the aura's boundary, immediately falling down to their knees. She deactivated it.

"Is something the matter?" She asked.

They stood up. "You dare attack—"

Another dose of fear aura. "I attacked no one, gentleman. What you are feeling right now is just the weight of my presence. I am the rightful owner of this land and the deed is here with me if you want to inspect it. You trespass into my land, threaten my life. I could end you now and get over with my day, or what's left of it.

"Let me tell you what is going to happen. You two are going to stand up now, and talk politely with me. If the request of the guard is an acceptable one, I'll see what I can do. Any disrespect will be dealt with accordingly, with you forfeiting everything. I hope you know what it means. Do we have an agreement?"

She dropped the fear aura and they stood up, wary of her. "Show us the deed."

"Here it is. Notarized and with the Lord's seal. Do take care. If you damage the document I'll have your heads and everything else you call yours."

She handed them the scroll with the deed but didn't bother to use her Skill. The guards read the deed and checked the date, handing over the document to her.

"Everything seems in order, milady." She raised an eyebrow at the sudden shift in treatment but just chortled.

"Well, is there any other business the guard has in my property?" She forced herself to ask haughtily, in an act to intimidate the guards.

"Did you have a demolition permit, milady? Since you seem to be new to the city, we require a permit to do demolitions. Some neighbors complained about the dust and noise."

So that's going to be their angle. Cless glanced back at the ruined manor and scoffed. "I didn't demolish anything. The place was in ruins and abandoned to the elements for over two decades, or so I was told. It crumbled on its own when we were inspecting the premises. I should be the one complaining because I was scammed. They told me the house was only 'in need of a few repairs'." She grumbled and stomped her feet.

The guards looked at each other and probably decided the trouble was above their pay grade. One of them meekly asked, "Milady, our captain is outside, could you open the gate?"

"Yes, of course. Lead the way."

The guards went in front of her. Cless lowered the stone wall and removed the hooks latching the gate in place. A man in his forties wearing plate armor was looking at her.

"Is this your captain, guardsmen?" She asked.

Before the guards could answer, the man pushed the gate and walked inside. He was visibly angry and moved in her direction, shoving the guardsmen aside. "Yes, I am the captain and you—"

She used [Fear Aura] again, glaring at the captain. The guards at the door and the two that entered went down on their knees, while the captain winced. Cless took notice of that. He was strong enough to resist her but not strong enough to ignore her aura. She turned it off.

Sensing that roleplaying the noblewoman would solve the problem faster, she talked down the guard captain. "You are trespassing my property, sir. I hope you have a good reason for that, captain." She could tell he was about to resort to violence. "And before you do something stupid with that sword of yours, I'd like to tell that what you just felt is a natural defense against hostile intentions I have. I am sure you don't want to devolve this situation into a brawl but I am on the right here. Once again, you are trespassing and unarmed."

He looked up and straightened himself. For a minute, he just stood there, evaluating Cless. He looked at his men and finally sighed. "Are you the owner of this place?"

"Yes, I am. Your men already inspected the deed. The house came down on top of myself as I was inspecting it. I have my guild clearing up the debris as we speak. I was scammed by the civil servant that sold me this property and will probably have to bivouac tonight. Is there something you can help me with, captain?"

He looked at the golem and slemuroth working in the distance. Silverfang kept his beastkin form so he was not standing out from this distance. The guard captain probably decided it was more trouble than what he'd like to deal with.

"I will file this as a false report. Good luck with the renovations, miss."

"It is guild master Cless of the Blind Eye delver guild, captain," she introduced herself offering her hand to shake. The captain caught it and felt her hundred-fifty Strength stat on his hand. It was the last push she needed to make him respect her as he even straightened his back. "Pleased to know the law enforcement here is so responsive. I'd invite you for a cup of tea, but I'm homeless."

"The pleasure is mine, guild master." He respectfully replied.

They left and she closed the gate with a sheet of stone again. With a sigh, Cless walked the cobblestone path back to the ruined manor.