The Martial Unity

It was true that there were other people he could trick. There were other powerful merchants, such as the Cabinet Merchants of the Shionel Merchant Guild. These comprised the hundred most successful, powerful, and richest merchants and businessmen of the Shionel Confederation. These people possessed an immense amount of power and usually had private Martial Artists exclusively employed by them.

Yet there were very few that possessed the sheer scale that Rui was looking for to clear the fourteenth floor.

The two best candidates were Guildmaster Bradt and Chairman Deacon. These two people possessed the ability to quickly gather a huge number of Martial Squires and raid the dungeon swiftly and clear it. The rest were somewhat less reliable in his eyes.

('So either Guildmaster Bradt or Chairman Deacon have the be the victims of my little scam,') Rui mused.

Of the two of them, he was obviously more inclined to trick Chairman Deacon, but he wanted to make sure he considered all his options. Fortunately, the merits and demerits were obvious.

Guildmaster Bradt may not be a friend, but he was a working partner with mutual interests with Rui. They each had what the other sought, and they worked together to get what they wanted from each other. Rui was able to peacefully sell his harvests with zero hassles, with complete state-guaranteed anonymity so that people like Chairman Deacon couldn't just look at the Adventurer Guild registry and learn of Rui's identity and then send a million Martial Squires, or a single Martial Senior, to assassinate Rui.

Chairman Deacon was far from the only one who would love nothing more than to erase Rui's very existence itself. Rui had inadvertently pissed off pretty much the entirety of the supplier market not just in the Shionel Confederation but also the surrounding and participating nations of the Shionel Dungeon raid as well.

Without the bill that Guildmaster Bradt had passed, that amended the registration and verification protocols of the Shionel Merchant Guild and the Shionel Adventurer Guild, all these people would very easily be able to learn of Rui's identity, and then it was game over for Rui. No matter how potent his Martial Art was, at this stage, he had no chance of surviving the second his identity was revealed.

In the best-case scenario, he would essentially need to sell himself to the Kandrian Martial Union. The Martial Union was probably the only organization with the Martial and political power needed to protect him from the ire of all the surrounding countries. Although Rui would no doubt be on the blacklist of all these nations, none of them would dare fight the Martial Union just to kill him. Rui was not worth waging a war against one of the most powerful Martial organizations on the east side of the Panama Continent.

Still, Rui had willingly traded an accurate precise three-dimensional map of the Shionel Dungeon in exchange for the anonymity amendments. Guildmaster Bradt had basically drooled at the prospect of a map that could allow him to smoothly travel in and out of the Shionel Dungeon with complete and precise knowledge of what route he could take and what was where.

The two of them had a good working partnership, and although that matter was distinct from the matter of the fourteenth floor, Rui did not want to cause any bad blood to happen between them. It was just unwise, all things considered.

('That leaves us with our good old friend Deacon,') Rui smirked.

It was decided, he would use Chairman Deacon to do all the hard work for himself. The question was how he ought to go about executing such a plan. His goal was to get Chairman Deacon to try and monopolize the Shionel Dungeon, and invest energy into cutting the tree's branches down so that they could safely access the core.

Once he finished clearing all the branches, Kane and Rui could sweep by with Void Step, pluck the giant esoteric ore deposit and drop it into their dimensional storage, and then simply leave.

The issue was conveying the existence and location of the fourteenth floor to Chairman Deacon in an organic and unsuspicious manner. If he conveyed the information too blatantly, then it would certainly arouse the suspicions of Chairman Deacon and he would be extremely careful and cautious. If he simply sent Chairman Deacon an anonymous letter, that would instantly trigger all the warning bells in the head of someone as shrewd as Chairman Deacon.

Why would anyone give away such a treasure so easily for free? In what world did that make sense? Why was it sent anonymously through an unsigned letter?

Such questions would be flying through his head and in his paranoia he would most likely excessive time investigating. In his paranoia, he might even make different decisions that would conflict with the way Rui wanted things to go.

That was highly undesirable to Rui.

('Thus, I need him to come to learn of the fourteenth floor organically and naturally,') Rui decided. That meant he could absolutely not convey the information himself, that wouldn't really work out no matter the way he chose to go about it.

('The objectively best way to get him to organically come to learn about the fourteenth floor is by discovering it himself,')

Rui knew that Chairman Deacon had an entire department in his company dedicated to exploring and discovering new floors and places inside the Shionel Dungeon.

('If that department happened to stumble upon the fourteenth floor, then that would be the least suspicious way for him to have gotten access to that information,') Rui just needed to figure out a way to make that happen. The issue was how he ought to go about it. He knew that Deacon Industries dispatched exploratory teams into the dungeon in different directions hoping to run into new floors, the best option he could think of was to somehow manipulate one team into reaching the fourteenth floor. Though he hadn't yet figured out all the specifics.