Kyle and the undisguised Chief entered the empty mine.
Naturally, Kyle told his team not to come to the mine today since the Chief's identity had to be kept a secret.
Chances were, if anyone watched in secret, the Chief would notice and kill them.
Of course, Kyle didn't want that to happen.
"Show me the first one," the Chief said after the two entered the mine.
"Right this way," Kyle said, leading the Chief deeper into the mine.
They walked down a long and narrow tunnel until they reached the end.
"About 100 meters or so in this direction," Kyle said, pointing at a spot on the wall.
The Chief put his hand onto the spot and closed his eyes.
"My ore sense isn't advanced enough to sense the Earth Elemental," he said.
"Wait, I can make the tunnel a bit bigger," Kyle said.
"No need," the Chief said as he moved his sword.
Kyle watched the sword move.
It looked magical.
He saw afterimages, and it looked like the sword was barely moving.
And yet, just an instant later, it was inside the wall.
"It just needs to sense that we are here," the Chief said as he pulled his sword out again.
Kyle waited.
Sure enough, moments later, his instincts warned him of extreme danger.
The walls started to move, but as soon as they came close to Kyle or the Chief, they stopped moving.
Naturally, the Chief had used Soul Cancel.
Some seconds later, one of the walls started to move again.
The Chief's sword left a silver trail in the air.
The wall stopped moving.
"Next one," the Chief said.
Kyle took a deep breath.
'Holy shit! He barely did anything, and the Earth Elemental is dead!'
"Sure thing!" Kyle said, leading the Chief to the next Earth Elemental.
Just like before, the Chief killed the Earth Elemental without trouble.
Within just an hour, all seven Earth Elementals died.
"Those are all the ones we have access to at this moment," Kyle said. "There should be more, but we haven't been able to find them yet."
The Chief nodded. "Focus on mining the Elemental Hearts. I'm not doing this for free."
"Of course!" Kyle said. "Expect the first ones within a week."
Naturally, the Chief would get all of the Elemental Hearts.
All seven Elemental Hearts together were worth over ten Ether Gems.
For an hour of work, this was a lot of money.
The Chief left the mine and went back to his office while Kyle called Lily.
"The Earth Elementals are dealt with," he said. "Make sure not to damage the Elemental Hearts. They are no longer ours, and I don't want to tell the person who killed the Earth Elementals that they are not going to get their reward."
When Lily heard that, she almost smiled.
Almost.
Finally, she could go wild in the mine!
Within the next days, Lily started to dig deeper into the ground.
Generally, the deeper one dug, the more valuable the ore became.
However, there were also more Earth Elementals.
But for now, she didn't need to care about those.
Lily didn't know who was finding the Earth Elementals without being attacked or who was actually killing them, but that didn't matter.
What mattered was that she was going to become rich!
Money!
More golems!
Lily harvested a ton of ore, and Kyle found more and more of his days being consumed by refining ore.
The ore also became more valuable as time passed, and Kyle found that refining the ore was no longer as easy as before.
The methods of refining ore were highly guarded, and refiners needed to purchase the method of refining ore.
Alternatively, they could just use trial-and-error, but that was often more expensive than just buying the method.
Fortunately, Kyle had a free encyclopedia constantly berating him inside his head.
The only thing Lily's golems were doing was carrying the big chunks of unrefined ore to Kyle.
Suddenly, Kyle heard a loud gong from outside the mine.
"Oh, almost forgot!" Kyle said as he ran out of the mine.
As he jumped out of the big hole, he saw a huge wagon pulled by two huge beasts.
"Hey, Kyle!" a Mid Fighter beside the wagon shouted.
The Early Fighter was a leader of one of the teams in the Stark Brotherhood.
"Sup?" Kyle asked before looking at another person beside the wagon. "Here for the weekly delivery?"
The man smiled. "It's time to make some more money," he said with a laugh.
Kyle also laughed. "Give me a second."
Kyle went back into the mine and told Lily to transport his ore outside.
Lily snorted, but some of her golems went over to Kyle's pile of refined ore and transported it out of the mine.
Several people inspected every chunk of ore and made notes.
After they made their notes, they put the ore onto their wagon.
"That's an even bigger haul than last week," the man said with a smile.
"Things are going well," Kyle said.
"I can see," the man said.
Next, Kyle pulled out a piece of paper from one of his pockets and handed it to the man.
"We got lucky with the sales," the man said, pulling out 19 Ether Stones and handing them to Kyle.
"Nice," Kyle said, pocketing them.
The sheet of paper Kyle had handed over was an estimated price for last week's delivery, which said that it would most likely be worth 16 Ether Stones.
The two of them signed a couple of sheets of paper before Kyle got a new estimated price for this week's delivery.
"28 Ether Stones," Kyle said.
"As I've said, it's a good haul," the man said with a laugh.
"Looking forward to it," Kyle said.
'The money-printer is working just fine,' Kyle thought.
The Millards got 20 Ether Stones per month.
Lily got a ton of ore per month.
The Chief got Elemental Hearts.
The Guild would get a weekly mission to escort the ore transport.
The ore merchant in Brineshore got a lot of ore he could sell.
Selene got a couple of Ether Stones for her scouting.
And Kyle had a revenue of about 80 Ether Stones every month, with around 50 of those being pure profit.
Everyone was earning money.
Everyone was benefiting.
'Capitalism, ho!' Kyle thought.
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