“So what do you think of this skill of mine that allows me to open a window to another dimension and steal their art? I know that it’s a viable business because our family earned a lot of coins from what we call “movie goers” while we were on the ship, even though we only charged very little because of the lack of funds of the passengers.”
“What was your business model, and how many movies have you stolen so far?” The butler, Mr. Jenkins, asked.
Anton liked the straightforwardness of the butler. He was finding out that he liked the no-nonsense attitude when it came to employees.
“Source materials are not the ones that you can have any issues with. I have thousands upon thousands of them, from every genre imaginable, including love stories, action, adventure, horror, drama, and even genres you haven’t heard of. I copied the business model from the dimension where they came from. Typically, a movie will be shown in a cinema, much like this ballroom that you have prepared, for about a month to a maximum of two months, but those movies were shown in thousands of cinemas. When we were on the ship, we showed our customers new movies every two weeks.”
“It’s a viable and lucrative business. Your family can purchase a building and build it into a high-class theater. If all of your movies have the same quality that we just recently saw, your family will earn tons of coins, and you don’t have to think about other businesses that will support your family. This alone is enough,” Mr. Jenkins said, and looking at Ronia and Torbin, they appeared to agree with the butler as well.
“The decision to continue this business will rest on my father. Once he arrives from New Drennor, a lot of the things here in the manor will rest on his shoulders. I know that it’s me being lazy, but to be honest with you, I don’t like to bother with such things. Now, the second part of what we need to talk about is a cinema viewing room. Please prepare one of the larger rooms in the manor to be a dedicated movie viewing room, since my family likes watching movies. I want to have a room that’s comfortable and beautiful, so please use Ms. Orwells expertise. Since the cinema room will be exclusive for family and guests, it doesn’t need to accommodate a lot of people. Up to 50 people are enough. Tomorrow, I will be returning to delving into the dungeon. I’ll be back in three or four days.”
“Before you rest, I wanted to ask if you want us to purchase magical defenses for the manor,” Mr. Jenkins asked.
The question intrigued Anton. If he was being honest with himself, his magical proficiency was severely lacking when it came to permanent magical defenses. That type of magic involved arrays and runes, and he didn’t have the slightest knowledge about them.
“Is it very important? There’s nothing too valuable in the manor right now for powerful bandits to turn their eyes on it. I’m carrying all of the family treasure with me. Is Ormunda’s security for this place not enough?”
“For general security purposes, Ormunda’s peace officers are enough. Normally, though, the truly wealthy family will have treasures in their manor, and they were usually protected by magic. But you are correct, Anton. You haven’t stored anything valuable in here yet. It’s just that Torbin told me that you have hundreds, and they might even number in the thousands now, of valuable magic items that you have gathered from the high-level dungeon,” Raymond Jenkins said.
“Yes, I have a lot of those, but I plan to continue carrying them for everyone’s safety. Right now, I think the guards that you hired are enough for the manor’s security.”
Anton then asked if the letters had already been sent, and after the butler said that they were, he went to his room to rest. While taking a bath, Anton thought of the cinema business. He wondered if it was safe to continue doing that sort of thing. What if a powerful Invincible Wizard became interested in knowing about his “window to another dimension” and tried to accost him to learn more about it? He remembered the terror that he and his family had felt when they had learned that the Invincible Wizard Katrina became interested in his ability to allow mundane folks to learn magic and didn’t care about his family’s survival as long as she learned how Anton did it.
He knew that that was a very important thing that he should research before they established that business. Anton knew that he was returning to his usual naïve behavior of trusting everyone too much about his abilities. He decided not to show any more movies, not until he learned a lot about Ormunda’s Wizards' behavior regarding this particular ability.
The next day, he left for the Corridors of Amuneta after saying goodbye to his employees. Before he slept the night before, Anton had decided to run through the 20th floor of the high-level dungeon for the sole purpose of gathering coins. He only had 8400 gold coins left in his Adventurers Guild bank card. Even though he was not worried about coins since he still had more than a hundred thirty something of high-level mana stones, he liked knowing that there was a huge number of coins in his bank card. The good thing about running the upper floors, like the 20th floor, was, he could run it while resting on top of his Dire Bear inside a comfortable mini-tent cooled by his Frozen Orb air conditioner while his summons killed all the monsters and collected all the loot. Not only that, while he was running the dungeon, he could also focus on leveling up his ladder Amazon character.
Another good thing about running the upper floors was, it would usually take him just a day to complete it. That meant that in three or four days, he could run the same dungeon floor three or four times, which would earn him an unimaginable amount of coins. Once he had gathered enough coins to be comfortable in blowing some of it on his manor’s expenses, then he could focus on conquering the more difficult lower-level floors.
When Anton arrived at the Corridors of Amuneta after a few hours, he went to the Adventurer Guild to request the 20th floor dungeon key.
The guild staff looked surprised.
“We thought that you would be requesting the key to the 60th floor.”
“I need coins. The lower floor was to challenge my ability, but since I only need coins for now, the upper floors will allow me to earn coins more easily and faster.”
The guild employee gave him the dungeon key for the 20th floor, and he queued in line again. As usual, there was a line in front of the entrance, and his presence garnered some attention again, especially when they learned that he was delving the dungeon alone. Anton felt a little amused and a little touched that most adventurers in the line were concerned about him diving alone, but their reactions were the same when he informed them of how many times he had completed the floors of the dungeon and how low he had been able to reach.
Anton received a lot of invitations to join groups. He had to reiterate several times that he was not planning to join any adventurer groups for now.