A few days passed since I got the system. I completed a few missions and spent most of my time cultivating. The false hopes faded somewhere along the way — I'd even been thinking of breaking through to tier 2 without drawing too much attention. Who was I kidding? By the time I actually got there, nobody would care because of how old I'd be. Didn't matter for now.
What mattered was the commission in front of me.
A cart headed for the Capital City. Standard escort work — the kind the Lin family built its name on. We were halfway there when the road ahead filled with figures blocking the path.
Bandits. Around a dozen, spread across the road like they owned it.
The steward climbed down and tried to negotiate, that particular stiffness in his back that men get when they're trying to look calm and aren't quite managing it.
"Fifty silver," he said. "That should be enough to let us pass, shouldn't it?"
The bandit leader looked at him the way someone looks at something they've already decided to take.
"Eighty percent of the worth of your goods."
"That's impossible! We can't do that, it's too much. The maximum we can go to is one hundred silver. That's thirty percent of the total worth."
"Eighty percent or you die. That's the only offer."
"You're crazy! This wasn't in the agreements we signed before!"
"Who cares about those?"
After that, there was nothing left to negotiate.
The bandits moved immediately — straight for the steward. Liam, one of the other guards, stepped in front of the strike without hesitating. Then they split their forces, trying to cut us down before reinforcements could arrive. The fight spread across the road, loud and messy, and most of the goods were lost in the chaos.
Liam didn't make it.
Reinforcements arrived eventually. No reset needed, but it was a complete disaster. The Lin family's biggest escort of the year, gutted. The goods were gone, the investors needed repaying, and the family didn't have that kind of money.
A week went by and the situation became worse and worse. Even my wage was postponed. I decided to leave at that point. This family had no future, and I wasn't going to stay. No saint, and no bond strong enough to change that.
After packing up, I spent some savings on a room at an inn near the capital and started looking for work. Eventually a job posting caught my eye — risky, but the reward was substantial. Enough money to live wasn't the problem. Funding cultivation was. I decided to try it.