Rigel went to Atlantis to discover the "treasure", but as he expected, it was nothing useful, just some tears that a mermaid had kept.
Rigel took advantage of being there and discussed the use of the island with Tamara. Tamara didn't mind Rigel and Calypso's presence, even the women were acceptable, but the men couldn't enter. Since Rigel had promised the City of Atlantis to the mermaids, he didn't go back on his word and left the city to them. In the end, Rigel simply submerged the city, keeping it underwater, so the mermaids wouldn't be disturbed even if other people came to the island.
In truth, the mermaids even wanted to take Rigel as their king after witnessing his power, his transformation into a Merman, and his singing ability. Unfortunately, Rigel wasn't interested in ruling the mermaids. At most, he might accept the title, which would increase his fame throughout the world.
The mermaids considered him a patron, with Rigel promising to help them in their need, and while Rigel could use the title of King of the Mermaids to enhance his legend in this world, everyone left happy.
Knowing he could not use Atlantis as a base, anticipating problems between the mermaids and the pirates, Rigel used the power of the crown and control of the Central Pearl to build his own city on the opposite coast from the mermaids.
The city was built of white stone, but Rigel was not as ostentatious as the Greeks, he merely created an ordinary city to house the pirates and their future subordinates.
Calypso seemed interested in the project and decided to help. The two spent several days building while the pirates were still focused on the gold. Now that Rigel could control the animals, he made sure they wouldn't bother the pirates.
Extracting so much gold could take decades or even centuries, but none of the pirates were complaining, they were all excited to leave the island and spend their wealth. They also received help from larger animals to carry the gold to the coast.
Rigel knew that if he didn't stop them, those idiots would let everything slip when they returned to Tortuga. In a normal situation, Rigel would have prevented it, but Rigel needed fame, so whether it was the mermaid adventure or the mountain of gold, Rigel hoped they would spread the word.
He even informed the pirates about becoming king of the mermaids and showed them his Merman form, all so that those idiots would help him spread the word.
What about the danger of exposing his base? In any case, Atlantis was already sealed, without his permission, no one could enter.
After a final dinner on the island, Rigel led the crew back to the Ragnarok, now stocked with giant gold nuggets, there should have been about ten tons in raw form, although it still needed to be processed to extract the pure gold.
The ship became very heavy because of this, but Rigel let it happen, so that when they took the stones to be processed it would be like evidence of the "mountain of gold".
Ragnarok soon set sail away.
//-//
The return trip took even longer, even with Calypso helping to speed up the ship.
It took them a week to get back to Tortuga. As soon as they docked, Rigel wouldn't let them go out to have some fun first, but they went to find a forge to rent. Will is a blacksmith, he knew how to do the process, but the sight of gold being dragged by carts still caused some problems. Rigel had to kill almost a dozen idiots, in addition to having to keep a good portion of the pirates on guard.
He could have hidden the gold, but how would he have become famous that way?
In the end, he only managed to deal with the consequences of 'fame'.
The process of extracting gold from the rocks was complicated, they first needed to grind the rocks into a fine powder. To do this, Rigel used water to create immense pressure on the rocks, breaking them into small pieces. Then, Will used a pestle powered by animal force, basically, some donkeys, to further fragment the stones until they became a fine powder.
The pirates would then wash the dust in gold pans using water to separate the sediment, as the water passed through, it carried away the lighter material, the sediment, leaving the gold behind.
The process was much more complicated than Rigel had expected, he felt that all that work was redundant, and next time he would just sell the raw ore, even though it was cheaper. In fact, it was better to just do this process directly on the island. In the future, when his base was established and operational, he could turn pirates into gold prospectors.
As long as there was rum to drink and gold to receive, he bets that many of them would volunteer on their own.
It took almost 2 weeks to finish with the help of magic, and even Calypso helped because she was tired of it, the end result was almost half a ton of pure gold melted into bars.
Rigel gave each of the pirates half a kilo of gold and let them enjoy themselves on the island for three more days, they would go after the Fountain of Youth soon after.
By this time, the news had already spread far beyond Tortuga. Rigel was already a famous pirate, which could lead to more problems, but for now, that wasn't Rigel's concern.
He used the downtime he had during those two weeks to continue practicing Fiendfyre.
He was also thinking about how to take more things from this world, his solution was the Crown's shrinking ability. He could shrink ships, and with that, he could fill them with treasure. He would only need a magic passport to transport many things, and with the amount of magic passports he now possessed, taking several ships full of treasure was no problem.
Of course, there can be no magical items or living beings on the ship.
This initially made him think of the shrinking spell, Reducio, but the Adventure Book made it clear that each "shrinkage" counted as a magic item, although if he shrunk, for example, a treasure chest, it would only be considered one item, no matter how much treasure was inside.
But having Triton's crown, he could simply use the enormous cargo of a ship to carry whatever he wanted, it was far more worthwhile than shrinking a chest.
Aside from the fact that the current result of his practice with this spell is mixed, although he can shrink things, he can't maintain that shrinking state for very long, only about a few hours. Furthermore, he can only shrink something the size of a volleyball to the size of a baseball.
The last point is mass, he discovered that mass doesn't change, neither shrinking nor decreasing. According to the book, proficiency in this spell can even alter mass, but Rigel was far from that, so the crown was the most obvious solution.
Rigel sighed, if it were a water spell, he would have much better luck, so he gave up practicing that spell for now. He still had a few years in this world, so spending his time on more powerful and useful spells was the right choice. With the crown at his disposal and ships serving as 'chests,' he would return so rich that he wouldn't need to worry about money for the rest of his life.
Three days later, some incidents occurred.
Some of his men were robbed, some were simply picked on while they were sleeping drunk somewhere, others were killed.
Fortunately, it was only the pirate mobs that did that.
Rigel frowned, looking at the two corpses in front of him, blade cuts still bearing coagulated blood. They had been dead for quite some time, but the pirates had only just noticed.
Rigel felt a growing rage within him, those were just ordinary, random pirates, probably with innocent blood on their hands, but they were his subordinates.
However, he didn't know how to find the culprits, there were no witnesses, and most of those mobs drank like skunks and passed out.
Sighing, in the end they hadn't died fighting for him, so they hadn't joined Black Flag. Rigel was ready to give up, but Calypso spoke, looking at the corpses with interest. "If you want, I can resurrect them for you, their souls haven't 'passed on' yet."
Rigel paused, blinking, but finally shook his head. "No need."
If it were someone important, he might have accepted, but these pirates were all cut from the same cloth, if they were resurrected now, the other mobs would see it as a blank flag to act as they pleased.
Rigel would let these two serve as an example of what happens to stupid idiots who only think about drinking themselves to the point of passing out.
Calypso simply smiled, saying nothing, and spoke. "If you want to find the culprits, you can just turn them into zombies. These guys would harbor a deep resentment towards whoever killed them, even if they didn't see them. You just need to let them go after them on their own."
Rigel paused for a moment, sensing that Calypso made sense, that this he could do.
Rigel looked at the group of pirates with bowed heads in front of him, they were the mobs who had lost their money but kept their lives.
Rigel said nothing to them, only felt his shoulder burn slightly, hidden by his clothes, the Aztec Rune appeared.
The corpses trembled slightly, then their eyes opened, completely white as if they were blind, Rigel spoke. "Go, hunt down and kill whoever killed you, then come back."
The zombies stood up, their bones cracking from stiffness, then began to run away.
Rigel didn't even ask them to bring the gold back, at that point, he simply let the pirates join the others to start gathering supplies. They were setting sail again, this time targeting the Fountain of Youth.