All Jobs and Classes! I Just Wanted One Skill, Not Them All!

Chapter 658

Just like that, Ludger created a new industry in the Empire.

He didn’t do it with speeches or banners. He did it the way he did everything else: see a problem, turn it into a system, then squeeze profit out of the chaos until it stopped bleeding.

The first step was control.

The magic water didn’t sit in an open barrel where every idiot with a cup could “accidentally” become rich. It went into the warehouse under lock, seal, and schedule. Every drop counted. Every drop assigned. Every drop accounted for.

The second step was optics.

Aronia handled the “taste” side of things like she’d been born in a vineyard instead of a grove. She didn’t drown the wine in mana until it glowed like a potion, too obvious, too crude. She layered it. She treated the magic water like an ingredient that had to be coaxed into harmony, not forced into submission.

Ludger handled the “don’t get robbed” side.

New refugees with glasswork experience got pulled from the registration lists and shoved into a workshop the moment they opened their mouths. Sand supply routes were mapped. Kilns were built. Bottle molds standardized. Wax stamps designed, simple at first, then sharper. A lion’s head profile. A fang mark. Something you could recognize across a banquet hall.

Then came the fun part. They didn’t sell it like a drink. They sold it like a rumor.

Small shipments. Perfect packaging. Letters written in polite, expensive words. A story attached to each bottle: “Labyrinth spring,” “mana-touched vintage,” “limited reserve from the frontier.” No lies that could be proven false, just truths dressed up in noble clothing.

Samples went out. To lords who thought they were above border-town nonsense. To ladies who collected rare flavors the way other people collected jewelry. To bored imperial officials who needed something to brag about besides paperwork. Even to the kind of aristocrats who had never held a sword but still believed their blood made them important.

The first bottles disappeared into private cellars. The second batch came back with orders. The third batch came back with bidding wars. Within a month, Lionfang’s new “magic wine” was a problem in the best way.

Merchants started asking questions. Spies started sniffing around. Rival houses started trying to figure out which vineyard Ludger had stolen it from. And the answer, of course, was: none. Because the vineyard wasn’t the secret. The secret was the water. And nobody could copy the water without walking into a runic golem labyrinth and convincing a guardian to let them leave with their spine intact.

The profits rolled in hard enough that Arslan stopped panicking every time someone mentioned “refugees” and started panicking about taxes instead. Viola laughed the first time she saw a noble’s order request come in written on paper fancier than the guild’s entire ledger book.

Ludger just looked at the numbers and felt his eyes twitch in a different way. This was the part where the world noticed you. And the world noticing you was always dangerous. Then Linne and Dalan made it worse. Or better. Depending on whether you enjoyed sleeping.

Their runic engineer allies from the Velis League weren’t part of the operation, officially. They didn’t own shares. They didn’t have rights. They didn’t have contracts tied to the product itself.

But that didn’t stop them from doing what Velis League people did best: turning craftsmanship into propaganda. Somewhere along the way, they started talking. Not like gossip. Like advertising.

They praised “Lionsguard frontier innovation.” They made comments in the right merchant circles about “a border guild with actual production capacity.” They laughed, loudly, about how the Empire’s nobles didn’t know what real quality was until a bunch of delvers handed it to them in glass.

They even started slipping Lionfang’s bottles into showcases at events where League merchants gathered, treating it like a novelty at first. Then treating it like a signal. A border-town product on a Velis table meant something. It meant the League approved.

And when the League approved, merchants stopped seeing it as “frontier luck” and started seeing it as “stable supply.” That changed everything.

Within another month, it wasn’t just noble whims keeping the business alive. It was contracts. Routes. Distribution agreements. Standardized glass shipments to Velis artisans. Wax stamps refined into anti-counterfeit markings. Lionsguard had always traded with the Velis League, mana cores, froststeel.

Now they had a luxury commodity. Now they had something the Empire’s rich wanted badly. And suddenly, what had started as Aronia’s quiet idea and Ludger’s desperate need to keep refugees working turned into an international business deal between the Lionsguard and the Velis League.

More than they already were before. A partnership with teeth. A partnership that came with coin. And coin, real coin, was just another kind of power. Ludger stared at the first formal trade letter stamped with Velis League sigils and realized, with a slow, tired kind of clarity, that he hadn’t just built houses and jobs.

He’d built leverage. And the Empire was going to hate him for it. 

Eventually, Ludger finally had room to breathe. Not because the world got kinder, Lionfang didn’t get that kind of luxury, but because the chaos stopped being new. The refugees weren’t a wave anymore. They were just… people. Registered. Assigned. Fed. Watched. Integrated. The ones who couldn’t accept the rules had either left or learned the hard way that direwolves didn’t negotiate.

The town had absorbed the weight without snapping. And the magic wine business… it didn’t need him the way everything else had.

Aronia had her recipes and her standards. Yvar had the ledgers and schedules. The glass crews had molds and quotas. The merchants had routes. Even the Velis League contracts had settled into a rhythm of stamps, signatures, and shipments.

It still needed oversight, anything that involved nobles always did, but it didn’t need Ludger’s hands on the throat every hour of every day.

For the first time in hours, maybe days, he realized something that felt almost alien. If he stopped moving for a moment… the town wouldn’t instantly catch fire. That realization hit him while he was sitting in his office chair, staring at a stack of reports he’d already read twice out of habit.

He blinked. Once. Then he leaned back slowly, as if expecting the chair to accuse him of weakness. His shoulders rolled. His neck cracked. A long stretch pulled through his arms and spine, unwinding knots he hadn’t even noticed were there because they’d become normal.

He exhaled. It came out like a sound that might’ve been relief if he knew how to let it be. A minute passed. Maybe two.

He was still sitting, technically. But the way he sat stopped looking like “vice guildmaster” and started looking like “boy who has been carrying a town on his back.” He slid lower in the chair without meaning to. One leg hooked over the armrest. His head tilted back at a stupid angle. One hand dangled off the side like he was about to just… spill onto the floor and accept it as a reasonable outcome.

His green scarf was half-twisted around his neck. His coat was unbuttoned. His hair was a mess. If Selene saw him like this, she’d laugh until he coughed.

If Elaine saw him like this, she’d either smother him with worry. Ludger stared at the ceiling for a long moment, eyes unfocused, brain finally crawling out of the swamp of logistics. Then he muttered, quiet enough that the walls barely heard it.

“I guess it is time to finally master all of the skills of the Geomancer class.”

He let the words hang. No dramatic music. No heroic pose.

Just a tired kid in a chair, sprawled like he was about to fall out of it, deciding, very calmly, that since the world had stopped screaming for a moment, he might as well get stronger. Because it wouldn’t stay quiet for long.

Ludger started emptying his mana pool on purpose. Not in the dramatic, saving-a-city way. In the quiet, deliberate way, like grinding a blade against a whetstone until your arms hated you and your instincts sharpened anyway.

It was the only way to push the Geomancer class forward without waiting for another crisis to do it for him. Of course, Lionfang refused to let him have anything simple.

The new housing rows had expanded the town’s footprint, and the walls that once made perfect sense on a map were suddenly… wrong. Too tight in some places, too exposed in others. A neat rectangle had become a lopsided animal with its ribs sticking out.

If enemies attacked, those outer houses would be a gift. A line of cover for raiders. A wedge to hide behind. An easy target to burn and turn into chaos. And chaos was always the first step to breaking a defense.

So even while trying to train, Ludger had been moving the walls. Not rebuilding them from scratch, he wasn’t insane, but shifting sections outward, reinforcing angles, thickening vulnerable points, extending the line so the town’s new skin didn’t hang outside its armor.

It was tedious work, the kind that didn’t make legends. But it kept people alive. And it kept the myth intact. Once he’d done what he could for the walls, enough to sleep without his mind running worst-case scenarios, he went to the warehouse and claimed what he needed.

Not the wine. The wine was… honestly pretty good. Aronia had done something unfair to it, something that made it taste like it belonged on a noble’s tongue while still carrying that faint, clean edge of mana like cold water at dawn.

But Ludger wasn’t planning to train his liver by drinking a barrel of it. So he took a barrel of the magic water instead. Pure. Clear. Heavy with potential. The workers watched him roll it out like he was dragging treasure to bury in the dirt.

He didn’t explain. Explanations invited opinions. He just loaded it, sealed it, and left.

He moved away from the town until the noise thinned out. Until the sound of hammers and shouting and barking direwolves faded behind distance. Until Lionfang was just a shape against the horizon, walls, rooftops, smoke, and the slow pulse of a place that was finally learning to breathe without him micromanaging every inhale.

The land out here was open and ugly in a way Ludger liked. Hard soil. Sparse grass. Old stone ribs poking out of the ground. Enough raw material for earth magic without worrying about breaking someone’s house or accidentally turning a child into collateral damage.

He set the barrel down, rolled his shoulders, and let his senses sink into the ground. The earth was steady. Patient. It didn’t care about refugees. It didn’t care about nobles. It didn’t care about the empire pretending it could bury a labyrinth with paperwork. It just was.

Ludger took a breath, feeling the familiar hollow in his core, mana not empty, not yet, but ready to be spent. Ready to be forced. Ready to be refined. He looked at his hands for a moment, flexed his fingers, and the dry humor in him surfaced like a bubble in mud.

“Alright,” he murmured. “No distractions. No emergencies. No idiots screaming in FULL CAPS.”

The wind didn’t answer. The earth didn’t answer. That was fine. He reached for the barrel, popped the seal, and drank a mouthful of the magic water. Cool. Clean. A faint mineral bite. It slid down his throat and spread through him like a quiet spark, subtle, but real.

His mana responded. Not explosively. Like something waking up. Ludger’s eyes sharpened.

With a slow exhale, he planted his feet and let his awareness drop deeper, deeper, into the ground beneath him until it felt like his bones were anchored to the world.

Today wasn’t just another training day. Today was a line. A mark. An important one. And Ludger intended to cross it.

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