Ethan stepped out of his mansion with a beaming smile on his face.

At present, Goldenveil burned through roughly twenty inferior magic cores every month. At that rate, its reserves wouldn’t hold out more than a few months before running dry.

Fortunately, the two hundred and fifty corrupted inferior mana beast cores he’d pulled from those premium gacha tickets had pushed the stockpile close to three hundred and fifty.

Even factoring in the rising consumption, that should comfortably last another year.

A generous window of time. With the help of the adventurers and the imminent arrival of war, he was certain he could keep piling up more cores without much trouble.

Shaking his head to clear it, Ethan set off toward his first stop of the day: the Goldenveil warehouse.

When he reached the old building tucked away on the street behind the barracks, he asked the two employees inside to step out and waited for the door to click shut behind them.

Only then did he press his palm against the aged wood, activating his instant build ability.

A nearly endless list of upgrades scrolled past his eyes until something finally caught his attention.

[Name: Huge Food Warehouse

Description: A massive food warehouse, widely used by wealthy cities to store their food, a design created by Estria’s wealthiest chamber of commerce. It has fifteen thousand square meters of usable storage space and magical arrays for refrigerated rooms.

Price: 2,200]

Without hesitation, Ethan spent another twenty-two hundred gold coins and took a step back.

The ground trembled beneath his boots. A deep rumble rolled up from below, and the warehouse began expanding sideways, upward, and downward all at once.

Dark doors surfaced between fresh walls of stone and concrete. The structure climbed more than four stories toward the sky, while another six floors burrowed deep underground.

In just a few moments, the old, dilapidated warehouse had given way to an elegant, imposing building.

It followed classic medieval architecture, yet somehow managed to look anything but outdated.

Ethan turned to the manager of the old warehouse, who stood frozen in place, his face pale with shock and his mouth slightly open.

The man was one of the few people in Goldenveil whose loyalty sat at a one hundred percent, so Ethan didn’t hesitate to press the keys to the new facility into his palm, ordering him to hire five additional employees to help manage the place.

After depositing a few beast cores and activating the cooling system, the young Lord set off toward the barracks.

Doran, as he always did at that hour, was training alongside roughly twenty members of the guard, while another thirty carried out patrols and watch duty at positions around Goldenveil.

The moment the captain noticed Ethan approaching, he halted his weapon mid-swing, turned, and bowed respectfully.

Ethan simply offered a gentle smile in return, giving a small nod of his head.

The Goldenveil barracks occupied a relatively isolated stretch of the city.

No houses stood anywhere in the vicinity, and an entire plot of land had been set aside for it: roughly four hundred meters by two hundred, totaling over eighty thousand square meters.

That much space was more than enough to raise a barracks as imposing as Ethan’s own mansion.

Of course, something so large would be useless in the short term.

Even so, he much preferred to spend five thousand gold coins now on a dignified, powerful barracks than to invest a thousand on a structure adequate for the moment, only to be forced, a few years later, to shell out another fortune to expand it.

He had no patience for that kind of waste. Even if the new barracks proved temporarily too spacious for the Goldenveil guard, he preferred it that way.

As for the gold, he had the system. Gold was the least of his concerns. What he truly needed was prestige and new citizens.

The barracks would also serve as a residence for the newcomers, since he planned to bring in at least two thousand people from those two human settlements that, for now, topped his list of priorities.

"My lord, may I help you with something?" Doran asked, drawing a gentle smile from Ethan.

"How large was the barracks where you served as an instructor in the Fallen Sun Empire?" the young Lord asked, watching a pensive expression settle across the captain’s face.

"It’s hard to say exactly, my lord... What I can tell you is that the barracks had a capacity for about five thousand guards. Why do you ask?" Doran replied with curiosity.

The moment he caught the peculiar gleam in the young Lord’s eyes, an involuntary shiver ran down his spine.

Ethan had been improving all sorts of things in Goldenveil.

The streets, the mansion, the blacksmith’s shop, the walls.

Everything had transformed with a simple touch of his hand.

Could the barracks be next?

Motioning for the guards to withdraw, the handsome young man pressed his palm against the barracks’ wood.

His instant construction ability activated on the spot, bringing up a vast gallery of blueprints.

He sifted through the options until he found something truly worthy. Something fit to house the Hell Soldier’s training portal, an SS-Rank artifact.

[Name: Grand Capital Barracks

Description: A massive fortress barracks, worthy of a wealthy capital and featuring a design created by one of the most famous architects of the past fifteen thousand years, who served the Fallen Sun Empire directly for a thousand years.

It contains administrative offices, meeting rooms, physical training rooms, battle mage training rooms, its own forges, emergency warehouses, and powerful walls to shelter up to twenty thousand civilians in the event of a siege.

Maximum Guard Capacity: 50/6,000

Effect: Increases the training efficiency and attribute gains of stationed soldiers by 50%, increases XP gains via training by 30%.

Price: 7,000 gold coins]

Ethan didn’t hesitate to click buy.

Seven thousand gold coins was a considerable sum, but with Alice by his side and the millions of magical herb seeds tucked in the spiritual greenhouse, a single day of growing and one trip were enough to recoup that entire fortune.

Honestly, he felt a twinge of pity for the other golden lords.

Well, almost pity.

They possessed their own fortunes too, and most had acquired, without lifting a finger, powerful and already established cities.

From what he’d gathered in conversations with the system, some had even received cities that started with a hundred thousand inhabitants in the richest regions of the seven forbidden zones.

Having practically infinite money merely put him on equal footing with those damn lucky bastards!

Taking another step back, Ethan simply watched the transformation unfold, his eyes shining with anticipation.