I zeroed in on farming the angel wing. Every day except Sunday, I ran the dungeon, killing the pigeon. The fun part? There was no difference in how it got reported—whether I healed or finished off the angel myself. So, I was quietly ticking off completions for my next rank, getting a good experience and decent loot along the way.

  The grind was worth it, even if waiting for the quest item to drop wore on me.

  Outside of the dungeons, I was still taking my Sundays breaks with Selah, the peak of my week.

  But I noticed that something was off with the twins. We still had our usual lunches—they chatted and gossiped like normal—but the air between us felt strange. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I decided to give them space. What they saw with Selah was unconventional, and they surely just needed time to adjust.

  Lastly there was this strange feeling... like someone was watching me. Alrune felt or noticed nothing, neither did I when I turned, but the feeling was there. I could not do anything about it, so I just kept on going.

  The breakthrough came about a month later. Two extremely important things happened within a few days.

  The angelic wing finally dropped.

  I ended up jumping and dancing around the battlefield like a lunatic for minutes, while Alrune kept on laughing in my head. After coming back here day after day, the damn pigeon finally dropped the wing.

  After this, I wanted to take it easy and catch up on my bounty hunter jobs that I had neglected while farming the dungeon. But as I was about to meet the twins and grab a quest from Cora, it happened.

  Something I was waiting for a long time.

  In the middle of the day, the blue sky without a single cloud, filled with thick, pitch-black clouds within a second. Static electricity danced inside them.

  Then came the rumbling, deep, guttural, and dangerous. The ground underneath us started shaking. People began panicking, seeking shelter, afraid of what was going on. Everybody was sure that it couldn’t be natural; nobody had seen a phenomenon like this for centuries.

  I quickly ran back to my mansion and watched through the window, a faint smile tugging at my lips. It wasn’t the chaos I enjoyed, but the outcome I’d been waiting for.

  It took a few seconds for the torrential rain to start falling. Then, lightning bolts struck several guard towers around the outer wall. Loud bangs and flashes of lightning, followed by the sounds of collapsing rubble, could be heard. Then the ground shaking intensified, leveling pretty much the entire outer district in a few minutes.

  But the the real show was just about to start. The shaking, grumbling, and even the lightning and rain stopped, replaced for several seconds by a creepy silence. It felt like something was about to come.

  And just like that, the calm before the storm felt more like a waiting game than a warning. About ten seconds after everything fell silent, two loud cracks sounded across the city. They were so loud that my ears started to ring a little from listening to them from inside my mansion.

  Two spheres of pure mana materialized high above the Commoner District at seemingly random points. One ball had about six meters in diameter, and the other had a little over twelve. For several seconds, they floated high in the air, above the ground, before they properly settled in place, about five meters above the ground.

  That’s when a sound like breaking eggs echoed across the city. Right after that, a thick, blue liquid-like substance started to leak out of the spheres, dropping to the ground. Freely passing through everything and stopping about a meter above the ground.

  As the substance started falling, the spheres began getting smaller and smaller, ultimately disappearing. Once both of the spheres disappeared completely, two beams of light coming from two buildings in the Commoner District pierced the sky, dispersing the black clouds.

  Then came the calm. It lasted long enough for the city to catch its breath, the eerie quiet hanging in the air. It took less than a minute for the sky to return to normal, and the beams to vanish, leaving the city in stunned silence as they processed what had just happened. Then the first voices sounded loud and clear.

  “New dungeons were born! We have two new dungeons!”

  At first, voices sounded only here and there, from people who had learned enough to recognize the event, but soon echoed through the entire city. What had looked like a tragedy at first became a blessing. The city, plagued by the fact that its dungeons were disappearing, had just received two new ones.

  As the city celebrated so did, but something entirely different. The two shitty plots I bought not so long ago had become dungeons—my dungeons.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  My smile deepened as I raised my cup of wine. Months of waiting, careful purchases, calculated risk—and it had actually fucking worked. Two dungeons. My land. My income. My control.

  In my head, Alrune's voice sounded happy, almost proud. “Congratulations!”

  “Thank you!” I whispered in silence.

  I let the city's chaos settle before heading out. The orphanage first—Selah was safe, the building untouched. Her fox was curled up with her, calm. Then the twins. I found them hiding from the mess in the Cock-a-doodle-doo Rooster, waiting for the phenomenon to pass, worried about me. When I entered the restaurant and we saw each other, they were relieved I was okay, but that strange distance from before was still there—hovering just beneath the surface.

  After we all calmed down and made sure we were fine, we decided to delay the lunch to tomorrow since both of them had quite a lot of things to do now that two new dungeons had appeared, the outer district got demolished and several guard towers got hit by lightning.

  We said our goodbyes, and I went to double-check my dungeons. Indeed, both the E-rank one and D-rank spawned exactly where they were supposed to according to novel, and were now on my land.

  Once this was confirmed, I headed straight to the construction guild, asking for some specific adjustments to both of the houses I owned, to make the admission collection nice and smooth. I then went back to the Servants Guild and asked them to provide me with personnel to collect my admission and guard the entrances.

  The last thing I needed to do was to register my dungeons, but I was in no rush for now. I had a lunch with Juliet and Cora planned for the next day anyway, and meanwhile, I had to wait for both of the buildings to be properly customized.

  The construction guild went to work the following day, promising that both spots would be ready in two days. So, I went ahead and sat down for lunch with the two women. After greetings and the first round of gossip about the fact that nobody had registered the dungeons yet and that nobody knew who owned the land where they appeared, I decided that it was time to let them know.

  “Do you remember how I mentioned to you some time ago that I grabbed a few plots I had a good feeling about in the Commoner district?”

  Juliet nodded. “Yeah, I do recall something about them. What about it?”

  “Well, you don’t have to look for the owner of the dungeons anymore!”

  Both sisters froze, staring at me in stunned silence. I chuckled, seeing their reaction. Some time later, Juliet woke up and asked.

  “Are you serious? You own both of them?”

  “Yep, both!”

  She pinched herself hard, winced, then spoke fast. "For real, real?"

  I just nodded.

  “We need to go, I need to do measurements and register you as an owner!”

  We all stood up and I led both of them to my buildings, where construction was now in full swing, so that Juliet could do her measurements. It took a little more than an hour to properly register both dungeons, with me as their owner. And an additional two days for me to receive official ownership certificates.

  The moment my ownership became public knowledge, I started getting offers to sell or rent the dungeons. Mostly from rich speculators, the Real Estate Guild, and the Dungeon Delver Guild. I refused all of them and threw myself into completing my setup. Right now, there were two rank E and D dungeons in the city, including mine. So, I was splitting all the proceeds from the dungeons' entries in those two ranks in half. But what if I could close the competing dungeons in each rank and make it so mine were the only ones available? Wouldn’t that be nice? And so the grind started again.

  I finished the E-rank in two days—a hundred runs, easy. The D-rank took longer. I could manage twenty-five runs a day, so I was halfway through when the E-rank dungeon collapsed and funneled all the rank E traffic straight to mine. Two days later, I finished the D-rank. Then I waited. Two days after that, the second dungeon collapsed.

  Seven cores for Alrune. A monopoly on rank E and D dungeons.

  It may not look like much, but dungeons of these two ranks were the most frequented by delvers. Risk was minimal, dungeons were quick and easy when compared to the higher ranking ones, and the pay was still decent. Even rank C delvers usually ran rank D dungeons if they weren’t pushing for rank promotions, since you needed the dungeons of your rank to count for that. There was no reason to risk your life when you could earn a decent amount of money and be much safer doing that.

  As the money started rolling in, I got surprised—it ended up being much more than I had hoped for. A normal day of collecting entry fees from the two dungeons brought me about three gold in clean profit, while a good day could climb up to eight. For doing nothing, it was the perfect passive income.

  But the money wasn’t the only thing I got from the dungeons. Soon, people started to talk about me. At first, I was just a lucky loser who somehow managed to buy the two exact shit spots where the new and now only dungeons of their rank appeared. Later, my reputation in both the Bounty Hunter Guild and Dungeon Delver Guild got leaked and connected with the ownership of the dungeons. Ultimately, earning me the nickname ‘Lucky Reaper’ across the city and plenty of personal requests in the Bounty Hunter Guild.

  People started to see me as something of a lucky charm for their requests. If their requests were sound, and they requested me by name, the request got handled with a one hundred percent success rate. So, people started to ask for me more.

  I stopped running dungeons for quite a stretch because of all the bounty requests coming in—the work I'd been meaning to catch up on, and a whole lot more. From serious ones like removing bandit groups, to absolutely comical ones like standing next to a person who wanted to confess or ask his girlfriend for a hand, like a lucky charm. And yes, the more absurd the requests got, the better I got paid for doing them.

  Plus, I had stories to tell both the twins during lunches and Selah when we met every Sunday.

  As for the city, it healed quickly. People rebuilt their shacks in the outer district practically instantly. They were fragile and easy to destroy, but similarly as easy to build back up. Luckily nobody died there, just a few got bruised a little.

  It took about a week or two for the rubble from the towers to be cleaned and the towers repaired.