Money was a stupid problem to have, and that was exactly why it made Soren's skin itch.
For the first few weeks, he had treated it as background noise, something that would sort itself out because it always did for nobles.
He hadn't even thought about it properly until the letter, until Louise, until that uncomfortable realisation that his own family could still slam a door without even looking him in the eyes.
He had walked back from that bench with the faint, lingering pressure of a hug he hadn't earned, his chest full of a grief that wasn't entirely his, and the first practical thought that managed to wedge itself in was depressingly simple.
'I can't afford to be careless.'
At first, he had assumed that being a count's son meant an allowance, a quiet stream of support that existed whether he touched it or not, like air.
Then he had learned the truth the hard way, learned that he wasn't a sheltered heir at all, he was an abandoned child with a surname that looked expensive from a distance and meant nothing when it mattered.
And even if there were a path back to Arden support, even if he could swallow his pride and write a carefully phrased letter, the last few days had made that idea taste bitter.
Sofia Arden's name still sat in his mouth like ash.
He didn't want to poke that nest again, not now, not when he had already started to understand that every "helpful" hand in this world came with invisible strings, and the Arden family had an entire loom.
So he did what he always did when emotion threatened to swallow him.
He narrowed it down to a problem.
He made it solvable.
Stellaris Academy provided students with modest funds each semester for daily living, enough to keep them fed, clothed, and minimally comfortable as long as they weren't stupid with it.
It wasn't charity, it was policy, and it kept the student body from turning into a parade of noble silks and starving commoners.
It also wasn't enough to build anything on.
Once he paid for necessities, there wasn't much left, not enough to take risks comfortably, not enough to chase opportunities that required a decent starting pool.
The kind of money you could lose without panicking, the kind you could invest instead of clutching.
In ❰The Knight of Stellaris❱, money had been a number that existed to be converted into power, and the game's sense of scale had always been ridiculous.
Maxing out a fresh character could drain an obscene amount of gold, the sort of figure that made sense only because the economy was designed to be eaten.
Here, the same figure wasn't a grind; it was a nation's blood.
Ivansia's currency wasn't simplified into one shiny metal either; it had weight and hierarchy, the kind that made you feel the difference when you held it.
Copper came first, the smallest coins you could lose between floorboards without caring, then silver, then gold, and finally platinum, the kind of currency most people would only ever see in stories.
Each tier stepping up in neat, unforgiving ratios, a hundred copper becoming a single silver, a hundred silver turning into gold, and a hundred gold condensing again into platinum.
He looked down at the small pouch on his desk, the soft clink inside answering him like a quiet insult.
Not broke, but close enough that he could see it coming if he didn't move.
Soren grabbed a piece of paper, dipped a pen, and started writing before his thoughts could spiral into something less useful.
By the time the ink began to blur from his palm smudging it, he had three options, cleanly numbered, like that made his situation less ridiculous.
1 — Working
2 — Dungeon Diving
3 — Future Knowledge
He underlined the first one hard enough that the paper dented.
Working.
It was the most honest answer, which was exactly why it made him recoil.
He hadn't been transmigrated into a world where magic existed and the protagonist was walking around somewhere in the same academy, just to immediately waste his time stacking trays or scrubbing floors for coins.
More importantly, it would steal what he already didn't have enough of: time.
Time to train, to study, to drag his stats up from the gutter, to make sure the next time the world tried to turn him into entertainment, he had more than rage and desperation to rely on.
And even if he swallowed his pride, it wasn't as simple as walking into town and asking for a job.
At Stellaris Academy, students could hold part-time work, but they needed permission from a professor, and that permission wasn't given lightly.
It existed for the students who had to work, the ones supporting families, the ones who had come here with talent but no safety net, not for nobles who were meant to play at hardship while their estates paid for everything quietly behind the curtain.
A noble working a commoner's job was still considered a disgrace.
Soren's pen tapped the page, leaving black dots in its wake.
'Not that I really care.'
That thought came easily, too easily, and the ease of it made something in his chest twist.
It wasn't bravery.
It wasn't righteous rebellion.
It was exhaustion, the kind that comes when you've had a title shoved on you and ripped away in the same breath.
If he were desperate, he would work.
If he hit the point where he had to choose between starvation and gossip, the gossip would lose without a fight.
But he wasn't there yet, and he didn't want to step onto that road if he didn't have to.
He scribbled a harsh line through option one and moved on.
Dungeon diving.
In another timeline, it would have been perfect.
It was the most straightforward way to turn effort into wealth, and unlike most of Ivansia's opportunities, dungeons were honest in a brutal way.
Clear them, live, take what you can carry, sell what you don't need.
And Soren had an advantage that felt almost obscene.
Between game knowledge and his own skill, he knew dungeon locations that hadn't even been discovered yet at this point in the timeline, places that would become famous later, places that would drown parties in blood and then spit out relics that could change a person's life.
But at his current strength, that knowledge might as well have been a map drawn on the surface of the moon.
He could report some of them for short-term profit, alert the guild, let professionals handle it, then collect a finder's reward like a polite citizen.
It would also hand over every item and every scrap of experience those places could offer, and worse, it would blunt the protagonist's growth path indirectly, stealing the kind of momentum the story assumed would exist.
That wasn't a moral issue, not really, not in the clean heroic sense.
It was practical.
He needed Alex to be strong because Alex being strong meant demons died, and demons dying meant Soren lived.
Still, even if he ignored Alex completely, there was the other problem.
Soren was still a Class F student.
If he had a party, he might be able to clear some early dungeons, the safe ones, the ones designed for beginners, but the list of people he knew well enough to ask was depressingly short.
Felix, Lilliana, Louise.
All powerful, all capable.
All, in their own ways, dangerous choices.
If they were strong enough to carry him, then he would contribute almost nothing, and the humiliation of that wasn't even the worst part.
The worst part was the inevitable question of compensation, because in the real world, carrying wasn't a cute gaming term; it was labour, risk, and effort spent on someone else's benefit.
Louise might not demand anything because she was family, even if that was in a way that didn't make sense yet, but expecting that kindness repeatedly would be stupidity.
Felix would absolutely demand something, even if he laughed about it.
Lilliana… Lilliana would do it because she felt responsible, and that made it worse, because Soren couldn't stand the idea of leaning on her pity like a crutch.
And if he got carried, he would lose the main reason to dungeon dive in the first place.
Experience.
Strength that was his, earned by his own hands, not granted because someone else decided he looked too fragile to fail.
Soren's jaw tightened, and for a second, bitterness threatened to spill over the edges of the page.
He forced it back down and crossed out option two with a slower, heavier line.
That left the third.
Future Knowledge.
Using the game like a cheat sheet, the way a worse person might use it to become rich and powerful and untouchable, the way Soren had promised himself he wouldn't, not because he was a good person, but because he simply just wanted to stay away from everything.
Still, money was money, and money was safety, and safety was the difference between having a choice or not.
There were plenty of ways to exploit the game's timeline, but two stood out as the easiest.
Stocks and gambling.
In Ivansia, the guild exchange allowed investments into organisations, guilds, and knight orders, and those investments rose and fell depending on political shifts, military victories, scandals, and story progression, as if the world itself was acknowledging narrative beats with a ledger.
There was risk, and there were always variables.
But Soren had mitigation.
[Library of Memories]
He had memorised the movements, the rises and collapses, the points where a guild's reputation would plummet, the points where a knight order would suddenly become valuable because a demon incursion made their contracts explode.
He didn't just remember them vaguely; he remembered them like he remembered his own name.
The problem was that stocks were slow, and they needed capital to matter.
He tapped the pouch again, felt its lightness, and sighed through his nose.
'I don't have enough to make that worthwhile yet.'
So he looked at the second option under "Future Knowledge" and felt something almost like reluctant amusement.
Gambling.
TKS was a live-service game.
Gambling was practically its love language, even if the gambling only came from cosmetics.
Still, for reasons only the developers understood, it also had an entire side story about gambling dens, a bizarre little arc that unlocked familiar raising and minigames where you could bet on creatures fighting, racing, or performing tricks, as if someone on the team had been desperate to turn the game into a circus.
In the game, you needed the right triggers to access it; you needed to unlock the den, you needed a familiar, and you needed permission from the system.
Here, there were no invisible walls.
There was just a city, a red-light district, and people willing to take your coins.
Soren didn't have familiars.
He also didn't need them.
He just needed to know who would win.
He stared at the paper for a moment, then wrote one final line beneath "Gambling" in smaller script.
A location.
He couldn't just walk into any den and expect it to match his memories.
The odds, the line-ups, the schedule, they mattered.
"Hmm…"
Soren leaned back in his chair, eyes unfocusing, mind sliding through his stored knowledge until it caught on something that felt right, something close enough to the academy to reach without trouble, something that ran the same events early on.
A few seconds later, he stood up.
The motion was abrupt, like he was trying to outrun the part of himself that wanted to hesitate.
He reached into his inventory, pulled out a cloak, threw it over his shoulders, and left his dorm room without giving himself time to reconsider.
————「❤︎」————