Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Chapter 261: Business (2)

The Plan.

There was a reason Damien had made his move now. Not just ego. Not just rebellion against the gilded cage of the Elford name. It was timing. Positioning. A high-stakes play in a city that was always shifting—but only if you knew where to look.

And Damien did.

The northeastern outskirts.

To most, it was dead land. Sparse infrastructure. Patchy mana flow. Low property values and virtually no transit grid. Developers ignored it. Investors laughed at it.

Damien swiped through the urban grid reports on his display, cross-referencing infrastructure logs with Elford’s private economic scans. The northeastern quadrant lit up dull—barely flickering. Sparse traffic. No mana siphons. Three broken conduits, and a full eighty percent of its zoning permits hadn’t been renewed in the last five cycles. Public reports called it a “waste corridor.” A gap between development zones. Useless.

But that was the surface read.

Damien knew better.

He remembered the data from Shackles of Fate. The strange, almost obsessive way that game’s world unfolded—not through quests, but through time. Not through character growth, but city growth.

Even for a solo-player mobile-console title, the Vermillion City map had been astonishingly deep. Entire districts changed shape as the in-game calendar advanced. Buildings rose. Traffic patterns shifted. Factions moved. And the northeastern outskirts?

That land evolved.

In the game’s further acts—years into the timeline—the area went from overlooked to contested. Not by war, not by raids, but by capital. Construction firms began appearing. New zoning overlays unlocked. Suddenly that dead zone became one of the most economically volatile spaces in the game—bursting with rare resources, side quests, hidden vendors, and backdoor corporate events.

ChatGPT said:

That land was going to change.

And Damien wasn’t going to sit around waiting for someone else to realize it.

He had seen it with his own eyes earlier—when he and Vivienne had cruised past the district on their way through the upper lanes. She hadn’t commented. But Damien had glanced toward the stretch of glassy silence at the city’s edge, and something pulled.

A jolt in his chest. The hum of quiet certainty under his skin.

His [Merchant’s Intuition] had surged.

Not faint. Not subtle. Blinding.

The glow across that district wasn’t scattered—it was dense. Like opportunity waiting to be carved out with bare hands. And now, that premonition, combined with what he remembered from Shackles of Fate, painted the picture perfectly.

In-game, the northeastern outskirts became the single most lucrative territory across all civilian sectors. Not because it was gifted to the player—but because it was ignored by everyone else long enough to build roots before the tide turned.

Which meant now, in this world?

It was open season.

Damien had already checked the registry. Most of the land had been released back into the general zoning pool under a quiet municipal turnover program. He’d gone through three shell companies, signed under an anonymous purchase clause, and secured the key parcels within forty-eight hours.

It wasn’t even expensive.

Because no one else was looking.

But ownership wasn’t the play.

Development was.

He wasn’t going to hold and sell. He wasn’t looking to flip it for some quick gain. That was what most of the people would’ve done—bought cheap, sold loud, padded a portfolio with numbers and names.

Damien was going to build.

From the dirt up.

He’d already run the math. His five core hires? They weren’t just support—they were keys. Kael could lock down the security architecture. Renia would oversee resource flow and audit supply chains. Lysa would draft internal movement systems and project staging layouts. Myla could handle outreach, draw minor investors and community leverage. And Jaro…

Jaro would build the spine.

The zone’s skeletal infrastructure. Multi-tier vertical zoning systems. Adaptive energy netting for mana convergence. He was the quiet core of everything Damien needed.

In a sense, the five he’d chosen weren’t just specialists—they were foundations. Pillars.

Each of them would become the seed of a division. The first node in a chain that would branch outward into teams, departments, and—eventually—an enterprise built not on legacy, but on execution.

Because Damien knew a simple truth:

You don’t build an empire with five people.

You start it with them.

Kael would command security and operations—first with boots on-site, then with a logistics division of his own. Field managers. Safety controllers. Infrastructure enforcers who could guarantee the ground stayed his once the mana value began to spike.

Renia would handle procurement and supply. She wouldn’t stay at a desk. Damien would give her room to construct her own armory of accountants, analysts, contract enforcers. The quiet war machine that made the right resources show up exactly when they were needed.

Lysa would architect the flow. Personnel routes, daily schedules, automated delivery chains, task interlocks—she was already sketching versions of it in her head when they spoke. All she needed was the bandwidth. Damien would make sure she had it—and the people to extend that precision across every layer of operations.

Myla was culture. Presentation. The bridge between inside and outside. Clients would like her. Investors would trust her. The media would lean forward when she spoke. That was her magic. And she’d need media liaisons, HR nodes, event planners, digital agents—a swarm of polish around a core of quiet iron.

And Jaro? Jaro would build the bones. Not just wireframes or theoretical models. But the actual modular blueprinting team. Engineers. Designers. Surveyors. If Kael was the ground, Jaro would be the grid drawn over it.

Was it risky?

Absolutely.

None of them had led teams at scale. None had held senior positions. And he wasn’t deluding himself—most would flinch under pressure before they adapted. There would be stumbles. There might be fractures.

But Damien trusted his instinct.

His [Merchant’s Intuition] hadn’t just pointed at talent. It had resonated with alignment.

These weren’t obedient subordinates.

They were compatible accelerants.

And he could work with that.

As he sat at his desk—one eye on the blueprint interface, the other scrolling real-time contractor rates, municipal permits, and urban mana forecasts—Damien let the data flood in. He was already drafting preliminary allocations.

Flexible. Tight, but not strangled. Enough to breathe.

He opened five side windows—one for each lead—and began plotting recruitment vectors for their future teams. Filters by compatibility, not credentials. He’d learned that already. Experience lied. Instinct didn’t.

KNOCK!

Just then, a light knock echoed—barely audible over the low hum of the desk interface. Damien glanced toward the door, already knowing who it was.

“Enter.”

It opened precisely. No creak, no delay. Elysia stepped through with the tea tray balanced perfectly in her hands. A silver set, steam rising like memory. She didn’t say a word. Just crossed the room in that quiet, composed glide that belonged more to specters than staff.

She set the tray on the corner of his desk, adjusted the placement with a precision he doubted she even noticed, and stood.

But didn’t leave.

Damien raised an eyebrow without looking away from the screens. “Elysia?”

“Yes, young master.”

“You’re still here.”

She didn’t answer right away.

And that silence—it wasn’t hesitation. It was her thinking. Measuring something.

He turned then. Slowly. Just enough to see her standing behind his chair, hands folded, eyes perfectly neutral.

“You seem tired,” she said. The words were soft. Almost tentative.

“I’m focused,” Damien corrected.

A pause.

Then—she tilted her head. “Should I give you a massage?”

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