Chapter 48 — A Thousand Gold Dragons!
The moment those words left Odin's mouth, Jaime froze.
Along the road, he had watched firsthand how calculating the man could be — how sharply attuned he was to profit, how obsessed he seemed with gold.
For a mere hundred dragons, Odin had laid a trap and played Haragg Stour and the others to their deaths without hesitation.
In Jaime's mind, Odin was a man of clear objectives — a hunter of gain. At times, he had even thought the man disturbingly similar to his own father, who measured the world in terms of advantage and return.
And yet, when an enormous reward lay within reach…
Odin had shown this.
This gentleness.
He had even considered Jaime's feelings, urging him to return home first — to reclaim the warmth of family he had been denied for so long.
What kind of breadth of mind was this?
What kind of heart?
Looking into those sincere, fathomless eyes, Jaime felt shaken to the core. Odin's image in his mind grew taller, more complicated.
Yes, he was calculating — but he also possessed something Tywin Lannister never had.
Something… human.
Jaime couldn't help recalling Harrenhal — how Odin chose to ransom Brienne instead of claiming payment for himself. A strange warmth stirred in his chest.
To be understood. To be cared for. To be… guided.
For a man whose life had been steeped in betrayal and scorn, such a feeling was unbearably rare.
It even made him think of the towering figure who had once laid a sword upon his shoulder and named him knight.
"Odin…"
But when Jaime finally came back to himself, the man was already gone — swallowed by the noise and chaos beyond the Lion Gate.
Only a voice drifted back through the crowd:
"Don't worry, Ser. Later, I'll pay a personal visit to Lord Tywin."
"I trust by then… my payment will be ready."
---
Flea Bottom
The stench here reached an almost physical density.
If King's Landing was a cesspit, then Flea Bottom was the thickest sediment at its very bottom — rot long fermented, crawling with unseen life.
Inside the infamous underground fighting pit known as the Blood Cellar, the air was a suffocating stew of sweat, blood, old urine, and filth beyond naming.
Torchlight twisted through the smoke, casting every excited face in hellish hues.
Beggar. Cutpurse. Mercenary. Even the occasional well-dressed noble.
Down here, all faces blurred into the same shape.
In an inconspicuous corner, Odin watched in silence.
[Insight Lv.2] let him notice what others missed:
The tremble in gamblers' fingers as they placed bets.
The smug flicker in the bookmaker's eyes.
The hoarse roars of winners.
The ashen collapse of losers.
Raw human emotion played out here in its most primitive form — naked, unfiltered.
Yes, after killing Stour and the others, Odin had stripped over a hundred gold dragons from their corpses and used them to raise Insight to Level 2.
Frankly, northerners really were poor — more than twenty men, and barely a hundred dragons between them.
Below, another bloody "performance" was underway.
A gaunt, shirtless man fought three snarling wild dogs.
He had no weapon. No training. He just flailed his arms clumsily in desperate retaliation.
Against dogs that had likely been starved for days, such resistance was meaningless.
One beast latched onto his calf and dragged him down. The other two piled in instantly, tearing into him in a frenzy.
The man screamed.
But the crowd's excited howls drowned him out, and he vanished beneath fur and blood.
Odin watched it all without expression.
"Crude," he said flatly.
That was his verdict.
Because he knew — though this was called an arena, beasts fighting beasts was merely an appetizer. What truly stirred an audience, what made them willingly part with their last copper, was life-and-death struggle between man and man, or man and beast.
Back in his previous life, during his long academic grind through bachelor's and master's, Odin had dabbled in psychology.
Watching mortal combat triggered intense physiological responses — extreme tension, heightened excitement. When experienced in a crowd, the emotion amplified, shared frenzy giving people license to vent the pressures of daily life.
Add to that the illusion of control — the thrill of deciding another's life or death — and even the most ordinary person could taste a fleeting sense of power.
It was an intoxicating psychological lure.
That was why, across history, such spectacles never truly disappeared.
But in Odin's eyes, this arena's methods were painfully unsophisticated. If he ran it himself, profits might increase a hundredfold — a thousandfold.
While these thoughts raced through his mind, the noise in the pit died down.
The man hadn't lasted long. He was lunch now.
Workers with hooked poles drove the reluctant dogs back into cages. Two men jumped down, efficiently dragged away the mangled remains, and tossed a few shovels of sand over the blood.
The whole process was brisk — like waiters clearing a messy table.
Odin tilted his head slightly and looked at the squat man beside him.
"You've trained this place fairly well. Looks like you're doing alright in King's Landing, Rorge."
It sounded like praise. It also sounded like a probe.
Rorge forced an ugly grin. "You flatter me, Boss Odin. If I were doing well in King's Landing, I wouldn't have been arrested and sentenced to death."
Indeed, he'd woken up on the road days ago and, with remarkable good sense, immediately thrown himself at Odin's feet.
Odin hadn't been surprised.
Men like Rorge, raised at the bottom, followed a simple survival code: follow the hardest fist, the cruelest hand. Pride meant nothing.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have volunteered for the Night's Watch the moment his death sentence was handed down.
"I don't care for flattery," Odin said mildly. "Ten thousand pretty words aren't worth one solid deed."
Rorge got the message instantly.
"Understood, Boss!"
Grinning, he shoved through the crowd toward a man perched on a high stool beside the arena. The man was bent over rough parchment, scribbling quickly with charcoal.
Three burly guards stood nearby.
Clearly, this was the bookmaker.
At least ten people waited to place bets — but Rorge wasn't the sort to queue politely.
He bulldozed forward, shoving people aside despite their angry looks, and stopped in front of the clerk.
Chest out, voice booming:
"Next match."
"I'm betting one thousand gold dragons."