Hebbard burst into the Lion's Den great hall like a fat boar that had rolled down a hillside.
His expensive silk coat was gone. In its place was a worn leather jerkin caked with mud and grass. Sweat had plastered several strands of hair flat against his forehead. He was road-dusted, travel-worn, and vibrating with excitement.
He hadn't expected this. He really hadn't. He was going to be rich. He was going to be so rich.
The guards frowned and moved their hands to their sword hilts, waiting for the lord's signal.
Solomon's voice came down from the high seat.
"Calm yourself. My fat officer."
Inwardly, he exhaled with relief. Finally. A break. He had been dealing with petitions all morning until his head was fit to split. A lord's daily duties in Westeros included receiving smallfolk who came to seek his judgment — and even after the Three-Elder System had been implemented and routine matters were now handled by the officers, a persistent stream of disputes still made it through: people who felt the officers had ruled unfairly and demanded to appeal directly before their lord.
His fence post crossed onto my plot by two inches. His dog bit my child and he won't admit it.
Hebbard wheezed to a stop in the center of the hall, gave a quick bow, and handed a thick roll of parchment to a waiting handmaid. He had been briefed on the lord's unusual domestic arrangements, and produced no reaction whatsoever at the sight of the handmaid's appearance.
He watched her carry it up to Solomon.
His voice came out slightly shrill with excitement. His small eyes burned.
"My Lord!!"
"A genius!! You are an absolute genius!!"
Solomon picked up the scroll but didn't open it yet. He looked at Hebbard with genuine interest.
"Go on."
"I went, Lord Solomon. I traveled to every one of your fortified settlements in the Moonstone Mountains."
Hebbard swung his thick arms, enthusiasm making his words come in bursts.
"I thought at first that your system — the dispersed farming in wartime, the gathered formations in peace, the Three-Elder hierarchy — was purely a military and security administration tool."
He drew a long breath, visibly trying to slow his own pulse. He had never seen a domain run like this.
"But the administrative efficiency on your land — My Lord, it is precise beyond anything I have ever witnessed."
"I saw household heads and village elders passing your orders down from the officers — word for word, nothing changed, nothing lost!!"
"I even asked a child by the road — a child — and he could recite your recent laws back to me!!"
Hebbard leaned forward. His voice dropped, but the energy behind it only intensified.
"Lord Solomon — this system is perfectly designed for a lord's monopoly operation. Perfectly. As if it was built for exactly this purpose."
Solomon listened without expression. As far as he was concerned, none of this was surprising. The fat man had slightly misread the mechanism — the real driver was the small population and compact territory, which made the Three-Elder System work cleanly. Scale it up to a larger domain with more people and the chain of command would start distorting information the way any large hierarchy did.
But that was a future problem.
For now, this was more than enough to overturn the worldview of anyone who had grown up in a medieval society.
Hebbard read Solomon's expression and understood: it was time to deliver something original.
His voice came back up.
"My Lord — think about this. We don't need to do what every other domain does — send men door to door hawking our monopoly goods!!"
"Salt!! Sugar!! Charcoal!! These things!!"
"We only need to deliver the goods to the household heads. The household heads pass them down to the village elders. The village elders distribute to the family heads. And each family head ensures that the five households under their care purchase your monopoly goods!!"
Hebbard slapped his thigh. The fat shook.
"A top-down sales channel that reaches every single household in the domain — completely controlled, completely accountable!!"
"No middlemen!! No losses!! Every last coin of profit goes directly to your—"
He caught himself.
"—to your hands!!"
He turned toward Evelyn, who stood quietly beside the lord's seat, and fixed her with a look of focused calculation. He had heard she was the woman behind the lord's household.
"Lord Solomon — now think about it in reverse."
"Working backward through the same system, we can compile precise demand statistics for every settlement cluster."
"Which area is running low on salt? Which settlement's iron plows are breaking? The family head reports to the village elder. The village elder aggregates and reports to the household head. We know before anyone else!!"
"No guessing. No waste. No shortage."
The great hall went quiet.
Only Hebbard's heavy breathing filled the space. Even Evelyn's expression had shifted — the image assembling in her mind of a commercial web woven from pure institutional structure was doing something to her composure.
Solomon was silent.
This sounds... familiar.
But the system fit his current situation — small population, compact domain — with almost perfect precision. At least for now.
Hebbard read the silence and understood that he needed to push further.
His voice dropped to something colder. More satisfied.
"And that is not all, my dear Lord Solomon."
He looked up at Solomon on the high seat the way a man looks at something made of gold.
What if this young man's territory were not quite so limited? What would the numbers look like then?
"Most importantly — the five-household mutual accountability system makes any attempt to privately produce or sell monopoly goods completely impossible to conceal!!"
"The moment one household dares to brew their own wine, or buy private salt from outside — what will their neighbors do? To protect themselves from being implicated, they will come running to report it!! My Lord, that is more effective than deploying a hundred tax inspectors to patrol day and night!!"
"And then we take the people who are stealing from you—"
His voice went bright with enthusiasm.
"Cut off their hands!! Cut off their heads!!"
Solomon finally unrolled the parchment. The writing on it was cramped and uneven but perfectly legible — dense columns of figures recording population, land area, output, and projected demand for every settlement. He stared at it for a moment in genuine admiration.
No one understands commerce like a merchant.
He looked up.
"Your thinking is excellent."
"So — how do you intend to implement it?"
Hebbard drew himself up straight. He knew the real performance was only beginning.
"My Lord — I propose establishing a Lord's Store in every military settlement and in both Cross Town and Riverbend Town."
"This store will be the one and only legal channel for purchasing all monopoly goods."
"Salt. Ironware. Wine. Sugar. And the charcoal we are about to produce at scale. Every person in the domain must buy from here."
"At the same time — it functions as a procurement point. Farmers with surplus grain, hunters with pelts, woodcutters with timber, craftsmen with goods who have no market to sell them — they can bring everything to your store and exchange it for copper coins and silver stags."
Hebbard allowed himself a sly smile. In his assessment, the lord sitting on that high seat was exactly the same kind of person he was — just operating at a higher level. He would love what was coming next.
"Or—"
He let the pause land.
"—exchange it for credit vouchers bearing your seal."
Solomon's eyes came up. He looked at Hebbard directly.
"Explain."
"Yes, My Lord — a paper certificate, redeemable at any of our stores for goods of equivalent value. This reduces the friction of metal currency circulation, and more importantly, it keeps wealth locked inside the domain's internal economy."
His voice went quiet, satisfied.
"They cannot escape your hands."
Solomon rose from the high seat and came down the steps.
A genius. This fat man has independently conceived the embryonic form of financial instruments.
The greedier the person, the more devious their mind.
He kept walking, kept listening. He could feel there was more.
"What else can the stores do?"
Hebbard's smile widened. No hesitation.
"Intelligence. My dear Lord Solomon."
He watched the lord descend toward him and felt something closer to admiration than he had ever felt for anyone.
"The store workers are your eyes and ears. Who has grievances. Who is making unusual movements. Everything flows through the stores like water through a channel and collects in your ears."
He paused, and his ambition expanded visibly, as though the walls of the hall were too small for what he was imagining.
"And in the future, my dear lord—"
"We could even use these stores to issue loans to farmers who lack tools or livestock. Or provide savings accounts for those with surplus coin."
"We become their purse. Their lifeline."
His voice dropped.
"When their money is in your hands — how would they dare to defy you?"
Silence fell over the great hall.
Evelyn — who had witnessed Solomon implement one impossible reform after another — stood with her composure visibly cracked. If Hebbard's proposals were all realized... the picture that formed in her mind was genuinely difficult to look at directly.
Solomon listened to the end.
He smiled — slow, real.
"You are very good, my friend."
"That greedy mind of yours moves faster than anyone else's."
"I approve."
Hebbard's fat face broke into a full blossom.
Solomon raised two fingers.
"Two additions."
"First — store workers rotate every two years. No one stays in the same location long enough to build a personal network."
"Second — all accounts are kept in duplicate. One copy held by the store. One copy held by the local household head."
Hebbard's smile stiffened for a fraction of a second — then became, if anything, more respectful.
The lord is guarding against my greed. He understood the controls immediately.
But oddly, rather than feeling threatened, he felt something close to relief. If the lord had simply handed him the operation and walked away, he would have been uneasy. Checks meant the lord was paying attention. A lord who paid attention was a lord worth working for.
Solomon extended his hand and clapped Hebbard on the shoulder.
"Two months."
"Make it happen."
The two men looked at each other and smiled.
The others standing in the great hall watched that exchange of smiles and felt, without quite being able to explain it, that something about it was slightly wrong — the way two people who understand each other's worst qualities sometimes look at each other with complete comfort.
70+ chapters are available now and daily updates! @patreon.com/agenttwilight