Emil rummaged through his satchel and pulled out his dedicated personal finance notebook. It was a well used ledger where he maintained rental payments, food costs, and every humiliating guild fine he had ever incurred.
Luna buzzed eagerly inside her casing.
“Okay, finance man,” she said. “What’s the damage?”
“For starters,” Emil muttered, flipping to a fresh page, “rent is due in five days.”
“How much?”
“Six silver.”
Luna stopped.
“…Silver is the one worth a hundred dollars, right?”
She’d started mentally converting these fantasy currencies into American money to more easily track how close she was to becoming a billionaire again.
“Yes,” Emil said.
“So your rent is six hundred bucks?”
“Correct.”
“Not a terrible price, living in a nice looking town,” Luna mused, recalling her thousand dollar minimum rent options back home. “No roommate either…”
“Until recently, no.”
“Still, uuuuhhhggg.” Luna groaned loudly enough that the machine’s casing vibrated.
Emil scratched down the numbers:
Rent: 6 silver (~$600)
Food (monthly): ~2 silver (~$200)
Guild dues: 1 silver (~$100)
Emergency junk: 5–10 copper (~$5–10)
Luna gasped.
“You spend how much on food?”
“Two silver.”
“Two silver?! TWO?!”
“Sure, I would get it if you were eating fancy food and actual meals, but you barely eat! What you do eat should not cost that much.”
“I do eat fancy things,” Emil countered. “Do you know how hard it is to ship beef into this town? Either you move the whole animal and kill it on the spot, or you shell out good money for a rune cooled carriage.”
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Luna hadn’t really thought about how insane modern infrastructure had to be for her to enjoy something as simple as refrigerated grocery store meat.
“Fine…” she said, giving in. “I’m going to invent semi trucks when I get the chance, though.”
Emil closed his eyes, taking a calm breath. He’d learned that a lot of what Luna said made no sense and thinking too much about it just wasted time.
“Okay. So, combining everything without buying any new clothes or anything extra at all…”
He wrote the total at the bottom:
Monthly expenses: 9 silver, 10 copper
(≈ $910)
Luna made a noise, choking back displeasure.
As a person who had been an independent adult paying her own bills before being whisked away into a magical fantasy land, this was… honestly not bad at all for a single man living in an apartment alone.
But as a magic grind machine, it physically hurt her to see that number.
Emil tapped the page thoughtfully.
“Here’s the issue,” he said. “If I stop going to work, I stop earning my normal pay: three silver per week.”
“And LunaCorp? could easily replace that in a day,” Luna said confidently.
“Suspiciously,” Emil corrected.
Luna groaned again.
“I hate the Guild. And rent. And food. And the entire concept of ‘jobs that don’t offer immediate upward scalable mobility.’”
“Welcome,” Emil said dryly, “to being an adult.”
Luna made retching sounds.
Had she gotten spoiled these last few lives she’d lived? Surely not.
“And what about the permit?” he continued. “We still need twenty silver for the authorization, and around fifty to sixty silver for the portable concentrator shell. That’s seventy to eighty silver total.”
“So we are shooting for eight grand in the bank to be safe,” she translated. “You also mentioned extra leeway to bribe the artificer should they be wary of taking us as customers.”
Emil sighed.
“Yeah.” He said, confirming the finished budget.
“During the day, I keep working and you keep printing coins independently. In the evening and nighttime we team up to print as much as we can.”
He tapped the margin next to the totals where he had written down figured notes.
“It’s looking like this will take about seventy five days to hit our goal, barring any surprise expenses.”
“Seventy five days!” Luna exclaimed. “Who do you think I am?! One of those performance art people that can sit inside a box for weeks without going insane?! It’s only been a few days and I am starting to lose it, Emil!”
“If you let me finish,” Emil continued patiently, “that figure is for you staying at Level 7. We could also opt to level you to Level 10 which would only take about three days of grinding for XP, less if we get some good Lucky Penny hits. Then we recalculate with the new knowledge of what class evolution upgrades and unlocked abilities you would then have access to.”
Luna went quiet for a beat.
“Okay,” she said at last. “Short term goal of hitting level 10 first. Then, if we don’t get a good evolution at ten and I’m stuck in here for another month or two, I reserve the right to spiral into a glorious fit of rage and insanity.”
Emil nodded. “That seems fair.”
The concentrator hummed around her, the mana loop tightening: regenerate, coin, consume, repeat.
Luna braced herself.
Three days to Level 10.
That much closer to getting out of this box.
