“The black carriage is coming” a man looking ghostly pale said with a stuttering voice. Everyone present in the room didn’t refute the man for entering the meeting room without knocking and took glances to see each other's reactions.

The men and women around the table had been present and witnessed the death of Winston Vidford only a week ago at the hands of the black carriage.

“How long do we have?” Alex Zhang asked in a grave voice. The man in the doorway simply paused for a moment seemingly doing some calculations in his head, “one minutes tops I would say”.

The man waited for a second but with no more questions and sensing the tense atmosphere he simply bowed slightly and exited the room closing the wooden doors with a thud.

Alex Zhang didn't waste a moment and turned to the other executives of the Guild “We need to greet Duke Khan immediately, we don’t want to get on his bad side like Winston did” he muttered. The others nodded in agreement solemnly and stood up to exit the room.

When Alex got to the bottom floor of the guild he could already see through the door’s opening that the infamous Phantom had arrived outside. Alex did not wish to keep the esteemed cultivator waiting so broke out into a light jog to speed up towards the door, much to the surprise of the other Guild members sitting around drinking ale or discussing plans for the day. It’s the fastest many of them had seen the old man move since becoming the Guildmaster.

Alex had to briefly shield his eyes from the bright midday sunlight as he emerged from the guild slightly out of breath from the sudden exercise. His old bones aren't what they used to be after all, even with the help of being a cultivator his body is still over 5000 years old. The other guild executives also followed close behind him.

From the Phantom a tall handsome man with a black robe and bright white hair that reminded Alex of the elegance of moonlight emerged. He had a playful smile that almost seemed like innocent curiosity on his face.

Behind him a catgirl emerged somehow being the exact opposite in every way possible. She had a beautiful snow white dress on and midnight black hair flowed down her back. Her cute ears seemed to be perked up and alert. Unlike the man’s smile she instead had an emotionless face and her cold blue eyes seemed to be analysing everyone present and despite her being the weakest one here she seemed to command an overpowering presence.

“So how can our humble Guild help the most dignified Duke in the city?” Alex said with a stern and professional voice as if he was presenting a project to a potential investor.

Yuan being his usual oblivious self answered honestly, “Ah Guildmaster I have emptied out my treasury building my castle recently so I came here looking for a job”.

Alex was genuinely confused. How can a Celestial Duke possibly run out of money? Usually they had vast territories and subordinates or were part of powerful sects. They would have people practically throwing money at them just to leave a favourable impression. There’s no way he could go broke in just a single week of being here…

“Did you come here to take money from the guild? I have to warn you that the guild is a powerful organization with a huge backing across the entire continent. You will be hunted down if you even touch a single hair on my head or take a single spirit stone from our treasury.” Alex replied in a serious voice.

Alex felt he really did need to warn Yuan before he tried anything drastic. The Guild is a private owned organization not a part of the government. Most countries and cities have a branch and allow the guild a lot of freedom due to their insane influence. Around 40% of the continent's fighting force are guild members and therefore could be called upon to strike down enemies of the guild. The guild branches in major cities or countries like Zlashire often even have Celestial realm guild masters to make sure nobody tries any funny business with the guild. There have been cases of cultivators threatening staff to give them higher ranked guild cards. Some stupid culivators even tried to take over a guild branch in the past only to be hunted down and killed without fail.

Yuan just looked at Alex with complete confusion “I just came to register though?”

Alex looked like his brain needed rebooting. Why did I never consider that he just simply wanted to register? Now I look like an idiot, ah I must be getting too old for this job.

Putting on a smile and waving his hands as if trying to act as if nothing ever happened “Oh of course, honorable cultivator welcome to the Vidford guild branch. To make up for my previous blunder let me personally explain the rules and get you set up with a card free of charge!”.

“Sure lead the way” Yuan responded seemingly in a good mood being led around personally by the guild master. Little did Alex know he was actually happy at not having to pay as he really was broke right now so any savings was a win in his opinion.

While walking through the guild Alex explained to Yuan different facilities and points of interest “Over there is the board for missions ranging from F all the way up to A rank. The main type of missions are:

Gathering: Collect minerals, plants (herbs), animal parts or items that are being requested. This is the most basic kind of mission and is usually handled by the lower ranked guild members.

Escort: Protect the client from one location to another such as escorting a merchant from Vidford to another city. This type of job is often taken by guild members that are already planning to travel to another city and simply earn some money along the way. Any ranked guild member can take these requests but they are often paid based on their guild rank.

Hunting: Monsters need to be regularly killed or a monster stampede can occur. The Vidford family themselves often sponsor missions that will pay for subjugating monsters near the city. Money can also be earned by selling the parts of the monster such as the fur or meat.

Assasination: People deemed demonic cultivators by the Guild will have a bounty placed on their head. The bounty can be increased over time or if the target is deemed more powerful than initially evaluated. People who specialized in assassinations can also be called bounty hunters.

Ranks are designated based on the person's cultivation realm. If they aren’t a cultivator and instead use a different magic system like the Demons do then they can take a separate test to determine their equivalent rank.

F: This rank is reserved for Mortal Realm cultivators. They mostly take gathering or simple odd job requests.

E: This rank is reserved for Qi realm lower stage

D: This rank is reserved for Qi realm middle stage

C: This rank is reserved for Qi realm late/final stage. C rank guild members are usually the most active as they are often trying to gain enough resources to break through the bottleneck to Sage realm.

B: This rank is reserved for Sage realm cultivators.

A: This rank is reserved for Divine realm cultivators.

S: This rank is reserved for Celestial realm cultivators.

“These are the ‘basic’ ranks anyone can get from registering. The higher someone's rank is the more perks they get. For example if someone is C rank or above they no longer have to pay the toll at city gates. Some certain auction houses will only allow guild members of a certain rank to attend is another good example.

There are 3 ‘special’ ranks above S. All require the guild member to first be registered as a S rank member so they are assumed to be in the Celestial realm.

SS and SSS are awarded to members that have made great contributions to the guild, either through missions or other means. One must be this rank in order to apply to be a guild master like me” Alex concluded his long speech, barely taking a second to breath.

“Huh, didn't you say there were three special ranks?” Yuan inquired thinking the old man must be senile.

“Oh silly me I forgot about the X rank, not that it's important for you right now. But i'll tell you anyway. This rank is awarded to the ‘strongest’ person on the continent. In order to get this rank all you have to do is defeat the current holder of the rank. The person with this rank changes quite regularly so I would have to contact the head branch to verify for you who the current X rank is.”

“I do not recommend you try to get this rank, it brings nothing but trouble. You quite literally put an X on you back as you become the number one target for battle junkies.” Alex concluded.

The man who had barged into the conference room earlier emerged from behind the counter to hand Yuan his S rank card. It was made out of platinum and had his name engraved in it. Yuan simply thanked the man and he scurried off behind the desk.

“That concluded the introduction, S rank missions are available on the upper floor in case you're interested. I have work to attend to so I will be off, good day” Alex gave a slight bow to the Duke and proceeded up to his office on the 5th floor.

Yuan turned towards Luna who had been patiently waiting on the side, “Well shall we go?” Yuan said while gesturing to the staircase leading to the S rank floor.

---

Foxy is a 20 year old beast girl of the fox tribe. She is quite tall for a girl but unfortunately rather flat chested despite her best efforts. She has orange and red fur and a bushy tail and small fox ears on the top of her head.

When she initially signed up to work at the guild she was overjoyed when she was notified that she had been hired and assigned to the S rank floor. Usually only the best attendants would be sent to attend to the famous and powerful S rank guild members.

When she arrived at the guild for the first day of work 3 years ago her co workers gave her weird looks when she asked them where the S rank floor was. At the time she thought they were just jealous but oh how wrong she was.

If there was a breeze and a tumbleweed then you would see a tumbleweed roll slowly by. Foxy had diligently turned up to work every morning, posted the new requests on the board, sat behind the counter and then did nothing…

Not a single S rank guild member had visited this branch since its construction to this day. Vidford is far away from any major countries and is poor on resources so nobody has reached the Celestial realm here before and no S ranks have come here from other cities or countries to visit the guild.

So you can imagine Foxy's reaction when two people came up the staircase for the first time in the three years she had been working here…

“Yea, I'm hallucinating” Foxy concluded and went back to sleep on the counter.

“Excuse me miss fox, are those really all missions for S ranks?” Yuan questioned the sleeping fox. She was purring peacefully, properly having a peaceful dream. Her bright orange tail that was deep red at the tip like a beautiful flame was swishing side to side and bringing up a small cloud of dust.

Yuan didn’t really want to disturb the girls' sleep but despite there being 19 other counters she seemed to be the only employee on this floor. On the lower floor all 20 counters had been occupied by a member of staff and most of them had lines of people waiting to be served.

Yuan tapped the fox girl's nose lightly that made it twitch and she let out a little cute yelp in retaliation. Yuan chuckled at this cute display and placed his platinum guild guard in front of the girl's nose.

A moment later she seemed to come to her senses and upon seeing the card on the counter her sleepy eyes went super wide and her eyes darted between the card and Yuan a few times. “So I wasn’t hallucinating,” she exclaimed.

Finally she calmed down “I thought the day would never come! Welcome to the S rank floor mister…” Foxy looked back down to the card to read the name “Yuan Khan”.

“OH! Are you the new Duke of Vidford?”. Yuan simply nodded with a slight smirk on his face. He liked being called a Duke the most.

“That I am miss fox, how should I refer to you”, “Foxy is fine that's what all my friends call me”.

“Oh uh sure I guess, So Foxy can you tell me why there's so many requests on that board” Yuan inquired while pointing his finger towards one of the walls.

Foxy followed his finger and realised what he was implying “Oh that's simple, there hasn't been a S rank guild member here since the founding of this guild branch so there’s nobody to complete the quests”.

“There are 7 gathering quests, 12 escort requests, 376 Hunting (Subjugation) requests and 10 Assasination requests.”

“Why so many hunting requests?” Yuan was confused. “Well when a request gets too hard for Divine realm cultivators it's passed on to our floor to be dealt with. To put it simply there are 376 confirmed Celestial realm threats out there that the Guild and city of Vidford wish to be exterminated.”

“Also the reason it's so much more than the other types of requests is that most can’t afford to hire an S rank to gather materials or escort them. Only the most wealthy nobles or merchants would be crazy enough to spend thousands of gold or spirit stones to hire a single S rank when they could hire 10 A rank’s for the same money.”

“Makes sense I guess, what's the most profitable mission here?”

“Well… assasination missions are definity the most money offered up front for completion. But tracking down demonic cultivators can be difficult and obviously they are much harder to kill then a simple magical beast. But they tend to pay up to 10x more than a Hunting mission”

“Assasination missions suite our Dao’s quite nicely actually” Yuan thought while looking over his shoulder to Luna, she simple nodded in agreement.

Darkness and illusion Dao certainly lacks firepower required to take down a powerful magical beast but they definitely suit assasination missions. Yuan thought.

“Could you recommend an assasination mission for us then Foxy?”

“Certainly Duke, follow me” she said happily walking across to the wall. Her swishing tail definitely showed her excitement to help a customer for the first time and Luna just chuckled at the sight.

After reading each request and some contemplation Foxy removed one of the papers pinned to the wall. It had a picture of a man looking in his late 40s and the name Amezhul the Undead and a bounty of 1000 high grade spirit stones was displayed.

“I personally recommend this guy, although he's strong and has one of the largest bounties he has been on the run for a long time and is recorded to have been injured recently. Also his location is known to be near Arberg which happens to be the closest city to us.”

“How far from here is Arberg?”

“About a month by carriage, so 10 thousand miles I would guess?”

“Alright I'll take this request then” Foxy took the paper back to the counter and stamped it to confirm it had been taken.

“Hope to see you again Duke!” Foxy said with a genuine smile to her first customer in the 3 years she had been working here. “Likewise Foxy, i'll be back soon”.

That concludes Yuan’s visit to the Guild, with a mission in hand he walks hand in hand with Luna back to the Phantom. Thankful that he has found some work to do or he seriously was about to be the first Duke in history to go broke.