“Ugh… What… What happened? What the hell is this place?” Linda slowly rose from her seat, feeling a throbbing sensation in her head as if she had just woken up from a d*ug-induced slumber.
Not a single ray of light permeated the surroundings; only the faint glow of lanterns beyond the iron bars illuminated the space.
“Is this a dungeon? Jake is… where is Jake?” Linda desperately searched for her beloved, but the only person in the narrow prison was herself; Jake was nowhere to be seen.
At that moment…
“This sound…” Footsteps echoed in the silence.
Linda instinctively peered over the barricade, her heart praying fervently.
“I hope the owner of these footsteps is Jake,” she whispered, hoping her beloved would come to rescue her.
However, her expectations quickly turned into deep despair.
“You… you…”
“I’m glad I arrived on time.” Linda immediately recognized the man standing before her.
Bahamut Fernandez, the owner of Beden Merchant Company and the one who had first suggested the gold mine to her.
He had brought her here under the command of the Archbishop.
Upon seeing him, Linda’s mind raced.
‘Why is he here? To threaten me into handing over the rights to the gold mine?’
She resolved not to yield until she and Jake were freed.
“What do you want? Do you think we will hand over the gold mines without a fight? We won’t. I would rather die!”
“Haah…”
Bahamut sighed deeply at Linda’s words, a reaction entirely different from what she expected.
Linda questioned that unexpected response, “Why are you sighing? What did you expect?”
Bahamut spoke in a slightly annoyed tone, “Well, that’s good… the gold mine… if it truly existed, I would have secured it at any cost. Even if it meant releasing people like you, I would have done it.”
“…”
Linda sensed something was amiss.
Trembling, she asked, “What… what are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you, there’s no way out of here for you.” Bahamut retrieved something from his pocket, letting it catch the dim light.
Linda, seeing it glisten, thought it was gold.
“That… that’s…”
“It’s something you dug up in the mine you developed. It shines like real gold.”
“What?” Linda was suddenly flooded with doubt.
Bahamut’s voice turned cold. “There is this old saying since the days of the alchemists, ‘all that glitters is not gold.’ Look closely. If you’ve worked in the mining industry, you should be able to recognize this.”
As Linda examined the object, a sense of desperation washed over her.
Gradually, her face hardened.
“That’s…a lie…”
“Sorry, but it’s true. As you probably already noticed, this isn’t gold. It’s pyrite. It resembles gold but is worthless in comparison. Your last hope was nothing more than iron disguised as gold.”
“Kuh… .”
A metal that was a mixture of iron and sulfur, often called fool’s gold.
Although the color itself is similar to gold, the difference was large in terms of properties, and above all, because it was quite common, it was actually traded at a slightly more expensive price than iron ore.
Even so, it’s price was so cheap that you couldn’t even compare it to gold.
As she recognized that her last hope was a piece of iron disguised as gold, a dark shadow of despair began to fall on Linda’s face.
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