Chapter 77: Bliss This Mess
Since the matter of managing the Blackguards was handed over to Ian Grayson by his father, a lot of money started to flow as the 17-year-old young master displayed a talent for cunning and trickery beyond his years.
Even with their reputation as one of the great houses of Elgard, House Grayson has survived many catastrophes because of their approach to organized crime and racketeering throughout their generation. As the House with the exclusive rights to harvest and exploit many resources around Elgard and its colonies, there was no limit to how this House could grow and thrive but that was only theoretical.
This situation happened 400 years ago during the schism between the great houses as Elgard was about to fall into the chaotic talons of a bloody civil war. The crown almost lost control over the lands and the vassals nearly rebelled until a grand summit was held and the Lords dictated that each of the Great Houses would get an exclusive right that grants it a power that even the crown can’t refute but would place them under a strict penalty in return. For House Grayson, which was devastated badly in the conflict, they got the right to harvest resources and sell them to the other houses all across the holdings of the nation.
While it seemed enticing, this only applied to the holdings of the crown and the holding of House Grayson, which were still some large portions of the land. Sadly, many of the other lords can refuse to allow House Grayson into their territories and sell the mining rights to private companies which they can be the owners of in secret.
Especially against House Moore, which owned the right of being the first to call dibs on any manufacturing practice and would always buy resources en masse at cheap prices, House Grayson started to decline badly in the first hundred years. Still, as the previous lords were upholding honor above all else, the latter lords who grew up in the early colonial period discarded this commitment for the sake of survival and established many underground operations while using criminal laborers or slaves to get it done. The purpose of that is to operate some industrial businesses in secret and smuggle raw materials in the shadows to create scarcity and illegally raise prices.
Throughout the following 300 years, House Grayson became widely connected in the underground world and would even intervene with the business of House Moore, sparking a fierce rivalry between the two. Still, some lines could never be crossed especially when the Royal Family and House Black were hounding over any opportunity to put the nobles back in their place.
The colonial and industrial revolution made only the crows on the banner of House Grayson grow hungrier and loom over darker horizons of crime and depravity. Their latest exploit was the Criminal Labor Act and they exploited it well under the guise of the Blackguards mercenaries which operated in all parts of the world. With that, not only did they secure funds for the House to flourish, but also remained unshaken in front of the other great houses.
Now that Ian Grayson was assuming the mantle of the criminal side of the family in order to prepare him for the position of the family head, his methods were considered an evolution compared to his predecessors. His focus was on Arms dealing, Drug trade, and Slave trafficking; a methodology that each part of it complemented the others in the most diabolical way possible. The slaves would forge weapons for the Blackguards, the Blackguards would get more slaves and resources for the drug trade, and the Drug trade would create a whole load of cash, rinse and repeat.
But in a single night, this smoothly functioning machine was disturbed badly and the culprit behind it was none other than the Bloody Swan.
"FUCK IT!"
Anger couldn’t be contained as a month’s supply worth of opium was burnt with that wagon.