"So, um, care to tell me a little bit about yourself?" inside of one of the rooms arranged for the people taken back to Xianshi Inn from Lady Vyn's dungeon, Jianmen asked a thin, bald, slightly sickly looking man with pale ashy skin, broken and grey fingernails, bags under his eyes and eating a piece of bread like he had been starving for weeks and weeks.
"My - my name is Sanders." the man looked at Jianmen, his pupils were dilated, his irises had tiny cracks and stains and Jianmen could tell that his eyes had been this way for quite a while since whatever toxin or drugs he had been forced to ingest had left quite a mark on him: "I - I was once Lucias Vyn's contact for the Grant Academy Hunting Ground."
"Hmm, really?" Jianmen nodded with pleasant surprise: "And why were you locked up in that dungeon?"
"'Cause I fucked up." the man coughed when he tried to swallow a bite that was too big: "I was tasked with kicking a small competitor out of the ring, but I failed. And as a punishment I was sentenced to be there for five years."
"That wouldn't be not that long, would it? " Jianmen poured the man some tea: "What made you wanna come with me here?"
"My sentence was almost ten years ago." Sanders shook his head and took the tea cup from Jianmen's hand, drank it up and started pounding his chest to let the tea wash the bread down: "As you can imagine, the dungeon, the prison was run by those guys, and they don't tend to keep track of the dates. And plus, they enjoy the fact that they have our lives held in their hands."
"Hmm." Jianmen smiled.
"Oh, I know my life's also in your hands." Sanders sighed and said: "But I figured - since they don't have anything or anyone I cared for in their custody, I might as well jump on a chance of change, and maybe revenge? I don't know man, you could've killed those power-tripping scum. But you held back, for some unknown fucking reason."
"Tell me about what you did for Lady Vyn in the Grant Academy." Jianmen laid back in his chair and said: "Then, maybe we can do something similar for you to what we did for another former employee of Lucias Vyn."
"I don't have families held hostage." Sanders shook his head: "But I do want something."
"Name it."
"I want to be free." Sanders took another big bite of the bread: "Don't worry, I won't be your problem. I have my plans of revenge, which I cannot put in motion if I am stuck here. Your place is nice and all, but it's not MY place."
"Talk then." Jianmen clenched his left hand in the air and a bottle of wine appeared in his palm and he just handed it to the man: "If your information is valuable, we'll send you off with a nice dinner, not just bread."
"Okay." Sanders took the wine with a smile: "I trust that someone of your caliber wouldn't lie to a nobody like me."
Jianmen waited as the man finished half a bottle with a long gulp. Then after a comfortable "aahh" and wiping the corner of his mouth clean with his sleeve, Sanders said: "First, how many groups do you think have spies in the Grant Academy?"
"More than two, as far as I know. Neither of which I care for."
"Oh, that would be very, very wrong. When I was there, there were at least four." Sanders chuckled: "One group is us, we had someone higher up who organized our plans and covered for our activities. What we did for the most part was copy and transcribe books that were in the restricted sections of the library. We occasionally traffic some materials in and out. The other group is the group of Carol Summers, they had their own thing going on, from what I know they are more into recruiting the students there, and they were also in the business of trafficking controlled materials. Then there's the Division, they have recruiting agents and people who gather information, and of course the occasional sabotage missions of other people's hard work. And this new group I was supposed to kick out was still small when I was there, they were very into trafficking and concocting controlled materials and were actually really good at it. "
"Concocting controlled materials? Tell me more."
"You know the hunting ground? Used by both students and faculty members?" Sanders took another sip of wine: "It's actually one of the biggest waste of space I have ever seen. Maybe it's just because the Grant Academy can afford to squander its potential. But, to put it simply, it's basically a mega realm with stacked planes, spaces and thus smaller realms, where through a single entry point you can access more than a dozen small interconnected realms without actually knowing it. And since these realms are vacant most of the time, knowing the right people will get you access to the reservation schedules of the realms, and with a handsome price you can actually grow a lot of things in those realms, and harvest them for all sorts of uses."
"So you had some hunting ground rangers on your payroll."
"We had a few. And we paid for their time and their stock, and if we're lucky we can get an actual slot for a period of time. We didn't own these rangers, so when a new group comes in, they will be competing for the rangers' time and available slots for harvest."
"And what do you and the corrupt rangers usually cultivate in those realms?"
"Controlled or even forbidden plants, mushrooms, hallucinogenic fungi, sometimes even actual small live animals with weaponization usages like small Swamp Serpents and Heart Ripper Toads." Sanders nodded and said: "And there's also a whole black market in the academy for those things."
"How did you manage to evade the administration? Didn't they pay any attention?"
"Are you really that naive?" Sanders scoffed: "You know how much academy professors make? How hard is it to get funding for research sometimes?"