Only Wisdom Awakened - Chapter 158

Chapter 158: Request
Hans walked out of the innermost area and tapped his earbud once to turn it on.

He then called for someone to take him back, and the whole team was happy to know he was still alive.

When he returned inside the building, the first person to greet him was the dean, curious to know about what had happened in the innermost area.

She brought Hans to the cafeteria in that place to talk to him.

“So? How is it going?”

“I don’t know, I managed to kill quite a lot of them, but there are still many left”

“Well, I did not expect you to take them all down in one day, no need to worry about that.

But still… you’re quite strange, to think that as a reward you would ask…

Two days earlier….

“Really?!”

Exclaimed the prime minister.

“The tortoises are….”

“Dont trust this boy, he’s just saying that to rip us off even more than what they are already doing”

Said Malik, the guy who had been hostile to them since the start of the meeting.

And this time the prime minister did not let this comment pass by.

“Would you excuse us for a second?”

He asked the dean.

She nodded, and the prime minister got up.

“Malik, follow me outside”

Once they closed the door, the dean moved her seat beside Hans’ and told him something whispering:

“How sure are you about this information Hans?”

He replied truthfully:

“I would say eighty or ninety percent”

Her pupils dilated, if someone like him, who had a connection with the night market, was even only eighty percent sure, then the information couldn’t have been anything but true.

In the meantime, the prime minister was sending Malik away, telling him that his presence in the discussion did nothing but create enmity between them and the Americans.

The man then returned to the meeting room, closing the door right behind his back.

“I am extremely sorry, it seems like Malik’s help was needed to solve an important trouble, so I sent him there immediately.”

“Of course… there’s no need to apologize”

Replied the dean while smiling.

But her real thoughts went along the lines of:

‘We can finally negotiate freely without that idiot interrupting us’

She then proceeded to back Hans’s words, saying that he was also speaking for her and that the problem was imminent.

“Sigh… so it is real”

Said TeamOne guild leader, who was also sitting there, he had seen the dean asking the boy something, and also her reaction, so he was almost entirely sure they were not lying.

A headache grew inside the prime minister’s mind.

‘The yeti’s, and even the tortoises huh.… I guess the most troublesome part was not even closing the gate, to begin with

Maybe he would’ve rethought that opinion of his if he had known about what Hans had to do in order to close the gate, but his reasoning was not completely wrong.

Since both the monsters inside the gate, if so you could call them, would’ve just said there, the trouble for them had always been the yetis and the tortoises.

They now found themselves incapable of defending both dangers.

For a second, he thought the end was truly about to come for Greenland.

“I can take care of them if you want me to”

Said Hans, interrupting all the prime minister’s negative thoughts.

“Would you really…. Be able to do that?”

He was not doubting anyone’s ability, but those monsters were enormously stronger than A-rank hunters, they didn’t even know whether they were superior to S-rank.

But the boy seemed so sure of it when he replied:

“Yes”

Another sigh resounded through the room:

“Alright then, if that’s the case, we are all counting on you to save out troublesome country.

But… I don’t know if we have the means to repay your work.

Do you have a special request?”

“Yes I do”

Said Hans.

He was clearly after something very specific, and that unsettled the prime minister a little bit.

He gulped loudly before the young man could even make his request.

“The materials dropped from the tortoises, I will keep them, and I want a team to help out with transportation and storage where the materials will be placed for the time being.

I also want all transactions done with those materials to be exempted from taxes, at least in this country.

I will not work just to put money in others’ pockets.

Will you be able to do that?”

“This… yes, I will make sure it will be done”

It was a huge request since materials obtained from gates were taxed quite highly in Greenland, and that was one of the reasons most hunters left the country.

Greenland before the catastrophe was considered to be a rich country.

It belonged to the Kingdom of Denmark, and it received a huge sum of money yearly to sustain its economy, in exchange, Greenland allowed Denmark to have a safe route through the Atlantic Ocean.

That, however, did not last long.

Just a few months after the opening of the gates, the deep sea became one of the most dangerous places on the planet, and the long-established trading routes crumbled under the various attacks of the sea beasts.

Having no use whatsoever to Denmark’s kingdom, Greenland was abandoned to itself, causing an extreme economic crisis.

Other than the fall of the trading routes, the other disaster caused by the unsafety of the seas was making deep-sea fishing impossible, and countries like Greenland and Iceland, whose economy was mostly based on that, received a huge hit.

They survived the state of poverty by selling monsters’ corpses overseas, obviously using planes, since the ships were unusable.

But being that gates’ spoils were the main part of the economy, they were heavily taxed, and making an exception just for a foreigner could’ve caused a rebellion of the awakened.

Greenland could not afford to have any of the awakened leave, so lifting the taxes from Hans’s transactions was not the right call.

“Instead of lifting the taxes, we will pay the difference, but I won’t pay for the taxes of other countries you plan on selling the materials to.”

“That’s fine as well”

…

Wouldn’t it have been better if you asked for some terrain, or maybe authorization to create a night market and a trading center, I heard there is not a main one here in Greenland.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I have nothing to do with the night market or the trading center.

I’m solo, S. O. L. O. ”

“Alright…

Then, Mr solo, would you mind telling me what was inside that gate? I asked Caleb but he told me you cleared it alone, and also that you returned heavily injured.

Seeing that you’re completely unscathed even after taking down multiple tortoises, who are supposed to be at least as strong as S-rank, I guess whatever was subside that gate must’ve been way beyond average.

Was it perhaps an irregular gate?”

Hearing this made Hans reflect, was it an irregular gate?

If so, are all the irregular gates he had found up till then also portals to other worlds?

At the time he still didn’t know he could analyze gates, so he wasn’t sure.

“I don’t know”

He said calmly.

“Uh? You don’t know? What the hell would that even mean? Yes or no?

That’s all you have to answer.”

“I said I don’t know, and don’t try to find out any more, I won’t tell you.”

Hans got up and walked away, he could not even find the words to reveal everything he had found out, also, telling someone with knowledge would’ve just meant cursing them with things they had no power upon, just like he had been cursed by Caelan.

While walking away, he turned around to say one last thing to the dean before going to sleep.

“I can at least tell you this though.

You’re taking it the wrong way…

That wasn’t a gate, it was a portal.”

“Uh? What do you mean?”

Without replying, Hans walked away, leaving her with more doubts than she had before.

Back to his room, Hans let his body fall on the comfortable bed.

It had been a long day, so his tiredness hurried him to sleep.

Before closing his eyes, however, he took a couple of seconds to think more about what the dean had said, coupling it with what he had discovered thanks to Caelan.

Apparently, opening the portal had been one of her servants or allies.

There was no doubt that the difficulty was way beyond B-rank, even if there had been an error in the mana sensor, the gate far surpassed even A-rank.

It could’ve probably been classified as an improbable gate, but did that mean that all improbable gates were caused by the hands of that being?

‘ I get opening a gate to weaken Caelan since he had caused them a lot of trouble.

But why open it for such relatively weak beings like the ice draconian and the moon snake?’

Hans couldn’t figure it out and came to the conclusion that he would just ask Caelan if he got another chance.