The Martial Unity

Soon enough, as Rui predicted, a bombshell dropped in the Shionel Confederation. Deacon Industries published an announcement in their media outlets and posted posters, and Chairman Deacon himself held a public press conference on the issue. 𝓫𝓮𝒹𝓷ℴ𝓿ℯ𝓵.𝓬ℴ𝓶

Deacon Industries was issuing a public bounty on the Voider for ten million Shionel gold coins. This sum of money shook the nation, ten million gold coins was an astronomic sum of money to kill a single Martial Squire. This sum of money was unprecedented as a bounty for a Martial Squire.

In fact, as far as everyone could tell, never in the history of the Age of Martial Art had a Martial Squire had such a gigantic bounty placed on their head. Such an enormous sum of gold was not trivial even for the mighty powerhouse that Deacon Industries was.

Bounties in the Shionel Confederation were usually placed on criminals by the state as a way to mobilize freelancer Martial Artists into aiding law enforcement. The reason they were otherwise illegal was that they violated the law and constituted conspiracy to murder and assault, and would normally instantly land Chairman Deacon in prison and disbarred from the Shionel Merchant Guild.

However, this was only under normal circumstances. The Shionel Dungeon was not subject to these constraints and restrictions, mostly because no law could be enforced within the Shionel Dungeon.

Chairman Deacon was exploiting that loophole to the absolute fullest. Killing the Voider inside the Shionel Dungeon was legal, and now would fetch one ten million gold coins.

Of course, things weren't as simple as that. For one, how did one verify that the individual, or individuals that were killed were the Voider?

Such a thing was harder to gauge as their identity was unknown. Regardless, Deacon Industries had laid many conditions that would go into identifying whether the individual was actually the Voider, or not.

For one, each bounty hunter was encouraged to purchase a recording device and record the individual suspected to be the Voider for whatever reason. Bounty hunters were also encouraged to procure the corpse or corpses and give it to Deacon industries that would analyze whether or not they were the Voider.

The way to do this would be to analyze their means of harvesting, the identity of the corpse, the existing harvested yield, etc. The Voider had a very unique way of doing things when it came to the extraction of esoteric resource deposits, storage, and transport. These could be analyzed and could be used to verify this individual possessed the remarkable ability to harvest at titanic rates that the Voider was confirmed to have.

This sounded a bit flimsy and not concrete at all, the conditions were subjective. However, the reward was absurd. The Shionel currency was weighted very heavily, each gold coin meant a lot when converted to most other currencies. Ten million Shionel golds were nothing short of a small fortune.

Furthermore, if this bounty was made by a smaller and less credible party, it wouldn't have garnered much trust at all. However, this was the Deacon Industries. On top of all of that, they had made such a big and loud show about it attracting attention internationally, that they did not dare intend on betraying any bounty hunter that succeeded!

Credibility, reliability, and history were some of the more intangible variables, yet also some of the most important variables that merchants and businesses needed to pay attention to. In fact, these were variables that made or broke success.

It wasn't because of moral reasons that companies worked hard to maintain honest operations, it was purely because companies that broke their word, deceived third parties, and generally engaged in shady operations were avoided like the plague. There were extremely practical reasons to ensure that one's transactions and operations were clean.

In that regard, Deacon Industries was extremely rigorous and solid. Its sheer credibility and reliability were huge reasons that it was able to reach the level that it had reached. If Deacon Industries dared to blatantly cheat bounty hunters and break their word, the decades that had gone into building up its pristine credibility and reputation would be utterly annihilated overnight. Prospective third-party clients, customers, and business partners would seriously reconsider the wisdom of collaborating with a company that unhesitatingly broke its word despite making such a big fuss about it and announcing it to the world.

Deacon Industries would rather lose ten million gold coins than their credibility and reputation. Losing the latter would cause far more damage in the long run, as would letting Rui run around. That was why Chairman Deacon did not hesitate to go big from the very get-go and offer a huge sum of money as a bounty.

That was why the general sentiment and response to the bounty was quite positive, no one believed that this was a scam. A huge number of Martial Squires expressed interest and eagerness to hunt the Voider. A bounty meant that they could still get paid if they succeed, and they didn't need to abide by orders from Deacon Industries. As long as they succeeded, they would get a huge bounty in return.

On top of all of that, Deacon Industries was providing full access to all of its intelligence surrounding the Voider, which was a huge help, since it allowed all the bounty hunters to gain a basic understanding of the Voider and made it likelier that they would catch the Voider. Without the information, they would be running blind and would have a much harder time catching even basic information about him.

The intelligence of Deacon Industries would also be updated with all information on the Voider available, meaning any time any progress was made. That progress would also greatly aid Martial Squires in the future allowing them to act on more updated information.

The sheer number of bounty hunters acting with this information made people quite optimistic that the Voider would eventually be hunted.

Soon enough, huge numbers of Martial Squires registered as bounty hunters in large droves, looking to be the ones to catch the Voider.