The Plan.
There was a reason Damien had made his move now. Not just ego. Not just rebellion against the gilded cage of the Elford name. It was timing. Positioning. A high-stakes play in a city that was always shifting—but only if you knew where to look.
And Damien did.
The northeastern outskirts.
To most, it was dead land. Sparse infrastructure. Patchy mana flow. Low property values and virtually no transit grid. Developers ignored it. Investors laughed at it.
Damien swiped through the urban grid reports on his display, cross-referencing infrastructure logs with Elford's private economic scans. The northeastern quadrant lit up dull—barely flickering. Sparse traffic. No mana siphons. Three broken conduits, and a full eighty percent of its zoning permits hadn't been renewed in the last five cycles. Public reports called it a "waste corridor." A gap between development zones. Useless.
But that was the surface read.
Damien knew better.
