“Hold on. Can I think about establishing the guild a bit more?”

Just then, the desserts I ordered came rushing in. Three staff members were faithfully fulfilling the request to bring the entire menu by pulling a cart. I guess, being a VVIP, ordering the whole menu is something they accommodate without complaint.

Upon reflection, I was assigned a private room via a special entrance with a personal shopper in tow, so if I hadn’t ordered this much, I might have lost face.

Human Jaehee, you have no common sense, do you have no diamonds? In my hand, I have a black card with no limit. I need to spend more diamonds.

Even without deliberately taking diamonds out of my phone, my dwarves sometimes casually toss diamonds out of it as a prank. When I put my hand in my pocket, I feel lots of hard, angular things. About 90% of the diamonds rolling around in my pocket are ones my dwarves threw out of my phone as a protest. Diamonds leaked out as if there was a hole in my phone.

I grabbed a handful of them and spilled them onto the table like taking out spare change. Everyone’s gaze focused on me. I’m used to people being surprised by this many diamonds.

What scares me is that I don’t know the threshold—how many more I need to pull out here to make people’s faces change color. I’ve now got a sense that this level is just diamond-rich bluffing.

I used my fingers to divide the diamonds I took out into exactly three equal parts. I gave them all to the staff as tips. A rich person with great sense. People tip abroad too, right? In American dramas, they even give checks as tips.

“Could you come back in about ten minutes and bring the desserts and drinks that these people have taken even a single bite of, again?”

The quality of service has changed. The clerks, who were already kind, seemed to have unlocked their kindness skills. Everyone feels good, how great is that? Win-win.

Suddenly, even the sound of forks clinking stopped. Looking at the druid party, I saw Iris and Zeffer hastily straightening their backs.

At the long rectangular table, my personal shopper and dryads were seated around me, while the druid party sat across from me. This setup and tension… I had the illusion that this place had suddenly become a large corporation interview room.

“Hey, feel free to sit comfortably! Eat as many desserts as you want, and if there’s anything else you’d like, just let me know! This is just a small gesture of mine to show I want to do well from now on!”

“If this is a small gesture…”

The food covering the table was beautiful—vibrant and tempting to look at, though I didn’t know how it tasted. Among it, the only dessert I could recognize was the cupcake… But honestly, I preferred to eat the dishes over the desserts, so I wasn’t reaching for them much.

I sipped my drink, holding my phone with the hand wearing the artifact, and thought calmly.

The dryads I needed were foremost Mesquite, who would help me grasp general knowledge about guilds, and Daisy2, who would advise me on manipulation techniques.

Pretending to look at my phone, I glanced at the terrarium artifact. Mesquite, help! I wish I could call them out, but since this is a commercial area, the large dryads were prohibited.

Mesquite and Elder weren’t in the artifact zone. More precisely, they weren’t in my room zone. The two were in the 28th terrarium. Mesquite was looking up at me with two dandelion children dangling from each arm. The dandelion dryads seemed to have grown a lot since I last saw them…

“Lucky you…! Everyone except me went to play in the 28th terrarium!”

Elder, who was sitting on an intact bench amid the rubble, suddenly burst out in anger. That bench was purchased from the 26th terrarium artifact workshop.

“I wanted to go there more than here!”

Whine. That guy is still sulking like that. Elder turned his head away sharply, but I could feel him sneakily glancing this way. With such a pretty face, he’s acting cute.

“Mesquite. Do you know about guilds?”

“I only know that if we dryads gather to form a forest, druids gather to form a guild.”

As expected, the guild was exactly the same as the common knowledge I had.

“The four druids I met today want to form a guild. What do you think, Mesquite?”

As long as my dryads are inside the terrarium artifact, my thoughts are all shared with them. Recalling the druids I saw and experienced and the reason they wanted to form a guild, Mesquite set down the dandelion children and fell into thought lightly.

“The former administrator also operated an exclusive guild for the 28th terrarium. To be precise, they weren’t the guild master… I think their assistant took on that role… Probably because managing the terrarium alone was overwhelming for the administrator. I remember they placed many important requests with the guild and also entrusted it with security duties.”

“Scarecrow? The 28th terrarium had an exclusive guild?”

“Yes, but they said it was disbanded because maintaining it became difficult as the terrarium’s situation worsened. If they had held on just a bit longer, it would have been a great help… Even when the fire invaded, it would have been easier to request help from other terrariums…”

It felt a bit strange to me, maybe because whenever I joined guilds in games, I only experienced those with strong bonds between members.

Disbanding at the toughest time and going their separate ways. Was it just a formal guild sustained solely by money? Even so, since it was a guild, I would have thought they’d be the first to ask for help when things got really hard…

“What do I need to do to establish a guild?”

“You’re planning to set it up here in the 28th terrarium, right? And you intend to make it an exclusive terrarium guild? Then, the guild members will become quasi-residents of the terrarium. Even if they reside in other terrariums, they’ll gain dual residency status here in the 28th. However, the difference from actual residents is in tax payment. You’ll need to either subsidize part of the taxes or cover them entirely. That’s such a major privilege that it’s the first reason people want to join an exclusive guild.”

Since I’d already abolished taxes in our terrarium, this wasn’t something I needed to worry about. It seemed like this was the main reason operating an exclusive terrarium guild came with high maintenance costs—tax subsidies.

“And you’ll need a place where guild members can gather, manage a warehouse, and check requests. They call it a Stonehenge, a meeting place for druids, but aren’t all of those completely wrecked around here, Jae?”

Stonehenge was a term I’d seen before when forming parties with other druids. My phone had switched to Stonehenge mode.

In other games, you’d need to pick a location called a guild house or guild castle, but the big problem in our terrarium was the restoration level. Though Daisy 2 had been working hard to fix up the terrarium while I was away, it was still impossible to erect buildings in that short time.

“Isn’t there any place we can use temporarily? It just needs to be enclosed on all sides and passable as a room…”

Even when I quickly scanned the 28th terrarium with the artifact, I only saw places where the ceilings looked ready to collapse at any moment.

No, there was one. A relatively unscathed spot, because the World Tree’s branch was rooted there—the orchard. And the former administrator’s room, though it had been messy when I found her diary there, was passable back then.

“Are you really going to use that room? It’s the biggest and best room in the orchard…”

“It’s fine. I’m busy running around here and there right now, and I can handle work from anywhere with my wallet, so it doesn’t matter.”

Since it was relatively less damaged, I chose the orchard as the location, but picking that spot created another issue. I would need to grant appropriate ranks so ordinary people could freely enter the business spaces, not just the open areas of the orchard.

In other words, just as I was designated as a gardener of a certain rank in two terrariums, I had to upgrade each guild member’s rank individually, and since this identity was certified by the terrarium, it came with a lot of responsibility.

On top of that, with the administrator role switching to me, I had to re-establish the benefits corresponding to each gardener rank from scratch.

I quietly lowered the hand wearing the artifact onto the table. Ah, there’s so much to do. This is getting annoying.

It was healing to watch Daisy already clearing a box of cookies with different textures by type and taking down the baked goods stacked on the tray floor by floor.

She eats well. In contrast, Wolfsbane, following Daisy, would touch various things but only peck at food like birdseed, making a puzzled expression.

When I, who had been looking at my phone, blatantly started slacking off, they asked.

“How’s the guild going?”

In other games, when I created a guild, I only had to press a few buttons and type a bit when writing the guild name or description, so having to start over from the design phase felt like a homework assignment—but I couldn’t tell them that truth.

“Since it’s an exclusive guild, I want to think it over more carefully.”

“Yes, yes, of course you should! I totally understand! We’ve never established a guild before… I know there’s definitely a complicated process.”

“But there’s no reason to ever create a guild. Because it costs a lot of money.”

“Shut up, will you? Here, eat more of this.”

“Then have you ever joined a guild before?”

Come to think of it, I suddenly got curious. They seemed to have completed plenty of requests and were quite skilled—if this were a typical game, wouldn’t high-level players like them usually join a guild?

“Ah… well, we did have a guild once, but… it ended badly…”

“That former guild master was such a miser, he took way too much commission from the guild request fees…”

“So it’s a money issue.”

The mood turned somber. So a guild master can deduct commissions from requests coming through the guild, huh. I wonder how guilds that aren’t exclusive to a terrarium operate.

The terrarium artifact vibrated faintly. Checking it, I found that Mesquite had called me.

“I want to see them myself and decide.”

If Mesquite says to do it, then so be it!