The Villain's Sword Is Sharp

Isaac ignored Johan and his fury. He reckoned Johan would see sense in a few days, and then wouldn't he be thanking Isaac for his advice? After all, revenge was foolish, fruitless and completely unnecessary. At most, Isaac would take out his frustrations on the training dummy when he practiced swordsmanship.

As for all that 'I need revenge to settle the grudge in my heart' bs? Nah bro, I'm good. What's a grudge, can you eat it? Can it speed up your cultivation?

Instead of wasting time on things like that, Isaac would rather improve his plot to steal other disciples' resources. Unfortunately, there wasn't much time left in the day, so he had to leave that for tomorrow.

He spent a peaceful night in his half-messy, half-clean room, then woke up in the morning to finish clearing the mess. He had no more resources and no clear direction to go in, so he felt like starting from a clean slate today.

Like usual, he spent the morning at the training ground, swinging his sword wholeheartedly. After expelling the last dregs of his anger against the training dummy, he decided to do something he hadn't done in a while: visit the library.

In fact, he spent the whole day there, sitting in the corner while enjoying a good book. Truthfully, only half of his thoughts were on the book itself. The other half were exploring several possibilities related to the sect mission board. In fact, he was so lost in these thoughts that he never ate lunch and only came out of the library when the sky was pitch black. However, his eyes were twinkling like the stars in the sky. A plan was fully formed in his mind, and he was ready to put it into action.

He went home and ate heartily to make up for his missed meal, then he went to bed.

*************************

6 hours later, the sun hadn't risen but Isaac had. He rubbed his eyes as he got out of bed and changed into thick clothes and a coat, since it was cold both inside and outside. Then he went to open his wooden shutter window and let in the fresh morning air.

He was in a good mood this morning, so he grabbed some hare meat, wolf meat, herbs and a frying pan from his cupboard. After starting the fire, he rustled up a delicious, well-seasoned breakfast to fill his stomach.

With that done, he knew it was time to set his plan in motion. Instead of going to the training grounds, he headed to the sect's mission board. Nobody was around this early, so he had a bit of time to work on his plan.

Missions came in the form of paper notices pinned to the board, and Isaac carefully took two of them down. Then he pulled a wooden fountain pen from his pocket and started writing on the back of one of the mission notices. He copied exactly what was on the front while also replicating the handwriting from the front side. When he got to the mission number, he didn't copy what was on the front side of the mission notice. Instead, he wrote the number of the other mission he'd pulled down from the board.

Then he started writing on the back of that mission notice. He used a different style of handwriting to do the same thing as before, copying everything from the front side of the mission notice onto the back. But once again, he did not write the correct mission number. This time he wrote the number of the first mission.

He grabbed a sheet of paper from his bag and drew a table with 4 columns: mission name, brief mission description, original mission number, and new mission number. Then he filled in the details for the 2 missions notices he held in his hands, before pinning the missions back onto the board so people would see the side he'd written on.

One mission was for gathering a special fox pelt, and originally had the number 3956. The other mission was for cleaning the sect's animal pens, and had been numbered 0918. After Isaac's tampering, the fox mission said it was number 0918, while the cleaning mission said 3956. There also weren't any crossing-outs or other signs to show the mission notices had been altered. Nobody would know that these weren't the original mission numbers, other than Isaac who was writing it down.

He continued to meddle with the mission board and changed 8 other missions before he decided to leave. His plan might fail if he was seen doing this, so he didn't want to risk lingering here for too long.

Since his work was done, all he needed to do was wait. However, simply sitting in his house and waiting would be a waste of his time, so he spent several hours at the training grounds. After spending most of his day with a sword in hand, Isaac had one last thing to do before the day ended; he visited the Adventurers' Hall to apply for a mission.

"I would like to apply for an easy difficulty Rank 1 mission with the number 4740. My name is Isaac Dahl."

"A team applied for this mission earlier. If you'd like me to, I can check whether you're more qualified to take the mission."

"No thank you. If that mission's taken, I'll apply for mission 1097; it's of the same rank and difficulty."

"Umm..." the man at the counter sifted through some files before finding the new mission Isaac had applied to, "nobody's applied for that one. Please return tomorrow to hear the result of your application."

"No, I'd also like to apply for some more missions..." Isaac began to reel off a list of mission numbers. Some of them had already been applied to, so Isaac said he'd leave them; others had no applicants, so Isaac became the only one to apply for them. While you could only accept one mission at once, you could apply to as many as you wanted. Isaac officially applied to 5.

After finishing his applications, Isaac left. The man he'd spoken to was confused, since the missions Isaac applied for were rather strange: 5 of the missions he'd asked for were easy but tiresome, long, and unrewarding. These missions all had people applying to them already, so Isaac chose not to apply. The other 5 missions were all a little difficult, but not too long and with high rewards; these were the perfect missions that all newcomers wanted. However, the clerk was shocked to see nobody had applied for them! Nobody other than Isaac at least.

What he couldn't know was that these were all missions which Isaac had changed the mission numbers for. When a team came to apply for one of the good missions, they were actually giving the mission number for one of the bad ones when they applied. This let Isaac sweep up all the good missions, though he could only accept them one at a time.

You might think having 5 high quality missions to complete whenever he wanted was a good outcome. But a lot was never enough for Isaac; he saw what he had and asked if he could get more. And the answer was yes, he could. He'd taken the first steps, but his plan had yet to reach completion. That would take a bit more effort.

Of course, effort should be centred around preparation and planning. Isaac had a little more preparation to do so he returned home and slept early, since he would be waking up in the small hours of the morning again tomorrow.