Purely capitalist. The Merchants Guild procures items that are rare in Nod from the mortal world, and items that are rare in the mortal world from Nod, and sells both to the highest bidder. The guild maintains its principal trading halls in Ashmarket and operates on Earth under the cover of a false corporation called Retinue Inc., running supply chains through mortal shipping infrastructure and maintaining ties to real-world criminal organizations. Retinue Inc. has shell subsidiaries, freight contracts, and enough legitimate-looking paperwork to move containerized cargo through customs in a dozen countries. The volume of Earth-sourced goods flowing into Nod through the Guild's operations is large enough to shape the material culture of the city; the canned food, electronics, building materials, clothing, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and industrial equipment that most residents encounter daily arrived through a Merchants Guild supply line, even if the end buyer has no idea where it originally came from. The Bethier Portal in Ashmarket has become the guild's preferred transit route for high-value shipments while the docks are preferred for high-volume. The reliance on Kuron Inc.'s infrastructure is a source of growing unease among the guild's leadership.
The Guild's Earth-side operations are more varied than the Retinue Inc. front suggests. In practice, Retinue handles Western markets. Goods moving through East and Southeast Asian networks are managed through family-based trading relationships that predate the corporation by centuries, some maintained by Theriae operatives with cultural ties to the regions they work in. West African and Middle Eastern routes run through informal value-transfer networks that the Guild's leadership in Nod does not fully control but has learned not to interfere with. The result is an organization whose official structure is a European-style chartered guild and whose actual operations resemble a loose confederation of regional trade networks held together by shared profit motive.