The Strongest Being

“Fe—Fei. What should we… what do we do next?”

After parting ways with Oscar and wandering the territorial capital without any particular destination, Lynferia spoke to me in an awkward tone.

The reason she hadn’t said a single word while Oscar was there was probably because she was trying not to slip up.

“Let’s see. We got information about magic tools—the thing I wanted most—pretty quickly… so next, we’ll check ordinary ingredients and cooking, and then take a look at weapons and the like.”

“Understood… yes.”

…Lynferia lowered her gaze, her face turning bright red.

Yeah… seeing her like this felt fresh and really nice… but if I stared with a stupid grin, that’d be sexual harassment. I should rein it in.

Anyway, this outing was “market research,” and I now had a rough plan for making money—quietly selling potions and selling hair-growth medicine.

Well, all I’d done so far was decide, “Let’s sell it.” I hadn’t consulted anyone, and I didn’t even know if I could secure proper distribution routes… but there should be demand, so it would probably be fine… probably.

It would be fine… right?

Yeah… I could just make the proposal and dump the rest on someone competent. They’d make it work somehow… though I did plan to talk to Karmos about the potion issue before moving.

He’d said it might cause trouble with religion, after all. I wanted absolutely nothing to do with that kind of headache.

Religious uprisings never end, so please, no.

Whoever I entrusted it to, I had to drill that point into them—if they touched the wrong thing, it’d turn into a disaster… The gods you don’t touch won’t curse you.

As I was thinking that, I noticed the area around us had grown noisy.

“Is this… a market?”

In the direction we were walking, there was a plaza lined with stalls. At first I thought it was a festival, but the customers were mostly middle-aged women with the vibe of everyday shopping, and the stalls in sight seemed to be selling vegetables, meat, and daily goods, so “market” was probably the right word.

“Looks like it… yes.”

“…Lyn. Light honorific speech isn’t unnatural. You don’t have to correct yourself.”

“S-Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. More importantly, markets look interesting. Let’s take a look.”

“Yes!”

I headed toward the market.

Just like it looked from outside, it felt like a fresh-food market.

Roofs that were basically just cloth stretched overhead, goods laid out on wooden crates… most of it looked like vegetables, but here and there were stalls carving up meat to sell.

But… it didn’t look very sanitary.

It seemed like they’d removed the organs before bringing the meat here, but they were breaking down meat right next to vegetables… there were fly-like insects buzzing everywhere… the guy selling meat was covered in blood…

I wanted to try lots of the food in this world, but… buying from here made me hesitate.

This wasn’t just me being picky. This kind of place was exactly where disease spread… There were probably rats too, and cleanliness really did matter.

Back alleys in the territorial capital… or rather, those gaps between buildings… were basically trash dumps—dirty and stinking…

All right. Decision made.

I’d previously thought, “Just make them build roads as public works,” but… I’d add hiring sanitation workers too.

And… building bathhouses.

A policy to keep both the town and the residents clean.

But if I was going to spread it, I wanted a test case first… I should ask Karmos if we could implement it in the territorial capital.

I’d heard the finances were improving a lot from reduced military spending and from purging the son-in-law-related corruption across various areas.

Mm. Coming on an inspection and having ideas pop up like this… it felt like I was actually doing my job.

Well, all I did was throw ideas at people… Oh, right. I should also have Oscar develop magic tools related to cleaning and bathhouses.

So this was the “inspection effect”… damn, inspections were dangerous.

When I heard “inspection,” I always thought it was just big shots wandering around, wasting time… but seeing the actual site was way more important than I’d expected.

I also understood why the people being inspected found it annoying… Someone just strolls in for a quick look and starts saying “Do this here, do that there”… extremely annoying. And it increased everyone’s workload.

But as far as hygiene went… preventing disease mattered, so they could work a little harder.

Building hospitals… oh, right, maybe I should also collect disease statistics.

If the number of sick people changed before and after strengthening hygiene measures, it would be easier to introduce it elsewhere too…

Hmmm… Just one idea, and a mountain of tasks appeared… Was this the power of an Overlord whose intelligence had increased by five…? It was easy for me to be relaxed, since I wasn’t the one doing the work.

Middle managers really did have it the hardest.

All right—before I forgot, I’d tell Karmos about the hygiene improvement plan… and keep inspecting for now.

“Lyn. If you see any ingredients that are rare—or that you’ve never seen before—tell me.”

“Understood.”

The ingredients we used at the castle were basically ingredients that already existed back in the game era, and most of them were vegetables and fruits that existed in Japan.

So far, the seeds I’d distributed to villages for specialty products were only vegetables already eaten in this world, but among the seeds stored in the castle warehouse, there were seeds for vegetables and fruits that didn’t exist in this world—and even seeds for plants that didn’t exist even in Japan.

Like the barometz.

Mass-producing and selling vegetables and fruits that didn’t exist in this world could also be a good way to make money.

But the problem was seed leakage.

Vegetables harvestable within a month… and ones that stayed high-quality even if you just sowed the seeds and raised them carelessly. They’d spread across the whole world in no time.

That would make it meaningless as a money-making strategy… Yeah, using seeds from Sword and Legions for profit was probably impossible.

So potions, after all… huh?

Come to think of it, there were also medicinal herb seeds… Those were materials for top-grade potions.

And the herb itself had no effect at all. No healing—nothing… It was a material item, so you couldn’t use it directly. Its only purpose was being required by the development department to make the highest-effect potion.

But to make top-grade potions, besides medicinal herbs, you also needed dragon blood and royal jelly…

Dragon blood was… exactly what it sounded like—an item that sometimes dropped when you defeated dragon-type monsters.

Royal jelly was a specialty product from villages with apiaries, but unlike vegetable specialties you could produce once you handed out seeds, it was a precious item produced only in certain villages.

I had stockpiles of it rotting in storage, but… maybe I should check whether it could be obtained in this world.

If I remembered right… it was a secretion from bees, right? Food for the queen?

If it could be harvested, it might be worth trying to make top-grade potions.

But there was a good chance people in this world didn’t even know what royal jelly was… and if that was the case… I didn’t know how to collect it, so I’d have to give up…

No, wait.

I was pretty sure the substitute for panacea—required for potion crafting—was royal jelly.

If royal jelly was impossible, I could use panacea instead… Panacea was an item you could buy at the general store, after all… though it was pretty expensive. I didn’t remember ever buying it back in the game.

Ah, and what about dragon blood… If I could defeat a Ground Dragon, maybe I could use that?

In the game, even if you beat a dragon, you only got one small vial… but if you defeated a dragon in this world, you should be able to get a huge amount of blood… one dragon could supply materials in massive quantities.

There was also the possibility the composition differed and it wouldn’t work, but… everything was an experiment.

By the way, in the game, a top-grade potion fully restored HP.

If I could produce them, I should test how effective they were in this world… It probably couldn’t revive the dead, but it might be able to heal someone who was practically a corpse.

…For experiments, I’d use criminals.

“Fei! Th-Those fruits over there are something I’ve never seen before!”

While I was thinking, Lynferia tugged on my sleeve with little pulls and called out to me.

Maybe because it was noisy, or maybe because she was nervous, but her voice was loud for how close she stood.

“Hm? Which?”

“That! That stall—”

I looked at the stall Lynferia pointed to… and sure enough, it was selling branches bearing colorful fruits I’d never seen before.

“Are these… edible?”

When I approached the stall and muttered, the older woman running it called out in a loud voice.

“Hahaha! You can try eating it, but it’ll be awfully astringent, you know? These are fruits for dye! You soak the fruit of the color you want in water, crush it, then soak the cloth!”

So they weren’t for eating… Lynferia looked like she’d failed, but since we were here, I’d keep talking.

“Oh? Then, for example, how many fruits would you need to dye a set of clothes?”

“For clothes like what you’re wearing, kid, five fruits is plenty. Use just enough water to soak the cloth… too much water and the color gets weak, see?”

“I see…”

“Which colors you use, how many, and how you mix ’em—that’s where your sense shows! How about it, ma’am? Dye your husband’s clothes, or dress yourself up pretty—either way!”

“W-Wi—”

Called “ma’am,” Lynferia froze, her face turning bright red.

It had been quite a while already… shouldn’t you be getting used to it by now, Lynferia?

“Oh my, what a innocent little wife… you newlyweds?”

“Yeah. It hasn’t been very long yet—long enough that we’re still not used to being called that.”

It had been a few hours.

“Gotcha! Then you’re in that stage where you react to everything! Turning beet-red—how cute!”

“Yeah, I think so too.”

“!?”

“Hahaha! If you’re gonna flirt, do it somewhere else! She’s gone so red, it’s like she got dyed by my fruit!”

The older woman laughed loudly.

She really was incredibly red… She wasn’t suffering carbon monoxide poisoning, right?

“Since I got to see my wife being cute, I’ll buy some of these. Do I buy just the fruit? Or the whole branch?”

“Oh, kid, you’ve got money to burn! What a generous husband—lucky you, miss! You can buy them individually, or you can buy the whole branch. It’ll cost you, though… no roots attached, but still!”

The older woman laughed just as loudly as before.

Yeah… maybe in this world it wasn’t “dad jokes,” it was “mom jokes”… Anyway, Ururu had given me a little money “just in case,” so I could use that.

An Overlord lived on an allowance.

“Then I’ll take a whole branch… is this enough?”

I said that and held out a gold coin.

“Hey now, are you trying to buy my whole stall!? One branch is one silver coin!”

“I see, then this—”

I realized I didn’t know the exchange rate between silver and gold, and handed her a silver coin. She let out an exasperated sigh.

“Good grief… Miss! Your husband’s generous, sure, but if you marry a man with no sense for money, you’ll suffer! You keep a tight grip on his purse strings, you hear?”

“Y-Yes!”

“Kid! Get it together a little more! Here—your change!”

The older woman held out copper coins.

“Why is there change for one silver coin…?”

“Good lord, you’re slow, kid! What idiot buys at the first price they’re quoted!? At this rate you’ll get stripped down to your underwear! Seriously, what rich boy did you crawl out of?”

She really scolded me hard… Apparently haggling was normal.

After continuing to get chewed out for a while, we were finally released and left the stall.

We walked in silence for a bit with the branch in hand, but when I glanced to the side, Lynferia had her head lowered and her shoulders were trembling.

“…I got scolded.”

“Pff—”

When I muttered that, Lynferia finally couldn’t hold it in and burst out laughing.

“F-Fufu…”

“The older lady really is the strongest. I don’t feel like I can beat her.”

Facing Lynferia as she shook with laughter, still trying to hold it back, I continued.

“Pff… ahaha… ahahahaha! Fei getting scolded… with his eyes all wide… ahahahaha!”

“I never expected to get scolded that hard… even the other stall owners and the shoppers started staring.”

“Ahahaha… I-I would normally call that disrespect… but…”

“Right now I’m just Fei. Words like ‘disrespect’ don’t exist… Without wearing the clothing of ‘king,’ I’m just a man who gets lectured at length by a market auntie.”

“Fufu… I think the money sense part can’t be helped. But since that woman told me to watch out, I’ll be managing your wallet from now on.”

After a small cough to stop laughing, Lynferia said it with a bright, refreshed smile.

“That sounds best. I don’t want to get scolded again.”

When I said that, Lynferia laughed out loud again.

Thanks to that older woman, Lynferia’s tension seemed to melt away all at once. Watching her, I thought that Lynferia without her Captain of the Royal Guard face laughed a lot more than I expected—when suddenly, a short, high-pitched scream rang out, sharp as ripping silk.