Chapter 9

Among merchant companies of a certain size, there were independent merchants, few though they were, who had branched off in something like a division of the business.

But upon becoming independent, they remained absolutely obedient to their former house, and seemed to pay over no small amount of money on a regular basis, so that kind of independence was only independence in name.

On the other hand, the artisans who possessed skilled trades were much the same, and in their case it might even have been harsher, since workshops were passed down from parent to child. Most masters who set up new workshops were either drowning in debt, or obtained a workshop by marrying the older widow of a workshop master.

When it came to that, the only path left for young men who simply could not suppress their ambition was to take up weapons and head for the battlefield.

The moment he heard my words, “Want to start a business?”, Kengo smoothly and without hesitation explained all of that in Japanese.

From the way he spoke, I understood that Kengo too had once thought things over in order to protect himself from the mercilessness of this world. He even told me that he had apparently tried to return to the original world and had looked into myths and legends and the like.

Everything I could think of, he had already tried in one way or another.

“This society is rigid and stagnant, and on top of that, we have no capital. How exactly are we supposed to start a business? This isn’t a world where you can make an app and sell it if you’ve got a credit card and a computer.”

Kengo’s point was perfectly valid.

More than that, I myself had never actually conducted business with my own hands.

At best, as part of my dream of making games, I had read various books because I thought it would be a good idea to learn about the history and structure of economics in order to make the business simulation part.

Even in my previous job, where I had at least technically been a working adult, I was basically a sacrificial project manager whose job was to get yelled at, which was of no use as a reference at all.

When it came to entrepreneurship, Kengo the consultant was exactly the kind of pro among pros.

And that Kengo had concluded that it would be impossible.

But I had one advantage that Kengo did not.

“What if I said I understood the entire trick behind Nodon’s outrageous profits?”

“…”

Kengo’s eyes widened.

“I’ve got an idea for how to break into the magic stone trade.”

Kengo stared blankly, then leaned his huge body over the table toward me.

“What? No, but Nodon handles the magic stone trade more or less exclusively, doesn’t he? In league with that Bax Company man, Cole.”

Kengo had fully switched to Japanese.

By paying kickbacks to Cole, Nodon secured exclusive magic stone contracts. Anyone even a little sharp could quickly notice that kind of mutually beneficial criminal relationship, but it was just as easy to see how difficult it would be to interfere with it.

Still, exclusive control of the magic stone trade was not the only reason the Nodon Company was making a fortune. He was making jaw-dropping profits because he had built a system that let him avoid even paying taxes.

I thought there was room to drive a wedge into that.

“Magic stones get processed before export, right?”

“Mm… yeah.”

Magic stones were incomplete as magic catalysts when first mined out; they had to be shaped and then engraved with a magic circle. That apparently allowed effects like fire or ice to be added, and adjusted things like power and duration.

Those magic circles were geometric patterns, and engraving them was done entirely by hand by artisans using chisels and gravers.

Since those magic circles were publicly known knowledge, any workshop in the Empire followed the same standards.

That meant magic stones had an industrial-product aspect to them, in that they were exported after standardized processing.

And because they were profitable and strategic goods, the status of the magic stone processing artisans involved in that work was also high. The guild formed by the magic stone processors probably had the strongest voice in town.

But almost no one in town knew that even they were trapped in the darkness of Nodon’s greed.

“The magic stone processors are suffering because of Nodon. That means we should be able to win them over. If we can buy magic stones and get them processed, exporting them won’t be difficult.”

“The magic stone processors…? And that’s connected to Nodon’s profits?”

As expected, Kengo, who did not know the inside workings of the company, had not known that part.

“Processing magic stones takes quite a lot of time. So even if they buy the raw stones, it takes months before that turns into income. Actually, magic stones are expensive to begin with, so it’s hard enough to buy the raw materials out of pocket in the first place. Unless a workshop has considerable funds, there’s no way they can avoid going into debt.”

“Ahh…”

Kengo lifted his eyes toward the ceiling.

“I see. So the Nodon Company also does moneylending.”

“Exactly. And when magic stones come out of the mine, Nodon buys up the whole lot first. The artisans have no choice but to buy magic stones from Nodon. So he can do whatever he wants.”

Kengo took a sip of ale, and it was as though, like a waterwheel, the force of the ale was turning things over in his head.

“It’s true that the magic stones coming out of the mine are bought up by the Nodon Company… I never thought much about it, but he buys up the stones that become the raw material, then sells them at high prices, and not just that purchase cost, but living expenses and everything else get loaned out too, so they’re bound hand and foot.”

Kengo’s face twisted bitterly.

But Nodon’s ugliness went one stage deeper still.

“What’s remarkable about him is that doing things that way is already old history.”

“What?”

“The numbers in the company books are so sloppy and careless that I once dug through the company records to verify them. I think it was up until about five years ago, before the current lord came here.”

“The lord… oh, you mean little Iiria?”

“Kengo, she’s still the lord, you know…”

I looked around and lowered my voice. Even if we were speaking in Japanese, proper nouns did not change.

“Haha, it’s fine. Sure, if I call her that in front of little Kururu, she glares at me like she’s about to bite my head off.”

When he said little Kururu with a face like she was about to bite, I pictured Kururu glaring like some ancient delinquent, but somehow in front of Kengo she looked like a niece trying to act grown-up.

If I called her little Kururu, I felt like my throat would get slit before she even got around to glaring.

“So? Until before little Iiria came, what about that ninety-percent-body-fat man?”

“…”

Kengo apparently hated Nodon too, but his insults had a strange flair to them.

“Um, well, anyway, charging high prices for magic stones was just his early method. After all, if he bought magic stones dirt cheap from the mine and then sold them dearly to the artisans, he’d produce an obviously huge profit.”

“Hm… yeah. Right.”

“And then he’d have to pay taxes in proportion to that huge profit. So once Nodon had trapped the artisans in debt, he made his next move. He stopped selling magic stones at high prices and started selling them cheaply instead.”

“Cheaply?”

“In exchange, he jacked up the interest rate on the debt to a ridiculous level. And on paper, it says he’s paying the artisans an insane amount in processing fees.”

“…”

Kengo looked puzzled. For a moment, he probably did not understand what the words meant.

But without showing any sign of panic, he sipped his drink as if turning the words over in his mind, then immediately leaned forward.

“He’s creating numbers that make it look like the buying and selling of magic stones isn’t generating any profit.”

“Exactly. He insists that all he’s receiving is interest on the money he lent to the artisans, and that the buying and selling of magic stones itself brings in almost no profit. He buys the stones cheaply from the mine because he has no choice but to sell them cheaply to the artisans, who have influence in town, and besides, look how much he’s paying in processing fees, Your Lordship. That’s the story.”

“Just imagining him saying that with that face pisses me off.”

Kengo said that, and then seemed to realize something else.

“In that case… wait a second. The magic stone processors’ guild pays quite a lot in taxes in town, right? Because they’re supposedly getting mountains of processing fees. But if that’s… actually their profit, then it’s not really that much?”

“The reality is probably that they’re barely managing to eat, or worse. But the artisans have honor to uphold, so they never let on that they’re drowning in debt. And the lord’s side doesn’t have the knowledge, authority, or manpower to expose the numbers.”

Iiria and the others had almost certainly investigated Nodon’s dealings on their own. But when they traced the magic stone trade one step at a time from the mine onward, they somehow kept running into the reality that Nodon was making almost no profit.

The reason Kururu had glared at me with that fierce expression and said I might know some secret was because they too could clearly sense that there was deception involved, but had no idea what it was.

What they had been shown was a set of transactions like one of those drawings of a staircase that keeps rising forever in a circle.

But even that famous illusion only looked strange because a three-dimensional object had been flattened into two dimensions, and once you realized that, there was nothing mysterious about it at all.

Knowledge was power.

When it came to commerce, I had researched an enormous amount, from modern times back to the medieval and early modern periods, all for the sake of games.

There had been a similar case in the medieval wool trade, so I was able to guess Nodon’s trick right away. Knowledge was the strongest weapon for increasing the resolution of the world.

I did not have any cheat ability, but I had come here after getting a solid taste of the power of knowledge from modern civilization, like Google searches or a giant library.

Even if it had been useless in the previous world, historical knowledge was still a living tool here.

“So then… when you say starting a business in the magic stone trade?”

“We rescue the artisans from debt hell. Once a domestic handicraft advance-payment system traps you, you can hardly ever get out of it by yourself. On paper they’re receiving amazing processing fees, but once they pay the interest on the advances for processing costs, their actual income is no better than that of an ordinary stevedore, maybe worse. So if we pay proper processing fees and don’t charge outrageous interest on advances, the artisans should take our work. And on top of that, because Nodon skims off a huge profit when exporting magic stones, that means there’s room to lower the sale price by that amount. In short, we should be able to buy magic stones from the mine at a higher price than now, pay the artisans properly for processing, and still export them at a lower price than Nodon does.”

There was nothing but competitiveness in that plan. There was no reason we should lose in trade.

Kengo nodded as though swallowing each word one at a time, but the eyes with which he looked at me had once again become those adult eyes.

“Do you think Nodon will just sit back and watch?”

This was not the modern world, where legal systems were well established.

If it looked like someone was about to interfere with Nodon’s business, it was easy to imagine what kinds of methods he would use to get in the way. If he could sleep through a man dying at work, there was no way I could believe he would hesitate to use violence.

“Of course we need allies, and there’s someone who fits perfectly.”

“Allies? In this world?”

At Kengo’s question, I forced a smile and said,

“It’s little Iiria.”