Chapter 33

“What is next?”

“The Leather Cord Artisans’ Guild. They say the amount the company pays to buy their leather cords is unfairly low.”

“Please bring me the transaction records for the Leather Cord Artisans’ Guild!”

The Nodon Company without Nodon was quickly overflowing with people demanding that their contracts be revised.

There were so many of them that it was starting to interfere with the company’s operations, so in the end, taking along everyone who could read, we started receiving petitions in Nodon’s mansion, whose master was now gone.

“Pious merchant Yorinobu-dono, I humbly ask that you hear the plea of our guild’s representatives.”

“Yes, uh, yes.”

As the representative of the Leather Cord Artisans’ Guild, a gaunt, bearded man who looked every bit the master of a tiny workshop, spoke in a voice begging for pity, I took the contract Yoshu, the boy serving as my assistant, had found from the mountain of documents and ran my eyes quickly over it.

“This is the contract for leather cords, right? The amount is… uh, wait, could it be that you also owe money to the company?”

“Oh! May merciful grace dwell in the wise Yorinobu-dono’s heart! We swear before God that we carried out honest work, and yet we were burdened with unjust debt—”

Cutting off what was about to become an endless lament, I recalled the going price of the animal hides used as raw material for leather cords, roughly calculated the processing fee, and gave my answer.

“The purchase price will be raised by thirty percent. As for the debt, how about suspending the interest for the time being?”

“—our poor and pitiable guild’s… hm? What?”

“The purchase price goes up by thirty percent. The debt gets a temporary halt on interest. And if it is confirmed that you have already repaid the amount you originally borrowed, how about we write the rest off?”

“Uh…”

Maybe he could not calculate what a thirty percent increase meant. Or maybe he was just bewildered that his request for debt relief had gone through so easily. Either way, there was a long line of similar people waiting behind him, so I added the new figures to the contract Nodon had once made, signed it, and handed it over to Yoshu.

Then Yoshu called over one of the people in the company who was relatively literate and gave instructions.

“Please ask over there for the details. Next person!”

The head of the Leather Cord Artisans’ Guild, who looked like a goat, blinked repeatedly and walked away as told, still wearing a puzzled expression.

During the day, I listened like this to complaints from small trading houses, artisan guilds, and even tavern owners whom Nodon had apparently stiffed on payments, and at night, I pulled out the enormous quantity of contracts Nodon had stockpiled in his warehouses and kept checking the rights tied to them.

If it was the Nodon Company’s business itself, I understood it, since I had grasped the ledgers. But I did not know the flow of money Nodon had lent out that were off the books, nor the other webs of debts and claims spread throughout the town.

It seemed that Nodon had held such tremendous wealth and power because he had lent money all over the place, and if that was so, then I needed to properly determine how much of the company’s profit had actually come from its business operations alone.

Even if we had no intention of continuing the kind of dirty rule Nodon had practiced, it would defeat the point if we ran an impeccably clean business only to bleed losses. For sound management, we had to understand every expense and every source of income, and of course, the goal was to make a huge profit through honest business.

In particular, as an immediate goal, we needed to establish a system that would allow Iiria to function as lord, and as the source of funding for that, the Nodon Company had to take the lead in paying taxes.

If we could stabilize this territory that way, then my own life would also gain stability and safety, and I could work on things like making board games in this world or researching the magic circle that might return me to my old one.

And for that, I had to remake the Nodon Company, which had been run on Nodon’s business instincts, intuition, and shouting, into a proper company.

That was the plan, but…

“…Hey… hey… hey!”

“—Hah?!”

“Hey, are you alive?”

It was only at that voice that I finally woke up.

In front of me was a familiar apron of rough cloth, with a cat tail flickering in and out of sight behind it.

When I lifted my face, Kururu was there.

It seemed I had nodded off again.

“You look awful. Go wash at the well. I brought you food.”

As she spoke, Kururu roughly cleared a space on the long table covered in documents.

What she set down there were things like freshly baked bread and a pot of hot soup, and the smell quickly stirred my stomach.

Nodon’s mansion stood on the same square as Iiria’s mansion, so you could practically call them neighbors.

“That saying about being close enough for soup not to go cold really is true.”

Kururu, who had been ladling soup from the pot into a wooden bowl, stared blankly at me.

Thanks to Kururu bringing food in the morning and at night, at least my meals had been proper ones.

Kururu also went around waking up Yoshu, the boy who had been sleeping face-down on another desk in the same way, then opened the wooden windows to let in fresh air, and finally turned to us with the morning sun behind her and said,

“Is there anything I can help with?”

Kururu could read and write, which made her one of our few precious sources of strength.

That said, at the moment, the only people I could trust to handle the work of sorting contracts were Kururu and Yoshu, and even counting people who could manage to read at all, we had only five.

With that, properly operating the former Nodon Company was going to be difficult.

The same was true for Iiria, Kururu’s mistress. Even if she wanted to govern Jirenu Territory well as its lord, she had no civil officials at all.

We urgently needed to recruit people who could handle paperwork, but in the long term, if we were thinking seriously, we ought to establish a school for reading and writing and raise the literacy rate among the townspeople. In the domestic management section of the game I had been planning, raising literacy had also been an important parameter… and all sorts of thoughts like that crossed my mind, but for now, I had to deal with what was right in front of me.

I got to my feet, went down into the courtyard with the staggering Yoshu, washed my face with cold well water, and polished off the breakfast Kururu had brought.

“Thanks to you all writing off debts here and there and revising the terms of trade, Lord Iiria’s reputation for driving out Nodon has been excellent so far.”

What was served after the meal was a drink made by roasting and boiling barley meant for ale, something that could pass as either barley tea or fake coffee. It was bitter, smelled strongly of charcoal, and lacked richness, but once you got used to it, it was not half bad.

When the options for drinks were either alcohol, raw water that looked risky, or strongly flavored goat’s or sheep’s milk, it was probably one of the better things to drink while working. Goat’s milk only filled the stomach, and alcohol interfered with work, so when I explained that, Kururu had started making this drink for me.

“That is good to hear. I have a much clearer picture of the company now too, so I think we can start deciding our policy going forward.”

“Is it not making a ridiculous amount of money?”

The Nodon Company had schemed its way around and paid almost none of the taxes due to Iiria.

Kururu was probably saying that out of resentment from back then, but from my point of view, the answer was half yes and half no.

“It is definitely profitable, but that is when you look at it as a personal enterprise… I suppose.”

“Hm?”

Kururu looked suspicious, then poked Yoshu on the head as he started nodding off again from having a full stomach.

“If you combine the magic stone trade and the regular business, the annual sales come to about 250,000 gold coins.”

“Tw—!”

As Kururu sucked in a breath, I went on calmly.

“About eighty percent of that is the magic stone trade, so roughly 200,000 gold coins. But after subtracting the cost of purchasing the raw stones and the processing fees, the profit rate is about sixty percent, so that comes to around 120,000 gold coins in profit.”

To Kururu, that was probably a dizzying amount of money, and in fact, if you thought of one copper coin as roughly one hundred yen, then since the official rate was 240 copper coins to one gold coin, one gold coin came to about 25,000 yen. That would make the Nodon Company something like a trading house with just over six billion yen in sales and a bit over three billion yen in profit.

The Nodon Company had basically been Nodon’s personal property, so as personal profit, it was extraordinary.

“As for trades other than magic stones, things like food, those seem to have been lumped together with debt lending and the like, and on the books they come to maybe around 10,000 gold coins in profit, if that. Around here, since we are raising unfairly low purchase prices, there is a good chance that will end up breaking even.”

Even so, as long as we held the magic stone trade, the finances would look sparkling in my old world.

Part of that was because magic stones were simply an overwhelmingly powerful commodity that underpinned the military strength of the world itself, but another part was because labor costs were absurdly low.

The Nodon Company was run by around forty people, and almost all of them were paid uniformly at twenty copper coins a day, so even over the course of a year, labor costs did not even reach 2,000 gold coins. Even if I added ten copper coins per person—that is, a fifty percent wage increase—it would barely affect profits. If this were a management simulation game, it would be a very easy mode.

And the reason wages were that low was because there were far too many workers for the amount of work.

You could gather as many laborers as you wanted just by offering the minimum amount needed to secure food and clothing.

That was why wages never rose, and only the capitalists could make enormous profits.

This was the merciless world of Karl Marx.

“However, for the moment, the company’s profits are also the foundation of Iiria-san’s political power.”

Kururu gasped at the profit of over 100,000 gold coins, but this was the reason I could not think of that profit as enough at all.

“When we exiled Nodon, we borrowed the beastfolk’s strength, so we need to repay that debt. Let us say we try to carry out anti-poverty measures for the beastfolk, for example by improving housing. I looked into housing prices, and one average house for a craftsman master’s family living together with apprentices or lodgers costs 1,000 gold coins. If that is the case, just how much would we need?”

The prices of things were fairly different from my old world. In particular, houses and land, and also clothing, were absurdly expensive. Since nothing was mass-produced, the price of goods was high across the board.

And while the beastfolk population did not reach a thousand, there were still several hundred of them, and almost all of them lived either in shacks or in conditions little different from sleeping rough, so if we wanted to give them houses, it would require a staggering sum.

In fact, since Iiria did not even have civil officials, we could not properly conduct the statistical surveys needed for this kind of activity in the first place.

“And we also need to improve the mining environment for the beastfolk.”

“Leaving housing aside, is that not something Kengo is all fired up about?”

“Yes, I am getting expense claims that could kill a man…”

Authority over the mines belonged to Iiria, but she had no money to pay those expenses.

If we wanted to improve the mining environment, then the former Nodon Company had no choice but to shoulder all the costs, and Kengo had seized that chance to send me mountains of invoices.

“And finally, there is Iiria-san herself.”

The moment I mentioned her name, Kururu, who had been pestering Yoshu while we talked, turned fully serious and faced me.

“There is no way Iiria-san can manage the territory by herself. She is already at her limit, is she not?”

When I asked, Kururu folded her arms and let out a dissatisfied sigh.

“The petitions and that sort of thing have only just started to calm down…”

When Kururu disguised herself as a magician and acted as Iiria’s retainer, even then, people in weak positions within the town who were sensitive to shifts in power had already come to pay their respects to Iiria.

And then Iiria drove out Nodon and succeeded in bringing the Nodon Company, the very heart of Jirenu Territory, under her control, so the transfer of power became decisive.

Those who had assumed that a little girl like Iiria, a noble’s by-blow with beastfolk blood, could never truly seize power were thrown into a panic.

So the very next day, the town’s influential figures, who until then had mocked Iiria while riding on Nodon’s coattails, came with awkward ingratiating smiles pasted onto their faces to beg for their lives.

As for Iiria, she probably wanted to cut them all down on the spot for their insolence, but it was also true that Jirenu Territory’s economy would not function without them, so she had no choice but to pardon them.

And it was not merely craven pleading for mercy that brought them to Iiria. With Iiria finally standing up seriously as lord, those with positions to protect had been driven to confirm that their businesses and privileges would remain secure.

Apparently, this was the sort of thing that should originally have been done when the lordship changed hands—in other words, when Iiria first took up her post as the new lord of Jirenu Territory—so you could say this was the price for having neglected it, but in any case, she seemed to be overwhelmed dealing with it all.

Kururu and Iiria spent their time holed up in the basement of the lord’s mansion, untying bundles of dusty parchment and comparing them against the privilege charters of those who had come to petition them. It seemed they were rushing through that work as a crash project.

Whenever I went to Iiria’s mansion between my own tasks because I needed to confirm something, there were times when Kururu was handling petitions in Iiria’s place, and if I peered into the courtyard, I would often see Iiria collapsed face-first in a hammock, dead asleep. Several sparrows would be playing in her fluffy hair, which only made the sight more pitiful.

“Once the response to the beastfolk and the verification of the rights tied to Jirenu Territory settle down for the moment, the next step is large-scale public works, right? Reclaiming land, digging waterways, installing waterwheels, and so on. I did some rough calculations, and profits on the scale of the current Nodon Company would disappear in an instant.”

What had been enough to satisfy Nodon’s overflowing desires on his own was nowhere near enough to support Jirenu Territory. In fact, as lord, Iiria did not even have tax officials under her command, so money would only keep flowing out.

Until things were on track, the former Nodon Company would have to handle the financing, and as the one who had started all this, that responsibility belonged to me.

“…Then what… should we do?”

Though she was bold in other matters, Kururu became somewhat timid when it came to money.

Maybe because she had been pushed to the edges of society together with Iiria as a by-blow carrying beastfolk blood, she seemed to have a kind of weakness when it came to economic matters involving gold coins.

“We can only increase it.”

After saying that, I looked at Kururu, who seemed to be enduring a sense of helplessness, and corrected myself.

“Put another way, all we have to do is increase it. That probably will not be difficult, and I will need Kururu-san’s help too.”

After smiling at Kururu, who raised her face with a doubtful look, I said,

“I have a new plan for exporting magic stones.”

In the end, Jirenu Territory was supported by the export of magic stones.

And our fate, too, depended on that.