Chapter 62

The day after discussing livestock raising with Dodol and the others, heaps of wheat soaked in seawater came out of the salvaged merchant ship.

I took it in rather than let it be thrown away, but then I had trouble finding a place to put it.

I could not leave it at the company, which was already overflowing with cargo, and the courtyard of the Takahashi workshop was occupied by magic stone craftsmen, so in the end it was decided to store it at Iiria’s mansion.

“I can’t even settle down and take a nap like this.”

She said it with a resentful look, and Kururu, who always took Iiria’s side in anything, glared at me too.

Though in Kururu’s case, it seemed she had a fairly serious reason.

“It’ll be a problem if bugs start swarming.”

It was the cargo of an entire ship, so there was an incredible amount of it.

What was more, we had dried it as much as possible at the harbor, but it was still damp and intensely fishy.

It was obvious that it would start rotting before long.

“…What about trying to bake bread with it as a test…?”

When I made the suggestion timidly, Iiria quickly stepped back two paces.

“I’m not eating it.”

Kururu sighed at Iiria, then put a hand on her hip and looked over the pile of wheat reeking of the sea.

“Salted wheat… wheat, huh… if only there were some dish for that…”

Kururu, who still occasionally helped prepare meals at the workshop, seemed to have completely gotten into cooking.

I hoped she might find some breakthrough, but the only thing deepening was the furrow between her brows.

Ignoring Kururu as she muttered and groaned to herself, Iiria suddenly looked over at me.

“Speaking of food, what happened with that idea of increasing the number of pigs and chickens and processing them? If salted meat and dried meat got cheaper, everyone would have an easier time getting through next winter, wouldn’t they?”

“Dodol-san and the others were eager for it… but.”

We had overlooked the problem of who would eat meat raised and processed by beastfolk hands.

I hesitated to tell Iiria such a thing, but she seemed to grasp it somehow.

“It seems there are people who are a little put off even by Kururu.”

Kururu turned one beast ear toward us alone, then looked back after a beat.

“What are you talking about?”

“Ah, well—”

“The thing about animal fur getting mixed in if we’re involved in preparing food.”

Iiria had a slightly nasty streak that liked self-deprecation.

Kururu seemed pained by that side of Iiria, but apparently something like this was common enough.

“Even though that Kengo guy is way hairier!”

I burst out laughing at Kururu’s indignant complaint, but I made absolutely sure not to let it show that what had flashed through my mind was the naked body under the blanket I had seen the morning after the banquet.

“Hmph. Starting with honor, the world is full of those hopeless divides. At best, all we can do is not let them trip us up.”

Kururu seemed rough around the edges, but in truth I thought she was more delicate than Iiria.

As Kururu spoke with distant eyes, Iiria placed her hand over Kururu’s.

To the two of them like that, there was only one thing I could say.

“But let’s do something about it, little by little.”

For now they were still hollow words, but it seemed they were enough for the two of them anyway.

“Shall we eat?”

Kururu said that with a faint smile.

“As long as it’s not bread baked from that wheat.”

I could only give a wry smile at Iiria’s words, but maybe we could at least use it as feed for chickens or pigs. Even salted and half-rotten, chickens and pigs would probably eat it.

Just as I was thinking that, Kururu and Iiria’s beast ears both turned in the same direction at once.

Once I realized it was the entrance to the mansion, I heard a human voice.

“Excuse me!”

It was not Marks’s voice, so it had to be someone in town who knew Marks and the others were swindlers.

Has someone heard about the taxation at the harbor and come to petition that their own business not be taxed?

Iiria seemed to think the same thing, looking slightly fed up as she began to straighten her appearance, while Kururu, having guessed as much, helped her.

But when the three of us showed ourselves together a moment later, the person there was an unexpected one.

“My greetings to you, Iiria-sama.”

The gentle bearing marked him as belonging to the intellectual class of this town.

He was the head of the Notaries’ Guild, the guild that guaranteed the contracts of the town’s people.

“What business do you have with me?”

The reason Iiria’s voice was a little stiff was probably because she had no idea at all why the guildmaster had come.

Besides, paperwork was one of the things Iiria hated most, and the boss of the notaries, who lived surrounded by documents, might well have been her natural enemy.

Or rather, more than likely they had met many times while comparing records of the territory, and he had pricked at her repeatedly over sloppy recordkeeping.

“I heard there is a great deal of ruined wheat here.”

“Hm… what?”

After glancing at me, Iiria turned back to the guildmaster.

“Would you allow the guild to purchase some of it?”

I could not have asked for better.

But ever sharp, Iiria immediately said this.

“If it is not too much, I can part with some of it, but for what reason exactly?”

The way she instantly spoke as though this wheat we had been struggling to get rid of were some precious commodity was impressive.

Or rather, she was so practiced at it that it was a little frightening.

“Yes, wheat is very useful in our work.”

For a moment I was reminded of the sand sprinkled to dry ink, but wheat grains were far too large, and they would not absorb moisture anyway.

So what on earth did they use it for?

“To make paste for binding documents.”

I see. That had been a blind spot.

In short, it was starch paste.

The way to make it was simple: grind the wheat into flour, mix it with water, heat it over a fire, knead it, then add water and heat it again, repeating that process several times.

I had done it once for a summer vacation independent study project, and when I recalled the steps and reproduced it for them, both Iiria and Kururu watched with curiosity.

“It really would be a waste to use edible wheat for this.”

“And so they apparently could not make much paste and had been having trouble.”

In the end, the head of the Notaries’ Guild took away a cartload of ruined wheat for us.

The price was only about one-third that of normal wheat, and there was still plenty of wheat left, but I was grateful that it had turned into money.

After all, it meant we could buy a proper amount of wheat equal to one-third of the wheat they had taken off our hands.

“Why don’t we sell paste too and make a profit?”

Iiria, who had been poking the starch paste in the wooden bowl with her finger, said that.

It was only natural to think of it, but there was a problem.

“We would have to solve the issue of who else would use it.”

The ones who did paperwork were the Notaries’ Guild and, at most, companies like ours. If they had a cartload of wheat, they probably would not run out of paste for quite some time.

“Should not Iiria-sama use it to bind your own documents?”

Kururu took the chance to nip at Iiria, who was always trying to run away from paperwork.

“What a shame. I prefer binding them with string.”

Iiria said that while turning away with a huff.

“Paste, paste, right…”

In truth, starch paste did not have such a wide range of uses. As an adhesive it was not as strong as glue made from hide, so it could not be used on hard, heavy things. At most it could be used to stick paper, and besides that…

“Mm.”

What caught my eye then were the two girls playfully bickering right in front of me.

“W-what is it?”

Maybe because I had been looking them over like I was licking them with my eyes, Kururu stepped back warily while shielding Iiria.

Even though she had been perfectly composed when we were naked under the same blanket, I really did not understand her standards.

“Ironing.”

“Ironing?”

In the phrase about making a shirt nice and crisp with starch, that “starch” was exactly this starch paste.

But I did not know what an iron was called in this world, so when I fumbled through an explanation, the two of them understood soon enough.

“Unless you’re going to a court ball, no one does that on a regular basis.”

Iiria said that in exasperation.

In my previous world, had irons become widespread during the Industrial Revolution in the modern era? I felt like I had read manga where maids endlessly ironed clothes with heavy iron tools.

And this place was still a somewhat underdeveloped civilization.

Even if the concept of an iron itself existed, doing that every day seemed far too luxurious.

“Well, I do think Kururu’s clothes could stand being ironed at least once.”

Kururu usually wore what was essentially a maid-like uniform.

Then again, if you had a skirt-style outfit with an apron in front, most people would probably look like a maid.

“Iiria-sama, you ought to iron your own clothes as well. You curl up in the hammock right away and make them full of wrinkles. You should be more conscious of being a lord and pay a little more attention to your appearance.”

At Kururu’s words, Iiria puffed out her cheeks in displeasure.

“You should dress cuter too, Kururu. You haven’t had anything new made in quite a long time, have you?”

“We should not be spending money on my clothes.”

The two girls kept going back and forth at each other.

I felt like I could watch them forever, but both of their arguments were reasonable.

Kururu’s clothes were bare minimum, or rather, so plain that they even looked slightly shabby.

But in this world, where everything from spinning thread to tailoring was done by hand, clothing seemed to cost enough to count as a modest asset.

Certainly, if I handed over some of the company’s profits, I could get Kururu dressed in something a little cuter, but… that was what I was thinking.

“Cute, clothes.”

The two who had been squabbling stopped moving.

“Speaking of cute clothes…”

I turned my gaze to Kururu.

More precisely, to Kururu’s clothes.

“Hey, what are you staring at now?”

Kururu tucked in her chin and looked at me warily.

“I think I may be able to make clothes cuter quite easily.”

“What?”

Kururu furrowed her brows deeply enough to hold a quill between them, but the one who grabbed Kururu’s arm and leaned forward was none other than Iiria.

“What do you mean by that?!”

Beside the sparkling-eyed Iiria, it was striking that Kururu, as though she had guessed something, looked distinctly displeased.