Chapter 63

The ruined wheat had found a use in being turned into starch paste, but even the notaries’ guild could not possibly use that much of it.

A single cartload would already amount to several years’ worth.

But perhaps there would be demand in a different area.

Especially for something one did not often see in this world.

Decoration for clothing.

“…”

Kururu stared off in a random direction with an expression like she was enduring humiliation.

Iiria, who had rolled up her sleeves and was working, was admiring the result in delight.

“You can make pleats in clothing, of course, but with paste you can do this too!”

Kururu, looking like she did not know where to put herself, glanced at me, then looked away again.

All while plentiful frills were being attached here and there to the clothes that had until then been plain and simple.

“The revolutionary part is that you don’t need thread. They can be removed easily, and anyone can add as many as they like.”

We gathered scraps of cloth, made frills with starch paste, and stuck them onto the clothes.

The laws of physics were similar in all sorts of ways, and aesthetic sense probably was not that far off either.

That was what I had thought, but Iiria was overjoyed, and Kururu was embarrassed like she had been made to wear a costume.

The destructive power of frills was terrifying.

“Do you think they’ll sell?”

“They absolutely will!”

Because the excited Iiria kept adding more and more, Kururu had become completely overloaded with frills, but if done properly, it would surely look good.

“If we show them to the ladies of the town, they’ll jump at them. There are useless scraps everywhere, and if you don’t use thread or needles, they’re cheap to make.”

It was like synthetic magic stones.

“Um… Iiria-sama, may I take this off?”

“No.”

At Iiria’s blunt refusal, Kururu let out a weary sigh.

Then she turned a look on me that all but said, I am going to remember this grudge.

But I too got carried along by Iiria’s mood and made this suggestion.

“By the way, in my old world, there were also things like these little hats.”

I pasted along the edge of a comparatively large piece of cloth, like sealing the edge of a gyoza wrapper.

It was a brim, the little lettuce-like thing maids wore on their heads, something like a headband.

“!”

When I placed the makeshift brim on Kururu’s head, Iiria let out a voiceless cry and covered her mouth with her hand in emotion.

Kururu herself wore an expression exactly like the cat back at my parents’ house when someone put a mandarin orange on its head and it sulked.

“Yorinobu, you’re a genius!”

“It’s a traditional style of clothing.”

“It’s a wonderful tradition!”

This might have been the first time I had ever seen Iiria’s tail wagging so furiously.

I had a feeling I had taught her a bad kind of fun, but as a way to reuse ruined wheat, the use of starch paste now seemed all but settled.

“Shall we go and sell this idea along with the wheat to the tailors’ guild?”

“With Kururu there, they’ll decide on the spot!”

“…”

When I told the dispirited Kururu, “You look cute,” she immediately kicked my leg, but I did not miss how her ears and tail looked a little pleased.

The tailors summoned to the mansion had been trembling, afraid they were about to be hit with some heavy tax, but once they were told the matter at hand, they were stunned, and before long they were leaning forward eagerly.

That was thanks in part to having a real example in Kururu, but also because they realized the limitless potential of scraps that otherwise were useful for little more than being remade into paper.

We had them take the wheat at the same price as what we had received from the notaries’ guild, and we also received a modest payment in return for the frill idea.

As a result, the cashbox filled up, and Iiria was once again able to nap in the courtyard without a care, but it was not as if every problem had been solved.

For one thing, I had earned from Kururu about as much resentment as the amount of wheat we had sold to the tailors. She had started giving me suspicious looks again, like when I first began working at Nodon’s company.

Still, though she freely knocked me on the head and grumbled at length just the same, something was clearly very different from back then. And despite everything, she seemed to have taken a liking to the frills themselves, since she left just a little on her clothes.

And then the other problem came from a place I had never expected.

“I have heard it was Yorinobu-dono who came up with these so-called frills.”

At the church, the priest greeted me with that sarcastic remark.

The church event to be held in the provincial capital, Roran, had been delayed by the appearance of the dragon, but now I was to head to Roran on the church’s ship together with the priest and look over candidates for civil officials and the like.

The date of the event was drawing near, so there were various things that needed to be discussed in advance.

And so when I visited the church, I ended up having to listen to the priest’s complaints.

However, though on the surface he was criticizing the gaudy styles suddenly spreading among the town’s women, the reason for his scowl had nothing whatsoever to do with theology.

“If it is not excessively extravagant, surely even God would overlook it, but I really must question the sight of women competing for scraps and pasting them together.”

“I see…”

“As a result, now even the town girls are all clamoring to men for paste and scraps. Why, I hear there has even been the oddity of scraps costing more than normal cloth. Thanks to that, my expenses keep increasing, and it gives me a headache.”

“What…?”

If I translated the priest’s complaints, this was what it meant.

He was troubled because the mistress he kept in town was asking him for cloth and paste so she could wear the fashionable frills.

According to Marks’s investigation, this priest apparently had no fewer than four mistresses, so he was certainly an energetic one.

“It will settle down after a while, no doubt, but honestly, you have spread a truly troublesome fashion.”

“My deepest apologies…”

At any rate, when I bowed my head humbly, he seemed to feel somewhat better.

“Now then, as for the voyage to Roran…”

At last he moved on to the main subject, and I felt relieved.

After we finished discussing things like lodging expenses in the provincial capital, Roran, introductions to the monastery, and the so-called referral fees disguised as gifts, I went out into town, and sure enough, it felt as though every woman walking through the square had frills on her clothing, though to varying degrees.

It was a bit too small-scale to think I had greatly influenced another world with knowledge from my previous life… but the priest had given me not only sarcasm, but a practical warning at the end as well.

That warning was based on the fact that paste was made from wheat.

“I’d heard of alcohol and bread competing for grain, but…”

Ale was, in the literal sense, liquor made from grain.

So when harvests were poor and grain yields bad, regulations would come in saying it was outrageous to turn grain that should be baked into bread into alcohol. In Japan, it had been the same sort of relationship between rice and sake.

I did not want to think that scarce wheat would be turned into paste for the sake of fashion, but there were always people who got carried away with anything. And rich people would probably turn it into paste without caring even if wheat prices rose somewhat, so the ones who would suffer were the poor.

“Maybe I acted too hastily…”

If you throw a stone into a pond, it is not hard to predict the movement of the first ripple.

But once it hits the edge of the pond and reflects back, it quickly becomes impossible to track.

I was walking along, groaning to myself, when I tried to head back to Nodon’s former mansion, which stood along the same square.

That was when I saw several girls coming out of Iiria’s mansion two buildings over.

What caught my attention was that they were hiding their faces furtively, and that Marks and the others were talking to them in a way that felt different from mere flirting.

More than anything, the people who came to Iiria’s mansion were usually influential townsfolk bringing petitions, and I had never seen young women come there.

Who could they be, I wondered, and when I returned to Nodon’s mansion, I ran into someone.

“Oh, if it isn’t the master coming back.”

“Gerario-san.”

Gerario, an adventurer by trade and himself a magician, sometimes came by the workshop and helped check whether the magic circles the apprentices had carved were functioning properly.

There had also been the problem during the dragon subjugation: the magic stones made at this workshop had been heavily biased toward certain types of magic, and because of that, we had nearly failed to slay the dragon. Based on that experience, it had been decided that rather than making only the easiest and most marketable magic stones, like fire and ice, we should also make difficult ones such as wind and lightning and build up our technical skill.

Gerario in particular possessed knowledge of special magic circles of the sort one only saw on the front lines of battle, and he had been teaching everyone knowledge on a level comparable to the master craftsman.

“Yorinobu, you really went and did something troublesome.”

“Huh?”

“These frills you came up with. Damn it all, they’re costing me money like you wouldn’t believe.”

With his appearance that clearly marked him as a man in a rough line of work, Gerario too was fond of women.

“But why is it that fluttery bits of cloth like that catch our attention so much?”

Gerario said that with genuine puzzlement, and the gap between his tone and the content made me laugh a little.

“And did you know? Those tailoring bastards have already treated the sale of paste and frills as some kind of exclusive privilege and are doing ruthless business with it.”

“What?”

“Make sure you tax them properly, all right? If nothing else, do at least that, or the balance won’t work out.”

Still muttering complaints, Gerario went back outside.

After seeing his back recede, I repeated his words in my mind.

“Exclusive privilege?”

He had also called it ruthless business.

This was a world where each trade formed its own guild and busied itself fighting over turf.

Come to think of it, I had received some additional money as payment for the frill idea.

They might have interpreted that as payment for an exclusive sales right.

The aftershocks seemed to be creating wave after wave of problems. Or rather, the people of this world were simply far too vigorous in their commercial instincts!

Feeling exhausted, I set about dealing with the work in front of me for the time being.

First I arranged travel funds for the trip to Roran, then I made arrangements for the monument I had promised the master magic stone processors during the turmoil over the dragon subjugation, and then, in order to find someone with the mathematical talent suited to analyzing magic circles, I instructed Yoshu to put up wooden placards describing mathematical puzzles, which earned me puzzled looks.

After finishing those miscellaneous tasks, I needed to consult with Iiria and the others about the trip to the provincial capital, Roran, so I went to the mansion, only to learn there as well that the small stone I had thrown into the pond had sent ripples all the way into a truly deep corner of the town.