Chapter 65

By acquiring Nodon’s company, we had recovered some degree of economic power, and by slaying the dragon, our authority had also been restored to some extent.

But Iiria was still too weak as a lord, and it was too soon for her to do anything overly forceful.

What especially hurt was that, lacking any police power, even if she made laws, she could not enforce them.

If a ban were issued and not enforced, people would start thinking it was fine to break it.

That would damage her authority, and then people would listen even less to a figure whose authority had been damaged, creating a vicious cycle.

So it was a little difficult to simply ban the tailors’ overbearing way of doing business. And it was even harder to interfere by having our own company sell scraps and paste at fair prices, because from the townspeople’s perspective, it would be far too obvious whose side we were taking by doing that.

“Maybe those slightly unreasonable school rules were more rational than they looked.”

Kengo, who had finished a fair amount of the dragon dismantling and had started shifting over to the civil engineering work needed to reopen the mine, stopped by the company while procuring tools for that work.

When I consulted him about the frill problem there, that was his reply.

“There was also that thing about uniforms originally being meant to hide differences in status.”

“Even if the fad settles down eventually, I think banning it now would just cause confusion.”

“Yeah. In that case, do we somehow support the girls in secret?”

“…”

Kengo, true to appearances, usually made snap decisions and quick judgments, but this time he hesitated.

“…Even if I do think no profession is inherently noble or base… it still feels wrong somehow for the lady lord to do something that would look like she was backing that kind of work. Especially since it’s not as if all of them are doing it by choice.”

Ethics were an infuriating thing.

No matter how much you ran from them, they were always there, like the moon at night.

“If we’re going to do anything, I think it should be in a direction that fundamentally helps the girls.”

Kengo said it with a groan, but then the question became: what method?

After a brief silence, Kengo let out the breath he had been holding.

“I knew about the problem too, actually…”

That surprised me.

Then tell me, I wanted to say, but perhaps Kengo had not spoken for the same reason as Iiria.

The scale of the problem and the darkness behind it were simply too deep, and there was nothing the still tottering us could do about it.

“In any case, if you want to help those girls on a big enough scale, you’re going to need money, right? Do we just have to expand magic stone exports even more? I heard you increased the number of workshop apprentices. How’s that going?”

“Ah, yeah. Thanks to the dragon incident, the attitudes of the master magic stone processors, including the guildmaster, have softened too. So we’ve been inviting in kids from the orphanage and other children who seem to want to enter service somewhere. But they’re still not contributing to production yet, I’d say.”

No matter how simple the work was, it was not something a complete novice could do after just a few days.

When we first set up the workshop, even the so-called apprentices had all already endured the hardships of apprenticeship to a certain extent, so they had become usable hands right away. As for the newly invited children, it was still completely unclear how many of them would accept doing steady, quiet work.

“And honor is… troublesome. It’s like with the beastfolk not being allowed into kitchens because people say animal fur will get into the food. Then even if they shaved off the fur, would that really solve the problem?”

Rank and honor.

Because they were vague things you could neither see nor touch, they were all the more troublesome, like a curse.

Apparently, not a few of the girls who had fallen prey to Nodon and his kind had been handed over in place of their family’s debts, and yet they were the ones treated as immoral, stripped of honor, and unable to remain in their own homes.

“I was thinking, what if we granted them citizenship?”

That would require no special expense, only Iiria signing the paperwork.

In this world, being a citizen meant being an honorable resident of the town, so it would be like forcibly restoring their honor by sheer power.

“It might solve things for a moment. But if they can’t get work, it’ll just end up back where it started.”

And how many places would gladly hire former prostitutes?

I did think about taking them into our company, but there was not an infinite amount of work for the number of people.

And unlike the beastfolk, they did not have physical strength either.

Then what would it take for them to be employable?

“Literacy education.”

“That’s the direction, yeah. It’ll take time, though.”

It was because I had become able to read and write that I was hired by Nodon Company.

The problem, as Kengo had pointed out, was that it would take time. And there was another problem too.

“Who would teach them?”

Whoever took that role seemed likely to become the subject of all sorts of rumors.

An adventurer like Gerario might not care, but in a town where everyone had known everyone else since birth, would anyone really take on teaching girls with such troublesome histories?

For that matter, the person doing the teaching might secretly have been one of their customers. Just imagining it was awkward, and it felt like it would cause a whole new set of problems.

In that case—

“Hmm…”

Kengo and I had both been groaning when suddenly we raised our heads at the same time.

“There is someone.”

“Yeah.”

Kengo and I looked at each other, matched our breathing, and spoke at once.

“The church.”

“Gorgon.”

“Huh?”

“What?”

Kengo looked at me like, what the hell are you talking about, and I was probably making the same face.

But once our mutual surprise subsided, the other person’s point began to soak into my head like broth soaking into oden.

“I see. If it were Gorgon-san, then yes, that makes sense.”

“So the church does make sense too, huh. Right. The priest was so worldly that it never even occurred to me.”

“That part does make me a little uneasy, but was it Assistant Priest Clover-san? He seems like a serious believer. But Gorgon-san would be a real possibility too. His character is trustworthy, and he seems extremely knowledgeable.”

Kengo and I put each other’s ideas on the table and wracked our brains.

“If we’re going to ask someone, it would be one of those two.”

That was what Kengo said.

“They’re oil and water, after all.”

The church and the beastfolk were opposing forces by the very nature of this world’s origins.

“Though, well, if it’s old man Gorgon, then there’s that—he is beastfolk. If it came out that they were learning letters from him, that might make the problem even worse.”

Kengo was immersed in the world of the beastfolk, but he had not forgotten the perspective of how things would look to society.

“There’s also the problem of work. If they were taken in by the church, it seems like that would make it easier to connect them to jobs afterward.”

There were jobs often entrusted to women, such as in attached clinics, or in the orphanage for that matter.

Would growing medicinal herbs be monastery work too?

I was remembering bits of medieval culture from books I had read while making fantasy stories when Kengo spoke.

“And if it’s the church, it feels like it could solve the problem of honor too.”

“Honor?”

That possibility had not occurred to me.

“If they studied at the church, then the church could vouch that they’re serious people, right? That should be a lot more effective than some slapped-on citizenship.”

“Well, that’s true…”

Stories like that showed up all the time in medieval tales. It was basically a kind of purification.

“If that’s the case, then what about a convent?”

“A convent?”

A house of the god of stillness and prayer.

“Ah… nuns. Mary Magdalene.”

The status of a devout nun would surely be enough qualification for them to return to lay life as honorable citizens.

“But…”

Kengo’s expression darkened.

“The problem is that if you’re talking about something like a convent, it’ll cost money. And that fishy priest doesn’t look like he’d put up even a single copper coin for something like that.”

Maybe Iiria herself had thought of this possibility.

But at the time, there was no way to know what would happen to the company after Nodon was driven out, and no telling whether the magic stone workshop would ever get on track.

The lord’s finances were still unstable, and it was obvious she could not possibly set up and run a convent on top of that. That was probably why all she had been able to do was quietly deliver food and the like…

However—

“In the convents of my old world, didn’t they also sell various goods?”

Medicinal herbs and spun thread. I felt like there had also been candle-making and beekeeping.

I did not think they could have run on that income alone, but in this world, religious authority was still tremendously strong.

If so, perhaps handmade products made by nuns would sell reasonably well.

When I told Kengo that, he gave a thoughtful grunt in agreement.

“Of course it’d be great if it turned a profit, but even if it only covered part of a deficit, maybe we could still support it. And if they learn practical skills at the convent, that would also solve the problem of work after they return to lay life. Actually, with the church backing them, I think we could even use some slightly dirty methods.”

“Dirty methods?”

To Kengo’s suspicious look, I answered in Japanese.

“The church openly smuggles goods at the harbor like it’s the most natural thing in the world. The church exists slightly outside the ordinary structure of secular power, so it should be able to bypass the rules concerning merchants’ and craftsmen’s guilds too.”

Bread could only be sold by bakers, meat only by butchers—that was the right of the guilds.

But if the church distributed bread to the poor, the bakers would not complain, and if it housed the poor, the innkeepers’ guild would not complain either.

Or rather, they could not complain.

“Then it could do any kind of business. If you ask me, something like a bakery sounds like it’d be especially popular, but—”

Kengo had gotten that far when it happened.

An arrow struck into my head.

“Ah!”

Kengo looked at me in surprise, eyes wide.

“Uh… um…”

I closed my eyes, pressed a finger to my brow, and thought.

Something had definitely connected just now inside my head.

It felt like one heavy problem after another had vanished in a giant chain combo from a puzzle game.

A convent that would shelter girls whose lives had been twisted by fate, and beyond that what I saw was…

The beastfolk.

“Hey, Kengo.”

“What?”

I was the type who fiddled with his smartphone when conversations like this came up at drinking parties, but I asked him this.

“Have you ever spent time with girls like that?”

Kengo’s eyes widened slightly, then he looked away awkwardly.

“Ah, no, should I ask Marks-san instead?”

Kengo, who had been averting his face, narrowed his eyes unpleasantly and shot me a sidelong glance.

“What are you talking about, Yorinobu?”

“Ah, right, um…”

I tried to connect in my head two enormous problems that felt like they would fall apart the moment I relaxed.

Still, this was only a matter of logic. I had no idea what the people actually involved would think. It was impossible to go beyond conjecture.

So some groundwork would be necessary, but there was one possibility that was far too promising to ignore.

“It might… work.”

When I explained the plan, Kengo looked dubious for a while, but before long he understood.

But after hearing the whole thing, he suddenly grew sullen and lightly smacked me on the head.

Then he leaned in and, wearing a more intimidating expression than was usual for him, said this.

“You’re going to keep this a secret from Kururu-chan and Iiria-chan, right?”

The fact that he had spent time with girls in the back alleys.

Kururu and the others probably would not care that much, but I was a little overwhelmed by how earnest Kengo was, and I decided to respect the honor of my companion from my former world.