Let’s Just Give It A Try First! (6)

Once cocoa officially began to be produced in our domain, the kitchen got busy along with it.

“So, you’re saying you want me to bake cookies with this?”

It was the first batch of chocolate chips we had ever made. Riin stared at them with a puzzled look, then, as if she had no choice, started mixing them into the dough.

She spread the dough out evenly, pressed it with a mold to shape basic cookie discs, then picked up each one to check whether the chocolate chips had been mixed in well before placing them on the baking tray.

“Try not to bake them too hard; could you make them a bit softer than usual?”

“…What if the inside ends up underbaked?”

“Ah, it’s fine. I’m prepared to accept that much risk when I eat them.”

“You’ll get a stomachache…”

“Here, we’ve got medicine anyway, so let’s just make them.”

Riin grimaced at both my words and my actions, but this was the lord’s project, and she knew this was one of the new products using “cocoa powder” that had been circulating in the domain lately, so she was curious too. She nodded and said she would bake them the way I’d requested.

Then we watched, as if enduring a trial of patience, while the cookies baked in the oven. Seeing the chocolate chips melt and wobble in the heat made my heart wobble along with them.

The sweet smell of baking chocolate drifting out of the oven also drew the interest of the nearby maids.

Riin, who was baking the cookies, was just as curious as the others.

A little later, when she judged them to be baked the way I wanted, Riin took the cookies out of the oven, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The cookies looked so beautiful my heart actually ached.

‘Ah, to be able to eat a soft chocolate chip cookie in this world… What if it isn’t soft? Should I pretend it’s a soft chocolate chip cookie and eat a not-soft chocolate chip cookie as if it were? I want a soft chocolate chip cookie though…’

I was starting to have all sorts of ridiculous thoughts as Riin set the baking tray down and scraped it with a cooking tool to pry off the cookies stuck flat to the bottom.

I would have preferred she handled them a bit more gently, but her hands showed no mercy. Still, once the cookies were neatly stacked in a basket, still warm, and set down in front of me, I found it in me to forgive everything with a generous heart.

I carefully picked up a cookie.

The chocolate chips looked moist. The lingering heat was urging them not to solidify yet. I blew on it and took a cautious bite.

Instead of a crunchy texture, the cookie in my mouth was exactly the soft kind I wanted, and the waves of flavor created by the chocolate chips in between each bite brought up droplets of nostalgia one after another.

“Perfect…”

The flavor and aroma filling my mouth were worthy of nothing less than the highest praise. If only I could add coconut chips or almond powder, it would be even better.

Thinking that, I quickly took out my notebook and spoke to a maid nearby.

“Could you bring me a quill? You can have this.”

Like I was paying her for the errand, I held out a cookie, and she hurriedly took it from my hand and ran off. When she returned, half her gaze unfocused, she set the inkwell and quill down in front of me but couldn’t take her eyes off the basket of cookies.

“How did it taste?”

“…It’s the first time I’ve ever been moved by eating a cookie…”

That was very nice to hear. So I called the curious maids over, as well as Riin and her assistant Leti, and held a little tasting session. In the end, everyone collapsed onto the chairs at the table, staring blankly into space, so I just picked up the basket and quietly slipped out of the kitchen.

‘Mm, it tastes good, but there’s definitely something missing. But I’d need a lot of extra things to fill in that gap… And if I bring those in, the amount of work will explode. We’re already short-handed as it is—what am I supposed to do…?’
It was proving difficult to recruit a merchant.

It was enough to show just how greedy nobles were, given how much they demanded. So what I came up with instead was that we should set up a trading company of our own—but Linda was the first to object.

According to her, without a noble title it was hard even to win initial contracts. It was a matter of “credit.” Even if we established a trading house under my name, unless I personally went around doing business, large-scale deals would be impossible; at best we might manage small-scale trades.

Linda also explained just how big a factor the princess was in helping us, which gave me an opportunity to reconsider how much distance I should keep from Princess Riana if I wanted to minimize contact.

That didn’t mean I planned to maintain a deep personal relationship. In terms of secrecy and the fact that I couldn’t force her to keep her mouth shut, I had already judged that, in the long run, she was someone who would harm our domain.

This was something Linda and Matilda both agreed on after telling me that I would need to ask people to keep a lot of secrets in the future.

They said the Imperial family would never want excessive wealth accumulation or monopolies.

I would think so myself. Everything I was doing was turning into a hot issue, and none of it was easy for others to imitate. The only reason the Empire was sharing in the profits for now was because they were taking part in that monopoly, and if any of the related techniques were leaked or they decided it was too much, they would impose sanctions on us.

‘Which means I need a secret stash…’

But then I wondered how I could build a secret stash the Imperial family wouldn’t know about.

That was when one thing came to mind: beyond the Demon Dragon Forest.

‘Beyond the Demon Dragon Forest, which you can only cross by ship, there’s the Northern Continent. There are five kingdoms there, and I heard their power struggles are severe.

‘And because of the Demon Dragon Forest, the demons can’t easily cross over there, so that side is still less directly affected by the extinction war against humanity.’

‘If it’s there…?’

Several possibilities came to mind. The North was a cold region. Because of scarce resources, the five countries were constantly suffering from frequent conflicts.

And those “resources” were largely related to food.

‘I have permission to go back and forth across the Demon Dragon Forest… And even without permission, if I send beastkin to carry goods, there’s no problem. Traveling by ship, a journey that would take weeks could be reduced to just a few days… We could save a fortune in time and money on transportation costs, too…’

Just from the few ideas that came to me, I could tell this would mean enormous profits, and I realized I could use that as the basis for setting up operations beyond the reach of the Teracan Empire’s eyes.

No matter how capable the Empire’s spies were, they couldn’t enter the Demon Dragon Forest. They would be killed by Demon Dragons sooner or later.

The Demon Dragon I had experienced was not something humans could do anything about. It was a being whose presence alone terrified even Wiesel and Demina—people who claimed they could face Masters with sheer aura. Humans? Even if you brought all the Heroes together, it wouldn’t be enough.

‘Which is why even the demons can’t do anything about it…’

What kind of existence was a Demon Dragon, really?

I found myself seriously pondering the question.

After that, I went looking for Linda with a few proposals in mind, but it seemed the work had been taking a toll on her. She was collapsed over her desk, fast asleep.

It was still technically work hours, but it was almost time to go home, so I hesitated over what to do. In the end, I walked up to Linda, knocked lightly on her desk to wake her.

She jerked awake, lifting her head so fast the sheet stuck to her cheek came up with it. She must have drooled in her sleep.

“Are you very tired?”

She hurried to peel the paper off her face, not realizing she had a cute ink mark left on her cheek.

“I’m so sorry! I fell asleep during work hours!”

“No, it happens. You’ve had a lot on your plate.”

“Ah, I… I’m sorry!”

She scrambled to smooth down her messy hair and stood up in a fluster, but it wasn’t going well and she ended up awkwardly half-standing. Her face crumpled like she was about to cry, and I found it more pitiful than funny.

Maybe that’s why.

I took out a stamina tonic from my subspace pouch and handed it to her, telling her not to overdo it. Linda immediately popped it into her mouth and declared she would work hard, which only made me feel more sorry for her.

“So, what brings you here? If you’d sent a maid, I would have come to see you.”

“It’s nothing big… I baked some cookies and thought you might like to try them.”

Moved by sympathy, I handed Linda a few cookies. She accepted them carefully, and with the ink mark on her face like a tattoo, she gave me a bright smile.

I seriously struggled with whether to tell her about the ink mark or not, then decided to save today’s agenda for tomorrow and instead told her to go home early and rest before leaving the room.

I hadn’t taken more than a few steps when it happened.

“Kyaaaaaa!! Wh-what is this!!! Kyaaaa!!”

Linda’s shrieked panic echoed from her room, ringing through the halls. Later, when I went to see Matilda, she had mostly finished her work and was drinking coffee. When she saw me come in, she hurriedly brewed another cup and offered it to me.

“What brings you to my humble office?”

A quick glance at the time told me it was a little past quitting time. I asked Matilda.

“Aren’t you going home?”

“I still have a bit of work left. I was planning to take a short break and then finish it.”

“I don’t like overtime, you know…?”

“I’ve heard that you’re the one who used to work until you collapsed.”

“Th-that was back then. These days I barely have anything to do.”

“As far as I know, you’re the one who works the most in our whole domain. And yet you say you have nothing to do?”

No matter how I thought about what I’d done lately, nothing came to mind. All I did was take a walk in the morning for exercise, then do some light exercise after lunch, and in the afternoon I would wander around asking experts about anything that piqued my curiosity. That was the whole of my schedule.

The problem was that this routine repeated every day, but it was more like a daily habit than “work.”

Matilda, however, seemed to mistake it for work.

“So, what’s the work you have left?”

“It’s about the beastkin armament proposal I submitted before.”

“Ah, the one we negotiated this time?”

“Yes. We’ve finished the price negotiations, and it seems we can roughly fit things into the budget. The problem is the time frame. Right now, there are areas where the sea has frozen over and ships can’t sail.”

“You mean up North?”

“That’s right. Most of the countries that produce large amounts of iron are in the North. It’s partly because of the mountainous terrain, but also because resource wars are intense there, and they’ve been pouring effort into iron mine development.”

When she mentioned the North, it lined up almost perfectly with the idea I’d had earlier, so I compared the two in my head.

When I fell silent mid-conversation, Matilda fell quiet with me. I thought this was one of her strengths. A short while later, after organizing my thoughts, I spoke.

“How about we do some business up North? Want to hear me out?”

Matilda’s eyes lit up at my words.