Ran-san

From her entire body, usually so likable and merchant-like, a powerful spirit was overflowing.

I did not know much about combat, but the strong pressure she gave off made me gulp.

“Sigh… That’s right. I used to be an adventurer. Used to, used to. It’s past tense. It was already years ago… Wine by the bottle! The one with the highest alcohol content!”

Her usual polite tone had disappeared somewhere, and the way she spoke to the waiter had a strange dignity to it.

Did this mean she was going to speak frankly with me?

It was only a guess, but this was probably the true part of Ran-san that she had been hiding.

Ran-san did not use the corkscrew served with it, but pulled the cork out with her teeth as hard as she could.

That was an absurdly strong jaw. S-so wild…

“Woody-kun, you’re Woody-kun too. Exposing a maiden’s secret is in bad taste. As a man, you’re the worst.”

“Ugh, I-I’m sorry…”

Since I felt guilty for exposing her background, I honestly bowed my head.

When I raised my head after apologizing, for some reason, Ran-san was smiling.

“That part of you, Woody-kun, where you can honestly apologize when you think you were wrong, is a virtue.”

“Thank you very much.”

“But if you really think you were wrong… you know what to do, don’t you?”

As she said that, wine was poured to the brim into the glass that had held juice until just now.

Naturally, it was the wine with the highest alcohol content that Ran-san had ordered.

I had a hangover cure in my pocket, but… using it here felt somehow wrong.

So I took a deep breath… and then drained the wine in one go.

“That’s a good way to drink.”

“I-it’s bitter and not delicious!”

“Call it an adult taste. As people grow older, they become able to accept bitterness too… Wait, who are you calling old!?”

“—Ow!?”

She smacked me on the head with a paper fan she had taken out from somewhere.

“I-I didn’t say that! I didn’t say anything!”

“You made me think it, so you’re guilty too.”

“What kind of logic is that!?”

Ran-san might be… a much more unreasonable person than I had thought!?

“Come on, your glass is empty.”

“Please go ahead…”

For the first time in my life, I was pouring alcohol for someone.

Even though I did not know how to do it, I tried imitating what Aira always did by watching and copying. When I wrapped a handkerchief around the bottle and poured, Ran-san said, “Good!” and drained it in one breath.

“What’re you holding! What’re you holding! I’m still not satisfied, so bring it over!”

She shouted some incomprehensible chant-like thing, then drank the alcohol I had poured.

If I remembered correctly, that was something called a call, which was popular among male adventurers.

I thought that was something used to make someone else drink… but she shouted it herself and drank it herself!?

“Come on, Woody-kun, one drink for arriving.”

“I think quite a bit of time has passed since I arrived, though…”

“Shut up! You exposed a maiden’s secret, so drink! —Who’s a maiden? I’m a maiden!”

Ran-san was starting to become incoherent somehow.

While unleashing a perfect alcohol-harassment package by pouring alcohol into my glass whenever she saw an opening, she steadily polished off both drinks and food.

S-she was an incredible drunk.

Father also became a little rough-tempered when he drank, but I felt like this was on a completely different level.

“Phew～～～～～～～, somehow, I’m starting to feel free for the first time in a while…”

“Ugh…”

An absurd scent of alcohol drifted from Ran-san’s mouth as she let out a long breath.

It smelled so strongly of alcohol that just sniffing it felt like it would make me drunk.

“Recently, thanks to a certain someone, I’ve been bu～～～～～～sy the whole time, after all.”

“Th-that is… I’m sorry.”

As someone who had asked Ran-san to do all sorts of work, I could not say anything.

Apparently, without realizing it, I had made Ran-san build up quite a lot of stress.

It was true that for Ran-san, who loved freedom as a former adventurer, the current situation where she could hardly take any free time might be quite harsh.

I regretted a little that I should have tried to properly understand Ran-san at an earlier stage.

As I hung my head and felt dejected, she roughly ruffled my hair.

“Don’t make such a gloomy face. I’m doing my current work because I accept it, and besides, the work of being a merchant itself isn’t something I dislike that much anymore.”

“Anymore means… did you perhaps dislike it at first?”

“Of course! I’m hopelessly bad at detailed calculations. That’s why I was running deficits the whole time. …Well, I did think that was fine too, though.”

The fruit pound cake Ran-san had newly ordered arrived.

Ran-san wildly bit into the whole loaf before it had even been sliced.

She offered me the side she had not bitten into, saying, “Do you want some too, Woody-kun?” but naturally, I declined.

“Woody-kun, have you ever hated being born into a noble house?”

Before I knew it, she had begun sipping the alcohol little by little, as if licking it.

Apparently, she had a firm grasp of her own alcohol tolerance.

“Hmm… not really. I grew up in an environment where that was natural, so I thought it was only natural to be born a noble and become a noble.”

To cool down my body, which was flushed from drinking too much, I decided to gulp down fruit water, detox water, and iced fruit tea to dilute the alcohol inside me even a little.

“I see… Then what about before you created Tree Village? When House Conrad ordered you to come to the desert, if you hated it, you should have been able to throw everything away, right? You could have run away somewhere, or vanished somewhere into the desert and lived quietly, couldn’t you?”

“That is…”

Ignoring the order and disappearing somewhere just like that.

If I had gone to another country outside the Kingdom of Aries, I probably could have lived quietly as just Woody, not Woody Conrad.

To be honest, it would be a lie to say I had never thought about it even once.

That surely would have been a free choice, bound by nothing.

“I think I could have… but in the end, I didn’t choose it.”

“I wonder why?”

“I think running away would be free and easy… but I’m sure I would regret it for the rest of my life after that.”

“Hmm, you’re serious, aren’t you, Woody-kun?”

The two of us sipped our drinks little by little.

As if her draining the alcohol in an instant earlier had been a lie, the two of us slowed our pace and quietly drank.

“I quit being an adventurer. My combat ability at the time was top-class even among A-ranks. I didn’t feel like I would lose no matter who I fought. But because of that, all sorts of obligations increased… Did you know? Once an adventurer’s rank exceeds C, requests that are effectively impossible to refuse start coming. They’re what you call nominated requests.”

Ran-san’s face was slightly flushed.

I had not drunk nearly as much as she had, but my face was surely even redder.

But when having this kind of conversation, it was probably better to be drunk.

Because then, both of us could let it pass as something said over drinks.

“I was an A-rank adventurer, and it’s strange to say this myself, but my looks weren’t bad either. Because of that, nominated requests started flying in from everywhere. And most of them were boring requests I didn’t want to do. Before I knew it, I was escorting noble daughters and receiving hospitality in various places more often than I was fighting strong enemies…”

She swirled the wine.

After smelling its aroma, she tilted the glass in one motion and emptied it.

Ran-san let out a hot breath and smiled faintly.

“I’m not as serious or as hardship-prone as you are… so I threw it all away. I didn’t want to enter anyone’s service, and in the first place, I hated being forced to work. I became an adventurer because I wanted to be free. But in the end, once I succeeded as an adventurer, the freedom I should have wanted most kept disappearing…”

It was a wry, somewhat self-mocking smile.

I had ended up seeing yet another expression from Ran-san that I had never seen before.

“That’s why I decided to start over in a new land. Well, it was a miscalculation that some party that admired me as their big sister followed me… but I decided to live my second life as a merchant.”

Now that I thought back on it, Val-san had always seemed to pay respect to Ran-san. So that had been respect toward Ran-san as his senior…

From there, Ran-san told me about her life after she quit being an adventurer.

Apparently, life as a merchant was more enjoyable than when she had been an adventurer.

Even in her party, she had left the money calculations to the other members, so at first, she apparently made all sorts of mistakes… but even so, she had been able to continue because she gained a sense of fulfillment she had not felt when she was an adventurer.

“Adventurers are basically treated like nuisances, so unless you go to a region that’s really desperate, people don’t look at you kindly wherever you go. But merchants are the opposite. Basically, wherever they go, they’re welcomed. Though the fact that I chose a desert region where hardly anyone came or went was probably a big reason too.”

“To begin with, there was almost no movement of goods here, after all…”

“I do have a Storage Bag, same as you, Woody-kun, but if people found out I had one, it would become troublesome, so I didn’t use it.”

Certainly, in the desert, the importance of a Storage Bag that could preserve water and food for long periods was quite high.

Ran-san was not that good at making money, but how should I put it? She was extremely good at moving around in situations like that.

I supposed that was also experience from when she was an adventurer.

“They say a Storage Bag is a magical tool every merchant wants so badly they’d reach out their hands from their throats, right? I was actually targeted by Ashid because of mine too… though I somehow defended it to the end.”

“I earned a mountain of money when I was an adventurer. Even like this, I earned more than some half-baked nobles.”

“Adventurers really do have dreams, don’t they…”

“Well, no matter how much I earned, I was so busy that I hardly had any use for it…”

Ran-san’s face, as she said that, glowed faint orange under the light.

When Ran-san talked about her adventurer days, she often seemed to make a dark expression.

After that, Ran-san continued complaining about the days when she worked as an adventurer.

Thanks to the alcohol making my head a little dull, I was able to happily listen until the end even when she occasionally repeated the same story.

I had always thought adventurers were cool, like characters from stories, but apparently, they had all sorts of painful things too…

“Don’t you have any good memories from when you were an adventurer?”

“I… of course I do.”

When she said that, old stories began to come out little by little from Ran-san’s mouth.

It seemed most of the fun memories Ran-san could remember were from when she had been a novice adventurer.

“While drinking cheap alcohol, we’d argue until morning about which of us would become the kingdom’s greatest adventurer, and in the end, the next day, both of us were too hungover to move… Now that I think back, they’re all pathetic stories like that.”

“That’s fine, isn’t it? Talking about dreams until dawn. It feels very youth-like.”

Those were my honest words.

It must be nice to have a friend you could talk about anything with.

I did not have friends I could talk to about anything without reserve.

In noble society, practical interests inevitably became involved in relationships.

There were almost no friends one could associate with without thinking of gains and losses.

“—I’m still young! And don’t talk like you’ve seen everything, Woody-kun. You’re still young too.”

Ran-san lightly hit me on the head.

She was laughing happily.

“What you dislike most, Ran-san, is still losing your freedom, right?”

“Hmm… well, yes.”

Currently, Ran-san was running her own Wing Shop. Incidentally, that name was apparently taken from the party she had once belonged to.

The shop’s scale was large by Wenti standards, but looking at trading companies as a whole, it was about on the smaller side of medium-sized.

In Wenti, where all sorts of people would be coming in the future, it could be said to be a somewhat unreliable scale for fighting against other merchant houses.

Ran-san had pursued her dream as an adventurer.

After that dream had broken and she had chosen the path of a merchant, did she have a new dream?

I was curious, so I asked.

“A dream, huh… I don’t really have one, I guess? If I had to say, it would be to deliver goods throughout the desert.”

Apparently, perhaps because Ran-san had worked as an adventurer, she had an extraordinary attachment to freedom.

The reason she disliked becoming the manager of the general store was because she did not want to become tied to me and lose her freedom.

It was not that she disliked becoming close to me, and personally, we had been able to build a decent relationship.

In that case, the choice I should take was… After thinking for a while, I decided to make a certain proposal to Ran-san.

“Ran-san, if you don’t mind… would you accept a loan from me? As an initial amount, let’s see… about one hundred thousand gold coins.”

When Ran-san heard my proposal, she tilted her head.

Her eyes narrowed slightly, and while doubting my sanity, she tilted it even further.

“One hundred thousand gold coins…? Such an absurd amount… no matter how you think about it, that’s higher than Wenti’s tax revenue, isn’t it?”

Perhaps because she had entered work mode, her drunkenness from earlier seemed to disappear in an instant.

I matched her by taking a hangover cure as well, making sure I would not get any drunker.

“Well, of course it is… but you see, right now, we have money sitting unused in our own territory.”

“…I see. The profits from selling World Tree Fruits.”

“Exactly.”

At present, Wenti had more gold coins than it could use up.

Specifically, they were the profits from selling World Tree Fruits wholesale to the royal family and some major nobles, as well as the highest-quality fruits among those we harvested.

As for the amount, at the very least, it was so much that we could not use it all merely by doing public works in Wenti.

Because Tree Village and Guinea Village had both become Sanctuaries, there was almost no maintenance cost to speak of.

The expenses we had were only things like salaries paid to Sandstorm, the Dark Elves, and officials like Maton, as well as job support for people to learn trades.

And frankly, if it was just that much, it fell well within the range that could be covered by Wenti’s tax revenue alone.

At present, money was simply piling up in Wenti.

Furthermore, this was not temporary. We would continue to receive it regularly from now on too.

Letting a large amount of unused money sit idle because we could not spend it all was very bad for the economy.

It was not exactly that money made the world go round, but if money did not circulate smoothly, it would inevitably create a major distortion somewhere.

The reason I had been fixated on establishing a general store was because my goal was to use this to solidify Wenti’s weak commercial foundation and create a powerful shop rooted in Wenti.

But if I tied her down that way, I would not be able to gain the cooperation of Ran-san, who loved freedom.

In that case, I should reverse my thinking.

In other words… I just had to lend her the money while leaving her freedom intact.

“The interest can be minimal, and if you want, I don’t mind making it something like a conditional grant.”

“When you go that far, it honestly starts getting scary.”

As long as a large shop was created in Wenti, that was enough for me.

I had tried to take the form of investing myself and establishing a company because that would make it easier to manage… but if it could be created regardless of the form, I did not mind being flexible.

I would lend money to Ran-san, and Ran-san would steadily expand Wing Shop… Wasn’t that the best form for us right now?

“Wenti’s population will grow from now on. So when that time comes, money will be necessary… but that time is not now. In that case, I thought it would benefit both of us more if Ran-san used it.”

“I see… That isn’t bad. Rather, it’s a wonderful proposal.”

Money gathered where money already existed.

For merchants, the more money they had, the more things they could do.

The higher the risk, the greater the profit it would bring.

“You may use the money freely. I do not intend to place any particular restrictions on its use. Just one thing.”

“What would that be?”

“Use that money—for the happiness of everyone in Wenti. That is all I ask.”

Ran-san laughed when she heard my words.

It was a complicated expression, as if the rough Ran-san from earlier and the work-mode Ran-san had been added together and divided by two.

Women were always so difficult that men could not possibly unravel them.

“If that is the case… then I think I will accept your kindness, Woody-sama.”

The money had originally appeared almost out of nowhere.

Even if I was deceived and not a single coin came back, it would simply mean I had no eye for people.

And so, I decided to lend Ran-san the money currently sitting unused in my territory.

This would surely become a major step in Wenti’s future development.

For some reason, I was convinced of that.

And then I kept drinking happily with Ran-san until morning, and the next morning, Aira and Nadja scolded me thoroughly…