Luciel's Snack Shop. The First Hit Product: Chocolate Chip Cookies
Luciel's Snack Shop. The first hit product: chocolate chip cookies.
Devil's confections, zeroing in on the coins in children's pockets.
Three days after that.
Inside the shop floor of Luciel's General Store.
"Come on in."
"May I... really go inside this... magic shop of yours...?"
"It's not a magic shop. How many times do I have to say it?"
Click.
I opened the store's front door from outside, and—for just a moment, mind you—flipped the little wooden sign hanging from the handle from CLOSED to OPEN.
"Wow."
Erina poked her head through the gap in the door, and the gasp of admiration burst out of her almost immediately.
"Get in here. What are you hesitating for?"
"It's just... the uniform you gave me, Master... it's a bit...."
"What's wrong with the uniform?"
"Nothing! It's really pretty, it's just... was this dress always made with so little fabric?"
Erina shuffled in slowly, step by reluctant step.
Right now, Erina was wearing a maid outfit.
Since I'd never kept a separate employee before, I hadn't even thought about what a uniform should look like—least of all a woman's. I myself simply worked the floor in a crisp white shirt, black dress slacks, and an apron, so I'd just dressed Erina to match, in a maid outfit done up in the same black and white.
Of course, this was nothing like the crude maid garb you'd find anywhere in this other world. Those are honestly drab and not pretty at all.
No—what she wore was a specially ordered cosplay piece that put her thighs and cleavage on shameless display.
"It's... it's way too revealing."
"You didn't complain when you were buck naked."
"Honestly... being completely naked feels less embarrassing than this...."
Can't exactly have her work the register in the nude every day, though.
Erina kept tugging down the lace-ruffled hem of her skirt, but it was a losing battle—the top was just as short, and her navel peeked out regardless. She was so busy worrying about her backside that she didn't seem to notice at all the pink areola that kept threatening to surface over the deep plunge of her neckline.
It is... a bit much, isn't it?
And it seems tighter than I expected, too. I'd bought a size M assuming Western builds, and even that's too small on her?
Nothing to be done. This is, relatively speaking, the tamest thing I keep in stock. Otherwise I'd have to put her in the pink bunny-girl costume with the rabbit-ear headband, or the China dress slit all the way to the hip—and those are awkward to move around in, clash with the locals' sensibilities, and are frankly far too much. The maid outfit is the modest option here.
"Want to just wear your regular clothes until I can get a custom order in?"
"No, I'll get used to it in no time. You went to so much trouble preparing this for me, Master—I'll treasure every minute I wear it!"
Did I intend this? Obviously, I intended this.
Harnessing sex appeal for retail is an old convention, practically a law of commerce.
If I raised Erina up right as the face of our general store, our male customers would double. Triple, even. Of course, the creeps coveting Erina's body would multiply right alongside them, so I'd have to clamp down hard on that from the very start.
Hmm. Now, a word about our shop space.
To be honest, the building that houses our general store isn't all that big. It was an inn in its previous life, though—short-stay lodgings for travelers passing a night or two—so it isn't exactly short on space.
But I wanted the sales floor, at least, to feel grand. So while the shop does have a second floor, same as the office section, I left it undivided—knocked out the wall and turned the whole thing into a double-height space. The taller ceiling keeps the storefront from feeling cramped; it breathes now, open and airy.
I built extra shelving into the leftover wall space to display merchandise, and hung the lighter wares along the walls wherever they could be mounted. The result: wherever your eye lands inside the shop, it finds products. Every corner brims with them.
So when a customer steps inside, it's like walking into another world entirely—an exotic, disorienting thrill. No shop built like this had ever existed anywhere in this other world before. The variety of goods sold here has always been limited to begin with, which is why a first-time visitor can lose a solid hour just gawking at the shelves.
The second floor of the shop, however, is cramped compared to the ground level, so I hung a curtain from the top of the stairs and put that space to multiple duty: storeroom, staff break room, and changing room all at once.
Near the entrance on the first floor, close to the door, I displayed the cheap stuff—the snacks kids would grab and stuff in their mouths. Most of it was individually wrapped shortbread or pies, jellies, candies, and little treats like caramels.
I bought these in bulk boxes on the internet, dirt cheap, and emptied them out onto the shelves. In the beginning I'd made a point of ordering things with long shelf lives, but they sell through so fast now that I stopped bothering.
One box takes roughly two to three weeks to sell out. With as many varieties as I stock, aside from the two or three runaway bestsellers, most of it moves at a leisurely pace.
All of it was priced at a flat one copper. For most items you pay one coin per individually wrapped piece, but for tiny things like candies and caramels I didn't bother counting—however much a child's little hand could scoop up from the plastic tub in a single grab was measured out as one copper.
"You actually make money selling like that?" the locals would ask.
And every time, I'd smile and answer, "I just like hearing the children of this town laugh."
Doesn't that make me sound like some benevolent philanthropist of a businessman?
Truth be told, there's none of that. I do profit selling it this way. I profit like crazy. Selling one-of-a-kind confections that exist nowhere else in this world at a price nobody walks in for would earn me nothing—raking in a copper here, a copper there, beats that a hundredfold. A thousandfold.
(There was a time when one copper was my entire daily food budget!)
Of course, Goat works hard cracking open the snack boxes and restocking the shelves every single time.
Anyway—one handful, one copper. And because of that rule, a little game had spread like wildfire among the children of Greenhill: betting on who could grab the most snacks in a single scoop. The big-fisted kids who could haul away the most became objects of wide-eyed admiration, and word had it the biggest-handed among them had claimed the crown of alley boss.
I don't sell the big-volume bag snacks, though—shrimp crackers, potato chips, onion chips. Charge more and the kids can't stretch their allowances; lump these in at one copper too and I lose money. And honestly, the kids don't even like them.
Being children who resemble Western Europeans, they seem convinced that dessert means sweet, not salty. Chocolate and candy, specifically—the kind with a sweetness so unshakable it makes your tongue tingle.
With this much merchandise indoors, I'll be honest—in modern-day Korea I'd have set up a stall out front and spread everything across it. But this isn't Korea.
In this town, if you lay goods outside, every last one of them will be picked up and carried off—children and adults alike. I could have left out an empty wrapper with nothing but crumbs stuck to it and someone would've pocketed even that. It isn't that these people are dishonest; the culture here is simply like that. And should something go missing, the prevailing wisdom blames the careless owner who left it lying about, not the one who took it.
Anyway, these snacks line the shop from the entrance down along one corner of the left window.
Truthfully, snack sales now account for less than two percent of my shop's total revenue. But I have no intention of dropping them. Why?
Because snacks were the very first item I ever sold from the modern world. My first business wasn't Luciel's General Store—it was Luciel's Snack Shop. Those cookies proved to me that I could actually make a living in this trade, and every child who tasted them went home, tugged their parents by the sleeve, and dragged them straight to my store, giving me the opening to sell them far pricier things.
Loyalty. Yes. Loyalty.
Even if it costs my business money, I will never stop selling snacks.
Two years ago.
After a year sleeping rough in the other world, and another year shoveling cow dung in grinding misery, I had used the house key that carried me back to my room and reclaimed my precious little studio apartment. That was the moment.
Once I'd rested exactly as long as I wanted, my thoughts turned to what came next. The first thing I mulled over was selling goods ordered from the modern world in the other world.
That was something only I could do. And it was far more delicate work than it appeared. Two years of scraping by here had taught me exactly how these people thought.
People in this world are conservative. And Greenhill—a rustic backwater, at that—is doubly so. Being behind the fashion of the great, prosperous cities is the residents' inferiority complex, true, but outside of a handful of youngsters they make no effort whatsoever to chase the trends. There's no need to live like that, after all.
One simple example: it's been over fifty years since the fork appeared in this world and people began using knife and fork together. But watch the elders of this town eat, and they still grip a knife in one hand while shoveling food into their mouths with the other. Using any tool besides the fingers God gave you, they say, is blasphemy—a worthless, godless act. Yet they use the knife just fine when it's genuinely needed. The religious justification is a mere excuse, really. They're simply scared of, and embarrassed by, upending a lifelong habit overnight.
Even granting that modern goods were extraordinarily useful and valuable here, actually deciding which item to sell, to whom, starting where, explained how—the thought alone was paralyzing. They might all take me for a snake-oil peddler. A fraud.
No—that would have been the lucky outcome. In a great city, they could easily have branded me a black wizard who'd sold his soul to a demon and put me to the block with my wares as evidence. Heretic! A servant of corruption, bewitching honest citizens with god-defying trinkets to drag them into the pit of ruin! In big cities like Stonefield, executions of that sort take place in the plaza once every two weeks like clockwork. Thank the gods this town wears its religion lightly.
And even if I somehow sold everything and earned this world's coin, that still wouldn't be the end of it. Converting it back into won was its own problem. No matter how many gold, silver, and copper coins I earned here—enough to load a wagon—if I couldn't funnel a decent amount into a modern bank account, my capital would eventually bottom out, and this precious home of mine might not survive either. What happens when you stop paying rent or miss your maintenance-fee deposits? I had no desire to find out firsthand.
"So then...."
I spent the whole night scrolling through my shopping apps, agonizing over where to start, until my finger stopped on one product.
This is it!
I hit the one-box express delivery button without hesitation. The first thing I ever carried from my apartment into the other world was chocolate chip cookies.
Start with food! Sweet, snacky dessert food!
My first target: the children of this town. Kids open their hearts far more easily than adults. Their weakness was having no money—but this was exactly the time to treasure every last hard-earned copper those children scraped together. No—at this stage, I didn't even plan on taking that. Now was the time to invest, losses be damned.
The moment the delivery arrived the next afternoon, I tore the box open and hauled out the contents. Then, basket of individually wrapped cookies in hand, I walked outside with no particular plan in mind. There, I found a pack of boys kicking around a ball made from a pig's bladder, blown full of air.
Having confirmed no adult was around to intervene, I approached the children slowly. To any observer, this would look exactly like child abduction. I remembered what my grandmother used to tell me when I was little—never follow a strange man offering you something delicious.
"Huh? It's the beggar mister."
That's what I'd been known as around here all this time—"the beggar mister." It was, truthfully, an accurate description, so it didn't sting one bit. Sleeping wherever I could, surviving on scraps of leftover food, getting sick from them, catching cold, stinking from going unwashed, moaning in pain on the roadside all day—that had been my daily routine, countless times over.
"It really is him? They say you've been washing up lately, and your clothes got clean?"
"You suddenly look rich."
"What's this? Did he become a rich mister overnight?"
"Mister, did something happen? Did somebody give you lots of alms?"
"Haha, nothing like that. But more importantly—"
Crinkle.
Without another word, I tore open a cookie wrapper. The glittering silver foil—something they'd never seen before—instantly snagged every child's gaze. Then the sweet smell of chocolate chip cookies drifted up from between the wrapper.
"Hey? My grandma makes these at home!"
A kid who actually knew what it was spoke up right away. And the moment they registered it as food, every child's eyes went wide as saucers.
Crunch.
I made a show of taking one out and biting into it. The children watched without so much as blinking until I'd chewed and swallowed the finger-sized cookie, all of them smacking their lips.
"Ah... what was that thing called again!? She baked them for my birthday once, and they were SO good!"
"It's a cookie. Chocolate chip cookie."
"Choc... choca-what?"
"There were cookies like that?"
This was exactly it.
This was the reason I'd made cookies my first product. Something that exists in this world too—but thanks to the lavish synthetic additives, processed sugar, refined butter, and salt, a flavor that leaps clean across dimensions! And this little impromptu tasting in the vacant lot would go on to become a crucial link in the chain—the moment that introduced chocolate and candy, whose existence no one would ever be able to deny again.
"Cookie! Right, they were cookies!"
"How did a beggar mister get his hands on these?"
"You... you didn't steal them, did you?"
"They're mine. I made them. Well—purchased them from somewhere else, to be precise."
In my old state, even children would never have believed a word of it. But now was different. One look at my presentable appearance and they trusted me without a shadow of doubt. More likely, though, they simply didn't care how I'd gotten them—they just wanted a cookie in their mouths by any means necessary.
"Want to try one?"
Not waiting for an answer, I pulled a cookie from its wrapper and handed it to the boy who'd first named the snack. The instant the words left my mouth, the cookie vanished as if it had never existed, and the other children stared at him with naked envy.
An age where no amount of food ever fills you up. Kids whose meals at home were dusty potatoes or whole-wheat bread, or stew with nothing in it. (The village is comparatively rich in meat, but if you have no coin, even a bone to throw in the soup pot is hard to come by.) Snacks existed, sure—but as Greenhill residents, those were treasures you could only dream of tasting by traveling to a big city with a proper confectioner's shop. At best they'd get a rusk—a piece of bread crust brushed with a little honey—on a festival day or at the new year, and even then never enough of it. Forget snacks; the chance to so much as see sweet food was vanishingly rare.
The reaction was one hundred percent as predicted.
"Wow! This is SO good!"
"It's that good?"
"Grandma's baking is little-chick-turd level! THIS is the real thing!"
Now, now... I almost feel bad for your grandma, and I've never even laid eyes on the woman.
"Wow...."
Every child's gaze locked onto the remaining cookies in my hand. The beggar-mister image was long gone. All they saw now was my hand, and the cookies in it.
"Who wants one?"
"Me!"
"Me!"
As if they'd been waiting for exactly those words, the instant I held out my hand, they each snatched a cookie as fast as they could. And sure enough, one child with slow hands got nothing.
"Hey! Who took two?! Now I've got nothing to eat! Hand it over!"
"There's more right here. But nobody gets two apiece, so don't you go asking for extra, y'hear."
I fished out another bag of cookies from the basket, tore it open, and passed them around to the ones who'd missed out.
For a long while after, the sounds of crunching and smacking lips filled the town's little square.
"AAAAAAHHH! IT'S SO GOOD!"
AAAAAAHHH! SO GOOOOOD!
The kids were so delighted they stamped their feet in place while they chewed. Before long, every last cookie had been demolished, and each child was sucking the crumbs from their fingertips.