Surviving in the City
The idea of dangling bribes as bait to offload the development of the printing press had been realized splendidly.
Backed by Grandpa Pates’s connections, I toured the printing houses of Montpellier and handed out, one by one, the mechanical printing-press blueprints I had carefully copied by hand, each accompanied by a modest bribe. I even slipped in a quiet threat that anyone who failed to invest in press development now would be left behind.
Once the printers invented the machines and book prices fell, everyone would sing my praises. More precisely, they would praise the owner of the lantern emblem engraved on the final page of every volume they produced. Later, when I raised that same emblem and declared the Order’s revival, the goodwill directed at the publishing industry’s patron would convert, intact, into goodwill toward the Order itself.
“It’s nice when things go the way you planned.”
I beamed as I looked over the list of printing houses that had received their apple boxes. The thought that all of this was future renown kept the corners of my mouth stretched to my ears.
“Are you that happy?”
“Of course. It’s the biggest mark I’ve left of my own free will.”
Just keep laying down goodwill like this and public support becomes child’s play. What people despise are the clergy of that era—those who, through endless corruption and incompetence, brought down the goddess’s wrath—not the Vesta Order itself, which had once protected humanity and cared for the common folk. And those old priests had already lost their divine power; they were either sitting in the gutters or had vanished without a trace.
Once our goddess made her will to purge corruption unmistakable by the extreme measure of reclaiming her power, the atrocities committed by the Order’s clergy no longer fed anger toward the goddess. The new Order, stamped with her quality-guarantee mark, was likewise free of the old Order’s notoriety.
“Now if only the goddess would send down an oracle…”
Of course the entire plan rested on the premise that Goddess Vesta actually wanted the Order rebuilt. If our goddess turned out to be such a hopeless blockhead that she forever refused to grant divine power, everything would collapse. Then I would have to either rebrand as a lantern-only cult or pour every last effort into commercial and industrial development until I died, leaving the rest to my successors. Either path would look pitifully meager beside the Order-reconstruction route.
“Since it’s come to this, shall we try praying? Do you know any prayer I could use?”
“Yes. O Flame of Benevolence who dwells in the heavens. Warm hand that cares for my soul. Your servant seeks peace in your name; please save this pitiful sinner from the mire of evil deeds…”
Rebecca offered the prayer with the most devout bearing I had yet seen from her. I carefully followed along, yet our goddess remained silent as ever.
Yeah. If she were the sort to answer just because someone memorized a prayer, she would never have kept her mouth shut all this time.
Besides, Vesta was not going to abandon me. Making a worthless country girl named Asty recover her past-life memories, then sending an oracle to the Lantern Bearer to appoint me Saintess, was clearly a miracle performed with purpose. The goddess is by no means an incomprehensible being. She has a definite goal, and to achieve it she turned me into Asty and named me her agent. I simply lack enough information to grasp her principles of action; there is no doubt she is a personality who thinks and acts in ways recognizably human. Moreover, she is suspiciously well-disposed toward humanity.
It is only speculation, so I should not leap to conclusions, yet the chance she is an evil god is vanishingly small. Just look at the fall of the old Order. Mere mortals had corrupted themselves enough to disappoint a god and stain her reputation, yet Vesta never scattered natural disasters as divine punishment, nor even personally struck down the corrupt priests; she simply reclaimed her divine power and called the matter finished. Compared with the chief god of the dwarves—who, in a fit of pique, reduced his own followers to an endangered species—this was positively angelic handling of affairs. Even after all that, she still felt enough attachment to humans to import a saintess from Earth and support the advance of civilization. At this point it is hard to tell whether she is a transcendent being or a transcendent sucker.
I still have no idea why our goddess is leaving me alone, but it does not seem to stem from malice, so there is little point in wariness. In any case, wariness would be useless. Our Asty is an utterly ordinary country girl with no superpowers and no magic. If she had been capable of picking a fight with a god, I would never have been stuck with this hardship. Opposing the goddess is simply not an option now; if Vesta ever revealed an evil nature, all I could do is die quietly.
“…Could it be that I’m not the Saintess? Maybe I misread the oracle somehow…”
The thought that ending it like that would be a little too disappointing suddenly crossed my mind. Even I found it ridiculous. Not long ago I had been whining that I did not want a second life, yet here I was doubting my only support out of fear of losing it. If Rebecca ever learned my true feelings, the ugliness of it would have been enough for her to recoil and walk away.
“There is no need for anxiety. That I came to serve the Saintess is, without the slightest doubt, a mission bestowed by Her.”
But Rebecca knew nothing of my thoroughly twisted heart; she simply stated the facts and reassured me. Yes—an oracle received directly from the goddess could not have been distorted. Which only made the whole thing more of a headache.
“Tsk.”
Fine. Fine. I would think about this later. What use was fretting over a goddess’s intentions I could not even see? Figuring out a safer, more effective way to deliver apple boxes would be several times more productive.
“How much money do we have left?”
“Six thousand florins remaining.”
I deliberately changed the subject. The money pouch Rebecca had given me went straight back into her keeping. A pouch stuffed with gold coins is heavy, and if word got out that we were carrying such a fortune we would become prime targets for robbers. Rebecca’s donation was precious operating capital and emergency funds—our lifeline. Lose it or have it stolen and the future would turn bleak in a hurry, so I left it with the one person I could trust completely.
“The pouch has gotten skinny.”
“Shall I exchange it for silver and fill it again?”
“If you do that, the pouch will burst.”
The pouch I saw again after a long while felt considerably lighter. At a glance its volume had shrunk as if it had undergone a brutal diet. Money would be flowing out in more places than one from now on, yet it was already this thin—how long could we last?
“Tsk… Should I start cutting expenses?”
Objectively, six thousand florins was not a small sum. Having this much left after bribing every printing house in Montpellier meant we had done reasonably well. The problem was that plenty of other “friends” still needed bribing, and unlike the printers they offered no room for cost-cutting on the apple boxes. The only reason a modest show of sincerity had been enough to play the printers was that the entire industry was mired in recession; I had leveraged Grandpa Pates’s connections and my own reputation as an inventor to apply pressure. That approach would not work on the other guilds, where monopoly and collusion were everyday facts of life; it might even turn them hostile. Yet we simply did not have enough money to buy them off properly.
The best way to gain allies was not to keep stuffing them with apple boxes, but to start a business and turn them into partners—or accomplices. Jumping blindly into the commercial fray in this cutthroat city, however, would only get us cleaned out and driven off. Hadn’t the spinning guild already sent assassins just to kill me? Every guild in Montpellier was watching the genius inventor Asty’s every move; clumsily poking at their rice bowls would not end with mere assassination attempts. And I had no time to build a business carefully.
Tsk…
Troublesome. I could not resort to loan sharks in this brutal age… was there anywhere I could scrape up emergency cash?
“Ah.”
I could use them—loan sharks. Debt or whatever, if I simply never paid it back, that was that. If I borrowed the money and then lay down and refused to repay, what were they going to do about it? Did they seriously think they could fight Rebecca and win? In the first place, did it make any sense for the goddess’s agent to show respect to the likes of usurers? In this neighborhood, extreme methods like fraudulent contracts and human trafficking went unregulated, so the gold and silver crammed into the loan sharks’ vaults had clearly been accumulated by unjust means. Part of me wanted to burn every last coin to soothe the sorrow of the innocent, yet while people may carry sin, money itself does not. Dirty money earned by dirty means could be seized by somewhat dirty means without the slightest problem. And if that money was then used for good works, it became an unquestionable act of virtue.
“In that case, it can’t be helped. Let’s go make some money.”
Our next target was the vaults of the wicked usurers. Somewhere, the goddess who was surely watching me must have been smiling with quiet satisfaction.