Earning Pocket Money (1)
My eyes lit up at the news Vitten had dug up for me. The lava spirit ranked a full tier above the salamander—by the bestiary's measure, salamanders sat at fourth-grade while lava spirits claimed third. It was a powerful material I needed right away, and its attribute was fire on top of that. There was no reason in the world to pass up a chance like this.
"Got any money?"
I asked, nursing a vague hope.
"Of course—"
"No."
Thalia cut Vitten off clean.
"The duchy is shouldering wartime expenses. There is no room in the budget to purchase a monster with an asking price in the hundreds of thousands of barts."
"What are you talking about? Master said he'd only take a thousand barts. Said it was a bargain item, so first come, first served—snatch it up before anyone else does."
"A thousand barts is merely the opening bid."
"That was an auction?"
"It has never once not been an auction. Do you truly believe that man extended his goodwill out of fondness for you, senior? His scheme is to draw in as many bidders as possible and skim the profit. For reference, the last third-grade monster to hit the block sold for 150,000 barts."
"What? A hundred and fifty thousand? How is anyone supposed to buy that?"
I simply stood by and listened to the two of them go at it. Come to think of it, I had never once taken money seriously in my life. In my past one, I'd wandered the world with Master, sleeping rough under the open sky, so coin never entered the picture; in this one, I'd been so well provided for that counting it had never been necessary.
Still, it seemed like something I ought to understand, so I summoned Lily, the head maid and keeper of the household.
"I'm sorry, but the castle doesn't have that kind of slack, Young Master."
Lily stood in the same camp as Thalia.
"You live on an annual stipend of 20,000 barts. After the servants' wages, the upkeep of the castle, essential expenses, and what we set aside in savings, there's hardly anything left over."
"Then withdraw the savings?"
A dark cloud settled over Lily's face.
"Yes, well... until quite recently, you did have savings, Young Master. Before the outer wall collapsed and the garden was split clean in half."
So I was the one who killed it.
"Sorry, Lily."
"Oh, it's quite all right. I simply must think of it all as an investment in your future."
Lily heaved a long sigh.
"I can scrape together 10,000 barts at most. I'll hand that over first, and see if I can't dig up a few more corners where money might be hiding."
Once Lily had gone, I put our heads back together with the knights.
"10,000 won't cut it, will it?"
"Not even close."
Thalia said, her tone perfectly level.
"Third-grade monsters rarely come onto the market at all. Lava spirits especially—their central core is prized as a source of mana, so the price is whatever the seller dares to ask."
"What does anyone need a source of mana for?"
"They eat it. As you did, Lord Iden."
Right... the people here weren't fools either. If your body could endure absorbing an energy source like that, the reward would be enormous.
"If we set the expected winning bid at 200,000, then 190,000 barts must come from somewhere else. That is a sum approaching ten times the castle's annual budget."
"Isn't there any way?"
Thalia's gaze drifted to the stack of invitations piled high on the desk.
"The option that comes to mind is appealing to families on friendly terms with you, Lord Iden. However, entangling yourself in debt with nobility may well breed fresh problems down the road."
I'd just as soon pass on that too. Borrowing money I couldn't repay and ending up led around by the nose was something I wanted to avoid at all costs.
"When is the auction?"
"The first of every month. Twenty days remain."
An awkward stretch of time—neither long nor short. I racked my brains with the two knights, but they were hired hands living paycheck to paycheck on the castle's wages; they had never handled a sum that large, let alone made one.
We found no clever answer, but one thing was certain: I could not let this chance slip away.
Not that I knew the first thing about economics. My lessons were history, general studies, etiquette, martial arts, and kingcraft—and not one of them had anything to do with money.
...Hold on. Wouldn't kingcraft be a different story?
"What kind of nonsense is that?"
Caroi heard out my troubles in the middle of his personal training on the practice yard.
"You want me to teach you just the money-making chapter of kingcraft?"
"Yep."
Smoke curled from the corners of the man's mouth—a sure sign that a lecture or a laugh was coming.
"What do you take kingcraft for? A sovereign is one who rules over others. A sovereign doesn't go groveling about trying to scrape together coin."
"But a king has a whole household hanging off him, doesn't he? To feed all those mouths, doesn't the land have to prosper first?"
"Then you make a man who knows how to make money your subordinate, and the matter settles itself."
He wasn't wrong. Anything I couldn't do myself, I could delegate to someone better. But given my precarious standing as the third son of a duke, I had my doubts that anyone talented enough to take capital and build a business would come serve under me.
"And if finding subordinates is the hard part?"
"Then you find your answer even in the hard part. That is, if you're truly the stuff of sovereigns."
Caroi's advice began with people and ended with people. If not for the twenty-day deadline, I might have taken his words to heart—but what I needed now wasn't long-term vision. It was a stopgap.
"Oh, right—Caroi, quit doing that."
"Doing what?"
I pointed at the training dummy he'd just smashed to splinters.
"Destroying property. We're broke, remember?"
"What? Hey—where did that even come from? You're a duke's son, aren't you?"
Back in the study, I circled the room round and round like a hamster on a wheel.
If Caroi was no help, and Vitten, Thalia, and Lily were no help either, then the only person left to find the answer was me. After tearing at my hair for a good while, I finally dredged up a scrap of memory from my past life.
Master and I had roamed the whole world without a single coin to our names. When night fell deep, we pillowed our heads on stones; when the sun came up, we dug wild greens to eat.
But it wasn't as though money was entirely unnecessary. Every now and then, when we passed through a great walled city, Master would engage in what he called "economic activity"—all so he could buy me sweets.
Grand as the term sounded, the activity itself was anything but. He would hang a single bolt of cloth from a bamboo pole, brush the words Purple Void Immortal Sage across it, and sell the medicines he made with his own hands. That was the whole enterprise.
'Old codger, setting up shop without paying your dues to the local powers!'
'Made a tidy profit, haven't you? Time to share the wealth with your less fortunate neighbors!'
Sooner or later, low-life thugs from gangs like the Hao Sect or the Black Slaughter Sect would come circling—but Master never once traded blows with the troublemakers who came walking up to him. He'd hand over every coin they demanded and simply chuckle. What remained was still plenty for snacks and a new set of clothes.
The reason he could afford to share his earnings with the "less fortunate neighbors" was purely that business was good. Medicine brewed by a Daoist who had ascended to the Spirit Transformation Realm—how could it not sell?
"Vitten!"
"Yes, my lord!"
Vitten came running, red beard streaming behind him.
"What if I used my Awoken Ability to make something useful? Wouldn't people pay good money for it?"
"Uh... well, that would depend on what you make, wouldn't it? Going by your Awoken Ability, it'd be something to do with fire and water..."
He crossed his arms and screwed up his face in thought.
"How about making ice and selling it? The weather's hot these days, no?"
"To earn 190,000 barts selling ice, you would have to freeze the sea."
"Or maybe fell some trees and char them into charcoal..."
"Achievable, if you burn the entire northern forest."
Thalia dispatched every idea Vitten produced the moment it left his mouth. Unable to watch any longer, I cut in.
"Forget fire and water for a second. Just assume I have the power to make anything at all."
"Hmm... the power to make anything, you say?"
"Yep."
"Then I'd simply mint barts out of thin air. No need to bother with any tiresome business venture."
"Something a little more plausible."
"Er... how about making a lava spirit core from scratch?"
"Under the assumption that's the very commodity we're trying to buy."
"Then Oradium. An endless supply of a metal worth more than gold."
"Something people actually use day to day."
"Then... hm. I've got nothing."
Vitten wilted the instant his ideas were swatted down one after another. This time it was Thalia who offered an opinion.
"If I possessed such an ability, I imagine I would sell potions."
"Potions?"
"Medicine that heals wounds when drunk or applied. It's what commoners rely on when they can't afford holy magic—and the market is flooded with fakes. It is not just once or twice that I've seen people who stake their lives in battle come to ruin over a bottle of counterfeit potion."
"How much does holy magic cost?"
"It varies with the patient's condition, but roughly 100 barts per treatment."
"Isn't that outrageously expensive?"
"Expensive, and therefore guaranteed to work. No matter how pitiful the story, they will never knock a single bart off the price—so commoners joke among themselves with the saying, 'no money, no life.'"
So holy magic was an astronomically expensive service. Which meant that Grandpa Colin, showering me with holy magic purely for his own amusement, must have looked to everyone else like a man flaunting his fortune.
"Then how much are potions?"
"It varies wildly with the ingredients. The cheap ones go for 1 bart; the expensive ones fetch more than 10. But whether they truly used proper ingredients—well, no one can say for certain."
Back when Master had done business in the walled cities, his competitors had never been fellow Daoists. They were the quacks hawking cure-alls.
Powdered tiger claw, they claimed. A vigor tonic blended with maiden's blood. Eat this, and the dead would walk back out of their graves. Nonsense, every claim, their efficacy dubious at best—yet people swallowed those tall tales whole.
Listening to all this, it seemed this world was no different. If anything, with Awoken Abilities in the picture, the swindlers here would run even more rampant.
"Are there potions that cure sickness, by any chance?"
"Disease potions draw the highest demand—and the highest number of frauds. You sword-swingers are built sturdy; you can grit your way through most wounds. But illness doesn't yield to grit. So a man lies alone, groaning, until he either buys some suspicious potion and drinks it, or empties his hidden savings and runs to the temple."
Vitten scratched his cheek.
"Actually, there was quite an uproar in the walled city recently over disease potions. The war's been driving one epidemic after another through the streets, and some swindler passed off monster dung as medicine and sold it by the cartload."
"Good."
My mind was made up.
"Let's sell medicine too."
"Don't tell me you can make potions as well, my lord?"
"Of course not. What I'm planning to make is something else entirely."
I lifted my head and gazed at the talisman pinned to the wall.