If It Fails, I Can Just Quit
"F-finally… the paperwork is done…!"
"You've worked hard."
"Elise… do you think I could just cling to you for a second…?"
"…Excuse me?"
If my sister had been here, I would have latched onto her instead. Unfortunately, Ms. Elise was the only one around.
"Just kidding. Anyway, well… somehow we managed to get it all sorted, right?"
"We've only finished untangling the logistics so far."
A magic tool manufacturing division had been born.
Come to think of it, this was the first time our merchant group had ever produced anything this complicated. The Kissinger Merchant Group had only ever ground spent magic stones into powder, and even the barbed wire hadn't required any particularly advanced technology.
Magic tools, on the other hand, were the absolute pinnacle of this world's engineering. In my previous life, they would have been the equivalent of consumer electronics.
In short, this was a high-tech, capital-intensive industry.
"Investment in technological development must remain our top priority."
"Ah, yes."
"The magic tool industry ultimately comes down to who seizes the newest technology first. Even a tool that was once ubiquitous will vanish from the market the moment something better appears."
"Mm-hmm. I see."
"Furthermore, we are not the only ones who inherited the original group's technology and research facilities. The moment the Anti-Monopoly Act split the merchant group, everyone started from the same line. That means we need to pour aggressive investment into research right now and pull a full step ahead of the rest."
"Yes, yes."
And in a business like this, the single most important thing was, in the end, technological power. Fall behind in tech and you get weeded out of the market. History was full of merchant groups that once dominated an entire era only to vanish because they failed to adapt to the next mainstream technology.
Just like that company from my previous life that invented the world's first digital camera.
"So what you're saying is… we need research and development funding."
"Yes."
"Hmm."
From my perspective, the absolute best outcome would be for the division to slowly wither in the market until we could finally scrap it. That way my workload would shrink even a little. Ideally, we would burn through money and achieve absolutely nothing.
Ms. Elise is just too competent—that's the real problem.
But the merchant group we had acquired was already a market dominator. Even after the Anti-Monopoly Act carved it into competing pieces, its brand value and technological base remained overwhelming. Even if we invested the bare minimum and simply kept pace with the others, complete collapse was unlikely.
With Ms. Elise's abilities, she would never let a division already in our hands go under.
Which meant I would have to stir up chaos myself.
Simply ordering them not to invest a single coin in technology wouldn't work—the Ministry of Commerce was watching. So the only option left was to pour everything into the least profitable field possible…
"Hold on. Could you bring me every single research document from the lab?"
"Understood."
I decided to examine them one by one.
Sound magic tools, video magic tools, storage magic tools, detection magic tools—countless everyday devices. In every single field, the merchant group's laboratories held the empire's absolute best technology.
It was no longer exclusively ours, of course. Still, with proper investment they claimed they could improve the tech in no time—higher audio fidelity for sound tools, sharper resolution for video tools, and so on.
If improving the tech was that easy, why hadn't they done it already?
A flicker of doubt crossed my mind, but the answer was already sitting in the reports. The previous merchant group, having monopolized the market and locked competitors out with proprietary standards, had deliberately throttled the pace of development.
Since they already owned the monopoly, all they needed to care about was sales and marketing. After all, people had nothing else to buy.
New models had appeared on a regular schedule, but they were nothing more than minor redesigns with slightly bumped specs—just enough to recycle the existing production lines.
Absolute bastards.
I could finally understand why the Anti-Monopoly Act had slammed them so hard.
Anyway, so they're fully ready to develop new technology…
At this rate I was going to get stuck holding the bag again. I fretted for a moment—then one particular research proposal caught my eye.
Proposal for the Improvement of Communication Magic Tools
A rather plain title.
"Communication magic tools?"
"Ah. I believe the previous merchant group attempted this once and failed. Communication magic tools are so simple in function that the first-mover advantage becomes absolute. There's also the infrastructure issue."
"Ahh."
"From what I understand, it's an extremely difficult business to turn a profit relative to the investment required. Currently three merchant groups effectively monopolize the entire communication magic tool market. Since three of them are competing, they don't even fall under the Anti-Monopoly Act."
"An effective monopoly…"
"The barrier to new entry is simply too high."
A business where returns never match the investment. A business where the influence of the existing players who own the infrastructure is absolute. A market essentially locked down by a handful of merchant groups. A situation where new entrants are nearly impossible.
Hmm. Hmmm. Hmmmmm.
"We'll go with this."
"Pardon?"
"From now on, our merchant group will pour massive investment into communication magic tools. Redirect every researcher who was working on other magic tools into this project."
"…Are you truly certain?"
"Yes. I've got a good feeling about it."
Take every researcher who should have been improving our flagship products and throw them into a money pit. In other words, freeze all technological progress on our main lines.
That should accelerate our decline nicely.
A few merchant groups already monopolized the market? Perfect. No matter how much we invested in technology, if we could never even enter the market in the first place, the tech itself would be meaningless. Eventually we would end up selling it off for scrap.
The kind of thing big corporations do to smaller tech companies—whether in my previous life or this one—was always the same.
And I was more than happy to be on the receiving end of that classic move.
Like a complete sucker.
I am a sucker! Come fleece me dry!
Haha!
The magic tool development laboratory of the Cave Merchant Group.
Countless researchers who had once studied completely different devices were now gathered in one place, trading opinions. Well, "discussion" mostly meant grumbling while running mana-circuit simulations.
"My specialty is video magic tools—what exactly am I supposed to do here? Slap a video function onto a communication tool or something?"
"What's the point of putting video on a communication tool? The mana bandwidth is so limited you can't even send video any real distance."
"I used to lead the sound magic tool team… does a communication tool even need great audio quality? It would just increase the transmission load for no reason."
"Hmm. What do you think the Merchant Lord is actually after?"
"What would the Merchant Lord know about magic tools? He probably just thinks if you cram every cutting-edge technology into one device it'll magically become better."
"For someone with that mindset, the budget he handed us is awfully large, isn't it?"
"Having a huge budget doesn't mean better technology just pops into existence."
They ran simulation after simulation, but the limitations of mana-based communication remained painfully clear. Raising audio quality past a certain threshold, or transmitting video instead of voice, was simply impossible. The amount of data a communication mana stream could carry was fixed.
"Then why don't we just… not send it?"
"Huh? What do you mean, not send it?"
"Our merchant group's greatest strength has always been the ecosystem—magic tools that can interconnect with each other. So just think of it as integrating all of that into a single device."
"Integrating?"
"Yes. One magic tool that can take photos, play music, check maps… doesn't that sound nice?"
"Then it doesn't even need to be a communication tool, does it?"
"True, long-distance transmission is limited by the nature of communication mana, but over short distances it can handle surprisingly heavy data. If people could conveniently share photos and such, there would probably be decent demand."
"Hmm. That actually sounds pretty good."
And the moment one researcher completely flipped the perspective, new ideas poured out in a flood.
"Wait a second—then couldn't we physically link a long-distance information network through routers and connect that to short-range communication?"
"Ohh. That might actually work!"
"I'll run a simulation right now."
"But wouldn't the mana consumption be insane?"
"Everyone recharges magic stones these days, right? Use one while charging another—if it can last about eight hours at a stretch, that should be enough."
"The device itself is going to end up enormous, though."
"Miniaturization is our team's specialty."
"If it can handle video, music, maps, communication, and controls… couldn't we even put games on it?"
"Possible… in theory? But we couldn't make that ourselves."
"What if we let users add new functions themselves? Provide a simple development toolkit that runs inside the magic tool environment and let them share what they make…"
"…To pull all of that off we'd need professors from the Magic Tower."
"I heard the merchant group that just acquired our lab has a lot of joint projects with the Magic Tower."
"Hmm."
"The concept itself is surprisingly solid…"
"Well, the budget's huge, so why not give it a shot? It's not my money."
"If it flops, I can just quit~."
And so, something was beginning to take shape inside the laboratory.