novelraw Chapter 75: The Businesses Taking Shape
Chapter 75: The Businesses Taking Shape
Joji stood in the soap factory and watched the kobold workers go at their labor with brisk, eager hands. He had chosen kobolds for two simple reasons.
They were dirt cheap, costing him less than a quarter of what it took to hire a human, and their senses were sharp enough for finer work.
Some stood over the roses, sorting them by hand and lifting each bloom to their noses before tossing aside any flower that had begun to rot.
Three more batches lay before them, each of a different kind. Lavender. Chamomile. Oats. Each awaiting its turn.
Sid stood beside him, looking more lost than useful. He had only come to look around.
Business had its secrets, and he had learned long ago not to ask too many questions unless he wanted trouble finding him.
Even so, his eyes kept straying toward the women standing near the knight. Daisy, Lena, and Nike had come along as well, each of them wanting a look.
"Lil Sid, what are you looking at? Focus," Joji said.
"Y-yes. I am focused," Sid replied, though there was little heart in it.
A week ago, Joji had come here first and left Rizz to oversee the construction.
Back then, Sid’s opinion of the knight had dropped by a good margin, but the moment the donkey started talking, he realized he had judged too quickly.
Before long, he had even come to count the big creature as a friend.
Now Joji held out a poster Lena had made.
"We will want you to start recreating this advertised poster. Can you do it?" he said.
The image was hard to ignore. A woman with softly waved blonde brown hair, fair skin, and a flirtatious smile stood wrapped in a pale yellow towel.
Her bare shoulders showed above the cloth, her arms crossed in a coy pose.
She looked fresh, confident, and romantic.
Behind her stood Alaric with a rose clenched between his lips and a towel just as short.
When Alaric had first seen the poster, the man had threatened to kill himself on the spot, saying Joji had sullied him completely with such an explicit image.
Joji, being far too good at talking people into bad ideas, explained that it also served as recruitment for knights.
He pointed out Alaric’s proper build, his clean appearance, and the sort of sturdy hands that inspired trust.
After a long speech and much visible suffering, Alaric had agreed.
"Well, Sir Joji, this is quite an evocative image," Sid said. Then he leaned closer and lowered his voice. "Is your product meant for brothels?"
"It may be," Joji said. "Do not worry. You did a good job here, so I will give you some."
Joji then let his gaze sweep across the factory again and felt a deep, private satisfaction settle in his chest.
This was Rizz’s design made real. The walls did not stand fixed like ordinary ones. They could shift on wheeled frames, folding and turning on heavy door hinges so the workspace could be opened wide or narrowed as needed.
It was a simple kind of cleverness, but the sort that changed everything. Raw materials did not always arrive in the same quantity, and now the rooms could be made to suit the work instead of forcing the work to suit the room.
Then came the vats.
At a glance, they bordered on something almost modern.
The whole contraption ran on two floors.
On the upper level, ten workers had to set their shoulders against two long beams and shove in unison to turn the great mixer inside the vat.
Forged steel iron grilles enclosed the mechanism for safety, with a gated panel where the raw materials were fed in.
Below, a broad steel tray sat beneath the raised vat, resting on round stones. Ten men could push it forward or draw it back as one, increasing or lessening the heat without ever needing to move the vat itself.
Even the outlet had been made with care.
It required three different wrench heads to open, custom work Rizz had commissioned with the Everhart Estate blacksmith.
The bolt lock and gate mechanism were built to release slowly, controlled and deliberate, for when the soap was finally ready.
Joji crouched near it and began turning the wrenches himself, wanting to see the thing work with his own eyes.
The smoking liquid lard came pouring out, no longer carrying the heavy stink of rendered fat, but transformed by rose into something richer, cleaner.
The soap ran fast across the washed floor, spreading in a thick, fragrant flood.
The scent of rose filled the air as the oil smoked.
Beneath the stone, a small magic circle Daisy had laid was already drawing the heat from it.
The hot soap did not harden all at once. Instead, it began to set in a slow, controlled cool.
Sid was curious about it, but the sight pulled an older image from his mind.
To him, it looked too much like the sort of thing poured down from castle walls during a siege. He kept his mouth shut.
In his thoughts, the knight was crafting some terrible weapon for war, and the rose was only there for style.
Rizz came closer and pointed with a hoof.
"Just tap it a few times and the steel wires will stop clinging to the soap," he said, openly smug now that he had seen the satisfaction on Joji’s face.
Joji was already excited. It would still need time to cure if he wanted the soap to last, but that hardly mattered. This was a start.
"Come. Let me show you something," Rizz said.
What waited beyond was a smaller arrangement of tubes and vats.
"Well, I told Sid I can make alcohol too. You know, the kind we had back then. So I had him invest in this. We have a bar, right? I want to use it to buy meditation resources for myself."
Joji stared at the setup, impressed. Then a brief flash of interest lit his eyes.
"Of course. But if you want to go big, I can help. You make it, I distribute it. How does that sound? I’ll even put it in writing."
Rizz saw nothing wrong with that and gave a nod. He was Joji’s mount, after all.
Joji went on to the tavern next. This time, he wanted it to become something closer to a convenience shop, though not at the cost of its soul as a place for drink.
He had told Rizz the building would need two floors.
The first would remain for ale, wine, and the usual tavern trade.
The second would be set aside for goods sold in small amounts.
Dried sweets, local specialties, and pastries with a long shelf life.
He had already spoken it over with Walter, and the man had agreed.
The money, though, was Walter’s, not his. Joji was only giving suggestions.
If Walter or Daisy decided a plan would not work, then he would change it. Simple as that.
The reason for it seemed plain enough to him. Walter needed to make a clean name for himself.
Women were the first to spread good gossip in any town worth naming, and once that name took hold, it became easier to branch into other trades.
After that, a man needed more hard work than loud advertising. In any age, sweets were enough to make a woman smile, and a smile could do more for business than a signboard.
Then there was the alchemy lot. The witch had told Joji she would handle the supply side, and that what she needed from him was help getting the place established.
Walter had agreed to that as well. For now, the golems were raising the structure on their own, since the witch meant to lay a magical circle in the shop so her wares could be sold there without her needing to stand behind the counter herself.
The sight pleased Joji, but it also reminded him that he still had his twelve required tasks for the duchy to finish before the year was out.
In return, he drew a stipend of two hundred and fifty gold each month.
Even so, few knights were content with the minimum. Many took on twenty tasks a year, and some went as high as fifty.
There were reasons for it.
The first was name. A knight who wished to be known could not sit idle.
The second was fortune. Missions often came with unexpected gains.
Back with Fourteen, they had recovered five intact swords.
The workmanship on them had been fine, and fine steel did not sell cheap.
Alaric managed to sell the five salvageable blades for three thousand gold.
A thousand of that had gone to hiring the kobolds, and the same fund had covered the next round of work when Joji asked for fifty more laborers to be brought in.
That was why knights kept riding out.
And even that haul was on the smaller side.
In a bandit subjugation, a knight could often bring back five to ten thousand gold on average.
The one thing they did not readily sell was the information gathered on site.
They could have, if they had been desperate enough, but most were not so starved for coin that they would risk it.
Some truths, once loosed into the wrong hands, could wound the duchy itself.
At present, Alaric stood at the Mission Post among the officers.
For now, Joji had asked him to choose their work, since Alaric’s rank as an Elite Knight opened more doors than his own.
The criteria Joji gave him had been simple.
Nothing large scale. Nothing involving aid to other nobles, not yet.
Instead, Joji wanted monster subjugations and tax collection.
The reason was simple enough. Monster hunts would help Joji grow stronger.
Tax collection, on the other hand, could be easy work with a storage ring in hand and even a dungeon to put to use.
It had its own rewards as well, since local officials often offered gifts.
In Primeria, such gifts were not illegal. The visiting knights were still expected to carry out proper censure, and if a later inspection found that a gift had softened a knight’s heart too much, he could forget about remaining a knight at all.
Then Alaric spotted one assignment that gave him pause.
Beast Migration Season Protection.
It required a party of six, which made him doubt whether they could take it on, but he wrote it down all the same.
There was also a tax collection task in the same region, covering a dozen villages and five towns in the south, near the mountain border closest to Dominic Barony, one of Everhart’s allies.