“I said it’s a fig secret and you’re still trying to get it out of me? Wow.
Aggressive tactics.”
“I am a salesman,” Tonio said, laughing.
When I first met Tonio, I got quite an impression of tiredness from him, but lately I was getting the feeling that some of his spirit had returned. Maybe the fact that business was booming had caused self-confidence, a sense of fulfillment, and all those kinds of things to show on his face.
The redevelopment of this city was something Tonio had taken the opportunity to propose while the adventurers were still in one place after getting rid of that chimera. We had sent many parties of battle-hardened adventurers out on a large-scale sweep to remove all the dangers still hanging out in the ruins.
With Ethel’s support, we had performed maintenance on the river port, dismantled the ruined buildings for materials, and rebuilt houses.
Then, using this place as his base of operations, Tonio started a lumber business in the depths of Beast Woods, felling trees, building rafts, and sending them downstream. This was hugely successful. The development of the Whitesails area had left it in need of firewood for fuel and lumber for construction. Meanwhile, Beast Woods, which was located upstream, had a ruined port city that could be redeveloped, as well as an abundance of wood resources. Where there’s demand for something, you stand to make a big profit if you can find a method of supplying it.
That may seem obvious, but it was the way that Tonio reliably spotted those obvious opportunities and actually took advantage of them that defined his way of doing business.
As for me, after I killed the chimera, the areas around there had reached an easy consensus on making me a feudal lord, but it seemed that all they were expecting from me was the military might to guarantee the region’s safety and for me to use my title of paladin to stand in front of His Excellency and represent the area. It wasn’t as though there were a mountain of things for me to make decisions on, either. In fact, despite being a lord, I didn’t even have a house.
I’ll repeat that: I didn’t even have a house.
I thought of persuading some village to let me live with them, but my entry into the village would mean I would be forcing my way into the top of their social hierarchy. There would be people who wouldn’t be very happy about that, and others who would try to use me. Furthermore, I thought it was completely foreseeable that some people in the village would get the idea of using my existence to give themselves the diplomatic advantage in relations with other villages. So given all that friction I would probably cause, I was hesitant to ask to live in a village without careful thought.
There was the option of not settling anywhere and governing by traveling around my territory — I knew examples of that from my past life — but that method had all kinds of problems, so I wanted to avoid it if possible.
And so I decided to get on board with Tonio’s business. I invested, helped provide security, and while I was at it, I settled here in this newly formed city.
Together with Menel and some adventurers including Reystov, I spearheaded beast and demon hunts for the city’s security and provided medical treatment.
Sometimes I headed out to various places in Beast Woods by request and handled an assortment of minor issues by coordinating with His Excellency and the priests I had borrowed from Bishop Bagley, including Anna. And that was how I spent my days.
It was just about that time that it happened. A band of mountainfolk — that is, dwarves — came, hearing that the woods had become pretty safe. I was the first one to meet them, in the woods. They were covered in dirt and mud, and looked as though they had fought starvation and wild animals to get here and only barely made it. They seemed to be really struggling, so I provided them with food and temporary lodging, and tried to help them find jobs.
Dwarves were a race of craftsmen who were good with their hands, but these were drifters, and I wasn’t expecting a high level of specialized knowledge from them. But once we got talking, I found that many of them did have a surprising amount of knowledge in things like smithing, the manufacture of leather, woodworking, pottery, weaving, and carpentry. I asked them why on earth they had gone through so much just to come all the way here to the depths of Beast Woods, but they wouldn’t speak about it.
In any case, since they had skills like that, I wasn’t going to let their talents go to waste. I decided to invest most of the money I had on hand, which I’d gotten from exploring ruins and so on, into their craft. I offered to lend them the funds to build all kinds of facilities: a woodworking shop to process the logs after they’d been chopped down, a leather-processing facility for making products out of the skins of the beasts we hunted, a smithy, kilns for pottery and making charcoal, and more.
I intended that proposal to be taken at face value, but they goggled at me in surprise, and came to the negotiating table greatly fearful and wary of what kind of terrible interest and terms I would impose on them. And when I presented them with the interest and terms, they goggled at me again.
But for me at the time, it was a necessary decision. There are an unbelievable number of things needed to maintain and expand a newly created settlement: weavers, woodworkers, stonemasons, carpenters, blacksmiths, leatherworkers, charcoal burners, and much more besides. At the beginning, you can get by to a certain extent with makeshift purchases and amateur work, but before long, you need skilled professionals.
There weren’t very many craftsmen curious enough to come all the way to the back of Beast Woods when they already had marketable skills. So now that people who had the skills we so badly needed had made their own way to us, there was no way I could waste their potential on unskilled labor like loading and unloading wood. They were emphatically worth spending my money on.
However, simply lending a person money would just make them suspect that I had some underlying motive. That was particularly true for these dwarves, many of whom were acting very cautious. I could only guess what had happened to them while they had been out roaming the land. Several among them insisted that creating debts was a bad idea. I visited them several times, each time re-explaining my circumstances in the hope of winning their trust.
As I bowed my head to them for the nth time and told them we needed them, their leader, a man named Agnarr, spoke up. “I think,” he said, “if this man betrays us… none of us could be blamed for having believed him. What do you think, everyone?”
I remembered feeling very happy for those words.
Not long after, workshops of all kinds were built; the air filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, and looms; and fires burned in kilns.
Once workshops existed, people opened shops targeted at the people who worked there. As the list of items being shipped to Whitesails grew longer, there was also an increase in the number of ships coming and going along the big river. Of course, it was a waste for the ships to come back up the river without any cargo, so they started to return loaded with things they thought they could sell here, and after selling them, they went back down the river loaded with this city’s products.
Goods and money changed hands again and again, and this was accompanied by an influx of people. By now, this place that was once a half-submerged city was rapidly becoming a center for river trade. Ships carrying wood and leather goods cruised down the river with the logs, and ships loaded with products came from downstream, their sails swollen with the wind.
More and more houses were appearing each day, and the sounds of the craftmen’s hammers and saws never stopped until the sun went down. I felt quite happy about it all.