—Afterward.
We dropped in on Marcus — Maria’s foster father.
Turns out Marcus, famous as the Adventurer King, also has his fingers in a great many pies.
Planning ahead for retirement, he’d used his savings to establish a full trading company.
So the fine print of the sugar-beet business got hammered out between Arisa and the Marcus Company’s executives.
The basic flow: we refine the beets into sugar and haul it to the Marcus Company.
They distribute it, and profits split fifty-fifty.
That WAS the deal, once, for about an hour — but between Arisa’s shameless haggling and Marcus being pathologically soft on anything Maria-adjacent, the final split landed at seventy-thirty. Our favor.
From the Marcus Company’s perspective, they’re flipping goods with an absurdly low cost basis from one hand to the other — so everyone’s genuinely happy, apparently.
By the look of it, this should generate around five hundred gold a month.
Beets are my fastest-growing cultivar, so roughly one production cycle per month is sustainable.
Expand the fields and a thousand-plus gold monthly is no fantasy at all.
At that scale I can’t run it alone, of course — I’d need to hire laborers from the elf settlement and elsewhere.
And so, business concluded, we hauled the Kaiser Dragon to the butcher.
For a monster this titanic, the deal with the guild was: we cover the transport they’d otherwise arrange, and in exchange we keep a share of the dragon meat, free.
“Heya, kids! Been a while!”
The same butcher who took the arc dragon off our hands last time.
Mid-fifties, built like a bridge support. Bandana, tank top, work trousers — the exact spirit-animal of a Japanese construction-site foreman, craftsman’s temperament included.
“Yeah — good to see you.”
“So what’s today? Death hawk? ‘Nother arc dragon? Hate to break it to ya, but THAT grade don’t surprise me anymo—”
I produced the Kaiser Dragon from the Item Box, and the butcher’s eyes flew wide open — and he fainted on the spot.