“Forgive me! Truly, FORGIVE me!”
Cornelia — over for curry, as usual — bowed her head to us, deeply awkward about it.
“Oi oi, what’s this about?”
“The palm-top rabbits’ overhunting… couldst thou rein it in? Even a little?”
“Meaning?”
“As I have said before — the Forest of No Return is home to high-rank monsters.”
“Sure. Naturally.”
“To phrase it another way: it is a treasure-house of material resources.”
“Right — pelts and bones from the hunts sell for idiotic money, from what I’ve seen.”
“And those material resources are… my allowance, thou seest…”
“They’re also this household’s lifeline, mind you.”
Well — skip the imported alcohol and we’d manage on anything… but this world’s liquor is BAD.
Worse, everyone’s palates have refined to the point of rejecting elf and dwarf liquor outright.
—A genuinely alarming trend.
I once knew a family who adored 100-yen conveyor sushi — until the day they won the lottery and would only eat at PREMIUM conveyor sushi.
I mean… at least it still rotated. There’s something almost endearing in that.
Point is: my household of women is drifting toward full gourmet-snobbery, and the drift is confirmed.
“So what’s the actual situation, Cornelia?”
“Magic beasts turn over generations in one to two years, broadly. But culled at THIS rate…”
“The resource called ‘magic beasts’ stops reproducing. Got it.”
“Mm. On the current course, extinctions begin within a few years. That much is plain.”
“That IS a problem, though.”
The beet-sugar sales are profitable.
VERY profitable, in fact.
For ordinary living expenses, sugar alone would carry us comfortably, except—
—the Money-Grubbing God’s exchange rate is a war crime.
Sugar money alone won’t cover liquor. It barely covers SEASONING.
Remember the rate: one gold coin — worth ten thousand yen in this world — converts to ONE yen of Japanese product.
A million yen becomes one hundred. As business models go, it’s obscene.
“Alright — understood, Cornelia.”
“Mm. I say not STOP — merely… moderate. I do beg it of thee.”
Watching Cornelia head home, my head filled with a single looping thought: “so… now what?”
“Tatsuya-san? Why are you fiddling with your smartphone? Isn’t this usually nap time for you?”
Mayu — mid-ledger — put the question to me as I sprawled on the sofa during my afternoon break.
“Various developments occurred.”
“Ahh, the money problem?”
“So I’ve been thinking — we’re going to do alchemy.”
“Hm? Alchemy? Wasn’t that debunked on Earth AND in this world? Sure, it laid foundations for chemistry, but you can’t actually MAKE gold?”
I turned my phone’s search screen toward her.
Mayu looked at the screen, tilted her head… then caught my meaning and grinned.
“Ahh. I see… yeah, okay. That IS alchemy.”
“Right?”
And so I headed off to find Katia the dwarf, currently mid-expansion on the house.