By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 4 - Chapter 9

Chapter 3 Episode 9: Departure

~Ryoma’s Side~

After we enjoyed some delicious bread and charcoal-grilled meat, Carla called out to me.

“Boss, I’d like to discuss the matter of opening a second store.”

“What about it?”

“I’ll get straight to the point. Our sales and the treatment fees from the attackers have given us ample funds, so isn’t it about time to get to work on that?”

“Already? Shouldn’t we give the staff more time to learn how to run the business?”

“You have a point, but Caulkin’s team were once researchers, so their reading, writing, and math skills were fine from the start. Normally they would also have to learn to haggle with customers and negotiate with other companies, but we have no competition in this industry. Instead, Carme and I have prioritized teaching them how to handle problems as they arise. They’ve also learned to leave records in an account book, so now I believe that gaining experience on the job would be the quickest path forward.”

“So you don’t just want to open a branch store for more income? It could be used to train new management?”

“Correct. Of course, Carme or I will have to work there temporarily and offer guidance until it looks like they can handle the store on their own. There’s also one more thing,” Carla said and handed me a document. It contained a summary of all our income and expenditures thus far, but after that, there were predictions for our income and expenditures as well. The predictions looked like they had been rewritten multiple times, and they were listed across several pages. Judging by the ink and the texture of the paper, it seemed like this was written a while ago. I spread the word about my store all over the place when we first opened, presumably explaining the big difference between the predicted numbers and the actual numbers. They also calculated the predicted sales with a predicted number of customers, presumably based on the fluctuations in customers in other industries.

“Did you collect all this information for our future business plans?”

“You’re very perceptive. We’re currently the only business that provides laundry as our main service. This is a highly unusual case. There’s little information for us to go on, so we’ve had to change up our approach as we went along. We’ve had more sales and customers than predicted, and we want to ensure we take advantage of that. Our predictions were off in a good way, thankfully, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re left with little idea as to where to go from here. If we were to open another store from which to gather more information, we could make more accurate predictions to use for our business plans.”

Even before we hired Caulkin’s team, we had enough employees to run the store somehow. Everyone has gotten used to their jobs by this point too. And Caulkin’s team wouldn’t have to run everything right away, so this would be fine for their training. The attacks were also becoming less frequent, the store had guards, and I could go out by myself without any issues.

If we wanted this store to continue its operations into the future, it would also be good to have somewhere else to hold my increasing number of cleaner slimes. I would have loved to take all the excess slimes myself, but I didn’t know exactly how many slimes I could form a contract with. There was no limit in sight, but I didn’t know if that would last forever. Considering that, having more stores and more tamers would return some benefits aside from money. For those reasons, I did think that expanding this store into a full franchise would be a good idea. It would at least be better than needing to slaughter our extra cleaner slimes if we ended up with too much. That wasn’t likely to be a problem any time soon, but maybe I needed to take care of it. I still didn’t see myself as a business owner so much as one of the employees, but these challenges were going to arise whether I liked it or not. Our job was to deal with them before time was up, no matter what it took. Thankfully I had Carla and Carme to help me.

“Understood, then let’s work on opening a second store,” I said. “Should I be the one to decide on the city and secure the land to build it on?”

“Will you do that for us?”

Carla gave advice from experience and I offered my own ideas. We discussed it for a while until we reached an agreement.

“Thank you for understanding,” she said with a smile. “It’s a pleasure working with you.”

“You take care of the employees that’ll work at the branch store, then. I’ll go to the guild and ask them some questions.”

■ ■ ■

“Welcome,” the guildmaster said as I arrived.

“Thanks for the help, as always. I’d like to ask about opening a second store.”

“Finally up for it, are you? I’ve already got some cities to suggest. Derma, Azul, Sikum, Zillman, Lufes, and some others too.”

It was going to be our first branch store, so I wanted something close to Gimul so I could travel back and forth quickly.

“You’d like something nearby, I’m sure. I have some suggestions like that as well.”

She must have gotten to know me somewhat by this point.

“Thank you.”

“At any rate, the closest cities I would recommend are Shuchiro, Haken, and Lenaf. The closest of those would be Lenaf.”

“Can I buy land there?” I asked. The guildmaster grinned.

“I’ve got some ready for you. Nothing as big as your current store’s built on, though.”

The land she introduced me to was about half as large as what my first store had, but it was near the center of the city and came with a building that would be perfectly usable. I looked at the floor plan as Glissela told me about how it was once a general store and had a storage room as well, so it wouldn’t take long to remodel it for my purposes. Even if I wanted a different building, I could just tear this one down and construct something else in its place.

“This is near Pioro’s store. I had him check the building out, and he says it’s nice and sturdy. You’ll have to get the paperwork done with the guild in their town, though.”

“I see, thank you. I’ll buy this land, then.”

Thus, my new store was soon to be realized. Knowing experts and cooperators who I could trust made matters quick. I went straight back to my store and reported my discussion at the guild to Carla and Carme. After that, I told Caulkin’s team about the branch store and made them promise not to give my cleaner slimes to anyone else. I said the same thing when they made work contracts with me at the guild, but I reminded them just to be certain. They didn’t hesitate to tell me they understood.

Later that night, I left the store early and stopped by Serge’s store on the way home. I told him that I would be in Lenaf for a while to prepare for my second store’s opening, took tons of cloth, and left. Tomorrow I would have to start getting ready for the journey, but I wanted to create as many waterproof cloths as possible throughout my preparations so they wouldn’t run out of stock. Serge told me that they were producing an increasing number of products from the waterproof cloth and they were selling well, mainly among adventurers and traveling merchants. A lot of adventurers needed to travel light so they could move quickly, so wanted goods that were as lightweight as possible.

Most of the merchants who bought the waterproof cloth used carriages that didn’t have a roof or canopy, and they used the cloth to protect their wares from rain. Leather covers already existed, but ones large enough to cover a carriage were heavy, put a greater burden on the horses, and took up space, whereas the waterproof cloths reduced the weight. A heavier carriage made it harder to flee from monsters or thieves. Wearing out a horse too soon and needing to buy a new one would also significantly decrease profits. Not only that, but an unspoken understanding among merchants was that horses were their business partner, and those merchants who didn’t care for their horses were considered failures. The waterproof clothes took up little space, didn’t weigh much, and were remarkably effective as covers, so many merchants bought them as replacements. I decided to give my sticky slimes a lot of food so they would multiply faster. There would be a need to increase the production of waterproof cloth in the future, and I wanted to reduce the workload for individual slimes. I thought about it as I returned home.

■ ■ ■

Four days had passed since then. I had others look after the store as I made time for my own preparations. At the same time, we tried changing up our operations a bit. For one of the changes, I took this opening of a new store as an opportunity to make a company logo. It was a picture of a bag, bamboo, a slime, and the name Bamboo Forest. A craftsman who worked with Serge’s business created a branding iron for us, and we used it to make new bags adorned with the logo. The new store would use these bags from the start, whereas our store in Gimul would allow customers to exchange their old bags for the new ones.

Second, we decided that the store would have days off in the future. The employees took turns taking breaks up to this point, but that made it difficult for employees to meet up outside the store. The plan was to put a sign or something outside the store to inform customers that this change would be implemented in about a month. Throughout that month, we would also offer trade-ins for old bags.

Third, we were going to change how cleaner slimes were managed. Caulkin’s team were all going to the new store, so the store in Gimul would temporarily have no other tamers. That would mean I couldn’t go on any excursions, but that wouldn’t do. Maria, one of the village girls, actually spent the last two months learning taming magic. From what she told me, her grandmother was a magician. She died when Maria was young and never got the chance to teach her magic, but she had plenty of magical energy.

One day, after we had started talking more, I suggested that she try taming magic. After that, she trained under Lobelia on her days off until she could successfully form contracts with slimes. As such, I could leave slime management to Maria or Caulkin’s team in the future, and I could have them take in slimes after I couldn’t make contracts with anymore. With that said, I still wasn’t sure I had any limit on contracts. What I heard about the creator of taming magic, another traveler from Earth, was that she had no such limits, because that was her specialty. I decided that would be a good question to ask the gods later.

I went out to the front of the store, where my employees had all gathered to see me off. Once they wished me goodbye, I walked to the city gate, basking under the morning sun and the refreshing blue sky. Then I ran straight down the paved road. This would be my first solo journey since I came to this world.