By the Grace of the Gods (LN) - Volume 5 - Chapter 28

Chapter 3 Episode 28: The Gift

After I deodorized the street and stores as much as possible, the victims thanked me and offered assorted goods. I accepted their offers, advertised my laundromat, and left town.

“Can you hold on a second?!” someone shouted right as I was about to exit the gate. It was the man with the smelly food who was being blamed for the incident earlier. He was riding a carriage and undergoing a security check at the gate. “Thank goodness I made it in time,” he said.

“Do you need something?” I asked.

“I wanted to thank you for before, but by the time I got back there, they said you had already left,” he explained. He, along with the other victims, had been temporarily taken to the guard station. Not because they were under arrest, of course, but so that they could be compensated for the damages they suffered. I cleaned the street while they were away and deodorized their stores in the order that they returned, but this man seemed to be last. As a result, we had apparently missed each other. “Oh, if you’re leaving through this gate too, would you like to travel with me? From the looks of it, you’re traveling by foot. You can ride with me, if you want.”

It would have been faster for me to travel on my own, but this sounded like an opportunity. If this was his way of thanking me, then I wanted to take him up on his offer.

■ ■ ■

“You’ve been a traveling merchant for twelve years, Mondo? You’re pretty much a veteran.”

“I don’t know if I’d go that far. Plenty of people have been at it for thirty, even forty years. I only just recently managed to start my own business, actually. And it’s in Reetil, if you know where that is. It’s a village near Lake Latoin.”

“I’ve never heard of a village called Reetil, but isn’t Lake Latoin the biggest lake in the country?” It was also the location of monsters I wanted to train against, so it was listed in the documents I received from the guild as well. There were many fishing villages around Lake Latoin, one of which was the home of an adventuring party I met before. “I know a village called Sikum that’s around there.”

“Sikum is on the opposite shore from Reetil. I generally go around the lake selling everyday necessities to small villages like that one.”

“I would’ve thought you sold food.”

“Because of the shappaya? That’s made in Reetil. My father was a fisherman there, and he told me that if I want to leave home rather than inherit the family business, I should at least find a way to sell this stuff and support the village. He foists it on me whenever I visit home. It just doesn’t sell, though. After it’s all washed and cooked, it doesn’t smell quite so bad. But it does still smell bad. It’s no surprise that nobody wants it, but it’s frustrating all the same.”

“I saw what happened at the Saionji Company.”

“Did you? If only they would’ve bought it, but the smell just drives everyone away. Oh well, I just have to keep trying. So which way are you headed, Ryoma?” Mondo asked. We saw a crossroads in the distance. Gimul was to the left. “I’m going right.”

“Then I’ll have to get off here.”

“You’re going left. Alright then,” he said, and the carriage stopped. He searched through the luggage and took out a tightly sealed barrel. “Take a barrel with you, if you’d like. It’s the least I can do to thank you. As long as you have this, most wild animals and monsters won’t even try to attack you. Especially the ones with strong noses.”

Getting a ride in his carriage was thanks enough for me, but he seemed to have nothing but good intentions with this offer, so I accepted his generosity. It couldn’t hurt to keep monsters away. This seemed to be a better application of this food than actually using it as food. Maybe that was why Mondo’s dad forced him to take it around with him.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Don’t mention it. Have a nice trip.”

I parted ways with Mondo, and after he was out of sight, I ran down the road to Gimul.

■ ■ ■

I picked some medicinal herbs on the way back, so I didn’t reach Gimul until after noon the next day. I went straight to my store to exchange information, and as usual, business was booming. But they did have two unusual reports to make. For one, Serge wanted to have a meeting with me.

“Well, of course, I don’t mind, but why?” I asked.

“He just said that it was about magic items,” Carme said, which I took to mean the music boxes. Maybe something happened with those, but that was something to think about later.

“I’ll meet with him as scheduled, then. What’s the other thing?”

“We received a thank-you letter and a gift from Fina, Jane, and Maria’s village,” Carme answered. I had never been sent a thank-you letter before, as far as I can remember. “They’ve been exchanging letters with people back home, it seems. The letter thanked you for treating the girls so well. The gift was left on the second floor.”

On the second floor, we had set up a room for temporarily storing laundry. We had gotten more efficient since we first opened and customers received their laundry right away, so the room was now extraneous, but it was fairly large. If they had to leave the gift there, it sounded like it was pretty big. Carme said he was going to go bring someone who could explain, so I decided to head up to the second floor ahead of him.

The second floor was packed with mysterious sacks, over twenty in all. I touched one, and it felt like it was full of some sort of grain, but based on the smell, I thought it might be sesame seeds. I cast Appraisal to find out.

Semesa Seeds

Highly oily and nutritious. These seeds are relatively simple to cultivate, but they have a peculiar aroma, which is further amplified when they are heated.

It turned out to be something like sesame seeds after all. Sesame seeds on Earth didn’t give off an aroma until they were roasted, but these were already awfully fragrant.

“Boss, I brought Jane,” Carme said as he arrived.

“Thank you. Jane, can you tell me why we were sent all this?”

“I’m sorry, Boss. We just sent letters to our parents saying how great this store is, and they just went and decided to do this. These bags are all filled with wheat and semesa, healthy crops. They wanted to thank you and the rest of the employees for everything, and they’re hoping that we keep working together,” Jane explained. She chose her words carefully out of, I assumed, respect for her parents. “It’s a bribe,” she then said, no longer choosing her words carefully at all. It’s nice that she was honest, I guess.

“Are these kinds of gifts common?”

“They’re given occasionally,” Carme explained. “Parents sent them in the hope that their children will get to work in a nice environment. Not all bosses are the best people, and when it comes to daughters in particular, parents inevitably get worried. If the child is already in a good environment, the parents ask that things continue as they are, and if not, then they send gifts in an attempt to curry favor. That’s most likely what this is about.”

“I think I get it. I’ve never been a parent, so I’m sure their feelings about their children are stronger than I could imagine. But I have to imagine they’re taking a hit by sending all this grain.”

Jane and the other girls from her village were only here because they needed the money in the first place. I didn’t know how her parents or village could have that much to spare. But when I asked Jane about that, she said that it wasn’t a burden to them at all. According to her, their village was northeast of Gimul, close to the national border, and they were a decently wealthy farming town until about a decade ago. Their main crops were wheat and potatoes, but they also grew semesa and vegetables. Most of the crops were sold to the country across the border, but when that country enacted a plan to develop farmland about ten years ago, their business gradually dwindled.

The man in charge of the development plan was the son of one of the younger children of the lord of this land, one who wouldn’t succeed the lord. With the lord’s help, he received plentiful funding and hired specialists who turned this project into a great success. This territory became famous for its grain production, but Jane’s village lost its customers and most of its income. The other villages in the area continued their relations with their old food sources and didn’t have the money to buy from new ones, so the village never found a new client to sell to. They were forced to send their healthy youths to work in bigger cities. But that was caused by their inability to sell crops, so food was the one thing they didn’t have to worry about.

“We still have enough crops to give as taxes and to eat, we just also have all the crops we can’t sell, so there’s more than we’ll ever need. Oh, but they’re high-quality crops, I guarantee it!” Jane exclaimed.

“Is there any way you could harvest less so you didn’t have excess crops that aren’t good for anything? It seems like sending people away to work in the cities wouldn’t leave enough farmers around to handle all of this anyway.”

“If we had crop failure one year without reserves on hand, there could be trouble. There are also a lot of people who want to protect the local farms that we’ve looked after for generations. We pool our money together to buy magic items and cows to use for farm labor. We can feed the excess wheat to the livestock, so that’s a convenient way to not let it go to waste. But they’re so serious about farming that we always end up with more than we need, sadly.”

It kind of started to sound like she was complaining. If that was all true, though, then I couldn’t just send the grain back.

“Got it,” I said. “But next time you contact your family, tell them that we don’t need gifts like this. It won’t change how I treat anyone. Personally, if they have anyone who’d be able to work, I’d rather they send new employees going forward.”

“Really?!”

I had no particular aversion to hiring someone because of their connections, and if I was going to open more branch stores, then I’d need more workers. This was something I’d have to discuss with Carme, but if it were just my decision, I’d take anyone who could do the work. I took great advantage of my connections with the duke’s family, the Morgan Trading Company, and the guildmasters, so I couldn’t blame anyone else for doing the same.

“Just remember, it has to be somebody who’ll do the work and won’t cause trouble,” I emphasized. “Don’t recommend somebody that’ll demand special treatment. And I don’t want any of you to give them special treatment just because they’re from your village, either. If they have some sort of special needs, then we can talk about accommodations, though.”

“Of course! That’s more than good enough!”

“Good. What do you think, Carme?”

“As long as they’re interviewed and closely supervised, I think it should be fine,” Carme said. “You’re right that we’ll need new employees at some point, and it will be easiest to hire people that someone here can vouch for.”

“Thank goodness. Oh, and as for these crops, can you have them assessed?”

“If you want to know approximately how much they’re worth, I’ve already written something up. If you want an exact value, I would recommend asking the person in charge of foodstuffs at the merchant’s guild.”

“I see. If you’ve already calculated the value, can you send that much money to the village? I feel like there are problems with accepting this much grain for nothing.”

“Understood, I’ll take care of it.”

“Hold on a second!” Jane cried. “You’re going to buy all of this? You shouldn’t have to do that! They’re the ones who decided to send it to you.”

“But it’d just go to waste if I sent it back, right? We can use it for food at the store; don’t worry about it,” I reassured her.

“Well, then at least buy it for as little as possible.”

“Then I’ll send them the cost price plus the shipping cost,” Carme said. “Is that fine with you two?”

“Fine with me,” I said.

“Then it’s fine with me too,” Jane agreed.

We accepted Carme’s compromise. Jane didn’t seem to fully agree with the idea, but muttered to herself and tried to get over it. Well, the most important thing was that her village found a new place to sell their grain.