Wait, say that again?!"
A giant of a man, wearing a single white sheet over his shoulder and wrapped around his torso over a simple tunic and pants, complete with sandals, rose up and slammed his hands on the desk in front of him.
"She failed."
Sitting with a straight back, mostly unresponsive to the sudden outburst of the man across from him was a man wearing the same outfit. But this man man's sinewy figure caused himself to look shrunken in his loose outfit, compared to the large man who's pecks were barely contained in his own tight clothes.
"I gave you a champion! Just like you wanted! And she was even the best I could find on such short notice!"
"That was your best? Really?"
"You think I can just wave my hand and conjure a champion like it's just water? Even in all the words we receive souls from, one truly good only appears once every few decades! I did everything I could to provide you with the best champion available! What about you? Did you really supply her with everything she needed for the job?"
"No, sorry. I didn't mean to, umm...anyways, it doesn't matter."
"Doesn't matter?! This is our godhood we're risking here! How in the multiverse does it not matter?!"
"Sorry, right. It's not that it doesn't matter. It's that her failure was a good thing."
"How?"
The large man, to the unexpected response, forcibly held back his boiling anger. If he didn't, not even he knew how he would act at this point. At the very least, he himself wanted to avoid such an event.
"Since she failed, it means our target would have relaxed her guard."
Thankfully for the two men, the thin man's words managed to avoid making the large man's blood from boiling over.
"I see..."
But even then, it was just barely. The giant of a man was still furious, and he made no attempt to hide that fact.
"It's only unfortunate that she seemed to have betrayed us."
"What?!"
"Like I said, she seemed to have betrayed us. Maybe she realized that you were lying to her."
"She seemed a bit too stupid to notice. And excited when I sent her down."
"Maybe, but the target convinced her to quit. At least we got a decent recording."
The lean man touched a few buttons on a screen hovering in the air above his desk. In a few short moments the figure of a person in a pitch black hooded cloak appeared. The only clear thing about the figure was that she had silvery white hair draped over her left shoulder and tied with a pastel pink bow dangling at her thigh.
"Oh, very good. We know that she likes to wear black."
"Shut it."
The smaller man quickly rebuked his larger partner for his mocking tone and pressed a few more buttons. The blurry background quickly grew too light to distinguish any remaining details, but in turn the shadows under the figure's hood receded, revealing the face of an unmatched beauty.
"Looks like she maxed out the beauty slider. Maybe she's pretty vain?"
"Maybe, but I doubt she'd be too vain. Her soul is quite close to being fully matured."
"Guess you have a point."
Now that he could fully see the woman's face, the large man's anger had mostly passed, and instead his professionalism had taken over.
"I hope the reason why you're not so concerned about our failed assassin isn't because we finally have a picture of our target."
"No, of course not. But this picture makes things quite a bit easier. It'll allow the real assassins to get a positive ID on the target."
"Real assassins?!"
The large man couldn't help but yell at the information. He had not been aware that the champion he had gone through so much effort to provide wasn't the real attempt in the first place.
"That's right. The one I had you send was a dummy. Her job was only to make the target complacent and to get us information on her so the real assassins would have a better chance at doing their job."
"And?"
While he was still upset at being left in the dark, he knew his priorities and pushed down those feelings.
"Well, it doesn't look like she did a good job of making the target complacent. If anything, she might be even more cautious than before."
"Let me guess. She wasn't even aware we might be after her?"
"I can't say for sure, but the chances aren't zero."
The large man sighed, but things were too late for complaining about that.
"On the other hand, we have a lot of good information regarding her. Her appearance, a bit of her powers, and a not insignificant amount of location information."
"And, you think it's enough?"
"I think so. I think I know where she's based at."
"We knew that much beforehand!"
"No, we speculated. Now we can say with confidence."
"Fine. And?"
"And, I can send in the real assassins with this information. I'm making sure they're as ready as possible as well."
"Fine. Everything's on this. If it doesn't work, it's only a matter of time before we're both caught."
"I know. I'll make sure we don't get found out."
With those words, the thin man turned his focus back to the still image in front of him. The target, which had given him and his partner in crime no end of grief for simply existing.
===========================================================
I was in pure grief. It was like I existed for that purpose.
"Here's some more."
"Again?!"
A demon came in to the simple room I was currently occupying. There was only a desk and a bunch of boxes stacked on shelves. Each box was labelled and contained various sheets of wood or bark. Documents, or what passed for them in this world.
They were bulky, inconvenient, and just plain a pain to use, but parchment was way too expensive to use in the quantities we needed and there weren't any decent paper substitutes. I had tried my hand at making pulp paper on the side, but the faded brown cardboard wasn't exactly usable. The pulp was just too dark and would be a serious source of eye strain when the surface colour wasn't different enough from the ink used to write on it.
Without any bleach, there was no way to get this to work. There was the Kraft process, but setting up something like that would take a lot of work, which I didn't exactly have time for.
Fortunately ink wasn't an issue in itself, as charcoal ground up into a fine powder, then combined with vegetable oil made surprisingly good ink. And it was easy to mass produce to boot.
Combined with light coloured wood and bark, the end result was good enough for the short term, though I really hoped that we could find a better solution. This wasn't a status quo I would like to continue for years on end.
But what was making me miserable wasn't the quality of writing tools at my disposal, but what was written on these documents.
Requisition requests, compensation, and all the paperwork in between.
During the day, my life ended up being filled with that.
After the establishment of the Hourai Commonwealth, one of the most important projects that had been set up was reorganizing the system to gather materials from the dungeon.
The system itself was based on the adventurers' guild in the light lands.
From monster materials to food ingredients, all of it was requisitioned through this new organization, and all the hunters and gatherers worked by taking the requests posted by this group.
We ended up calling it the Hunter's Guild, as that was an apt description. And as it was both my idea and was the most familiar with its function, I was volunteered to lead the project. If I realized how busy managing it would become, I wouldn’t have accepted this position.
Nobody had to use the Hunter's Guild to get things from the dungeon, or to even gather their own materials, but the streamlining process of it made it so easy for people to get the materials they wanted as well as hunters to get jobs, that it quickly overshot the traditional way of doing things for most people.
There were still some stubborn holdouts that preferred the old way, but I wasn't concerned about them. If people wanted to hire specific people to get their things, they could do that on their own. That wasn't the purpose of the Hunter's Guild, nor did I want to take over those duties either.
The main reason being because we were swamped.
With two settlements being built up from almost nothing but an already existing large population, the sheer number of requests for materials was staggering. And the fact that the dark people naturally had a high hunter population in the first place, meant that the personnel to do the available jobs also existed, causing an incredibly fast turnaround for the requests.
This meant that the number of requests that came to the guild to be approved and posted, then completed and delivered was extremely high.
Added to the fact that the dark lands didn't really work on a monetary system of any kind and instead bartered for everything, while the fairies mostly only bartered favours between each other and only used money when dealing with outside groups, we had to build our own monetary system.
Or to be exact, I just copied the one used by the light lands as closely as I could. But since we didn't trade with them in the first place, combined with the fact that we needed to make our own coins, meant that the prices of things were probably wildly different from the outside world.
And that didn't take into consideration that the coins we minted were different as well. Copying existing coins didn't make much sense, so I instead fashioned a new set of moulds out of some adamantium ingots and hired a few artisans to smelt the coins for us.
It took some time to get the dark people to accept the idea of using coins, but once we convinced the people that it was just an easier way to deal with payments when an intermediary like the hunter's guild was involved, it ended up being accepted once they realized how complicated negotiating prices without a currency became.
Just by having hunters be able to take any request they wanted without having to negotiate what sort of product they would be compensated with meant that those two groups quickly got on board with the idea. Once things got that far, with the Hunter's Guild being responsible for nearly all of the materials being brought out of the dungeon, pretty much everyone else was forced to start using the coins as well.
Most complaints were dealt with once the idea of wages and payment for services, not just goods, were accepted.
So, with two buildings, each right beside one of the entrances of the dungeon, the Hunter's Guild was established as the main tool to extract the riches of the dungeon.
But at the same time, this sort of thing was way beyond most of the people who lived in either settlements.
To the dark people, physical writing was for preserving important moments of history or delivering messages long distance. Not for quickly disposable notes and requests. And obviously the fairies entirely did away with physical writing for anything but art, so the idea of a practical use for them was pretty alien. It was something other people did, not themselves.
And while I did get help, I had to teach them all everything about paperwork from the beginning. And even after they were trained, I had to oversee it all as letting them loose on such an important duty without any supervision was bound for trouble.
Which was quickly proven with all the errors in the paperwork I had been catching.
Really, it felt like my job was more about catching everyone's mistakes and lecturing them about what was wrong and how to do things better.
So, for the third time this day, one of the workers plopped down a crate full of bark sheets. Each one was a request application that needed to be approved or a completed one that needed to be confirmed on.
We had been operating for a few months already, yet it was still necessary for me to check every request both on the way in and out. The sheer number of errors, and ones that I can fix without even consulting the involved parties, were so numerous that it was depressing.
I had seriously considered countless ways to improve and streamline things, but as things stood, I didn't have the time to implement any of them. Not when every one involved either training the existing employees on something new or hiring new hands and training them.
Not when my current subordinates made as many mistakes as they did.
It was quite amazing for a society that had a hundred percent literacy rate to be completely inept at handling paperwork.
I didn't know if my starting standards were just too high in general or that the people I got were just too muscle headed. It could be both. I had enough evidence for both options after all.
Putting aside the pile of documents I was working on, I picked up the first sheet from the new pile. With deft movements of my aura, I marked all the mistakes I found and burned in etchings to correct them. Once I ran my eyes across the sheet a third time and felt confident there weren't any serious errors left, I stretched my aura over to a large box beside my desk and lifted up a brand new sheet of bark.
Once that was in my hand, I ran a finger across its surface as I stared at the original sheet. The scent of wood smoke rose up once again as I etched a copy of the document onto the new sheet, complete with all the corrections.
In just a couple of minutes, I had fixed all the mistakes in the document, and reformatted it into an easy to read format on a new sheet.
The old sheet was tossed over my shoulder and went into a massive garbage bin, which one of my subordinates would empty later on. Usually two or three times a day.
(I really need to get that printing press working.)
That one thing alone should cut down a third of the work I was doing in an instant, but the progress wasn't going too well. The main problem was that the bark sheets we were using were inconsistent when it came to all sorts of properties, from thickness, size, shape, and even its cut. Lots of the sheets had holes in them due to the knots the trees the came from having. Despite it all coming from the dungeon, waiting for the trees to regrow wasn't too feasible as we relied on using the near white inner layer on the paper thin bark of a particular type of tree.
It seemed to be a specific variety of birch tree.
The problem was that it was not a very common tree in the dungeon floors we had found it on as it stood, and it took a while to respawn. The quantity of paper that was being used, not just by the Hunter's Guild, but throughout both of the settlements, was huge.
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