Once the official had left Yui was still staring around in disbelief. She had already known, that this place was not part of another kingdom, but she had never thought about this problem before, as she didn't expect it to come up at all.
It was no surprise that in a world, where powerful cultivators would often found their own kingdoms or designate a region where they were the sole rulers, that the owner of the Earthly Treasures Pavilion would be seen as the ruler of a small kingdom.
This would obviously make her the sovereign of such a kingdom.
"Sis … how did I suddenly turn into a queen? I didn't think we had a ruler, or it might be you or something."
Before, she was acting as if this was unrelated to herself, as if she was just reading a script, or roleplaying another person in some theater play. Now however that she had some time to think about all these consequences, she was totally floored.
"Silly girl, you're my master, obviously you would be the ruler. Also, if we want to get technical, according to the definitions here, you would not be a queen."
Yui sighed. "Thank god. People calling me your Majesty and bowing and all that would totally make me uncomfortable. It's good that I am not a queen."
Tora's laughing made Yui turn around her head and give her a cautious look. Having experienced Tora's teasing for quite a while now, she knew that there had to be some hook somewhere that she didn't know about, before her sister even raised her voice.
"Countries here are ranked by their most powerful cultivators. As this would also apply to me, our Earthly Treasures Pavilion and the surrounding land would by definition not be a kingdom but an empire."
While Yui tried to make sense of this new tidbit of information, Tora's grin became more and more obvious.
"I guess this would make you an empress." Tora told her gleefully after a moment.
-
There were a lot more customers spread throughout the day, than there had ever been before, as the information about easy access to quality resources spread quickly.
Yui was mostly watching her sister build the new forge, while their customers were inside of the mine and forest.
A bit bored, she looked at all the various tools that she received earlier. Now that they could do something with the materials, she wanted to try herself at crafting as well.
Once all the customers had left and the shop was closed again, she picked up a pickaxe and some other mining gear and prepared herself to head to the mine as well.
"Sis I'm ready!" she called out to Tora, before she was transported from the pavilion to the mine.
Being the master of the Earthly Treasures Pavilion she could obviously go use the places to gather resources any time she wanted. With such a large-scale operation and the places also being extremely large, a single person more or less would hardly make a difference.
Creating something would require materials. The only easily available materials to her right now were spirit copper and various plants.
An alchemy workplace was planned, but the only thing that was completed currently, when it came to workstations, was the forge, therefore Yui decided to try working with metal first.
A few hours later all her work was rewarded with quite a bit of ore. Exceptional mining tools, an expansive step by step guide how to mine the spirit ore, as well as some tips and explanations from Tora helped a lot, even though she could still not compare to a professional miner.
"You should first get experience with smelting it and getting rid of impurities. We can also extract some other spirit minerals from this ore, that might become useful as well. Making items is still a bit much for you without any training, we can work on that later." Tora explained to her.
Yui was given a special method to use the forge and extract all the various materials. She expected there to be quite a lot more steps, but it seemed as if the forge would help with a lot of these tasks on its own.
The fire in the forge, was a special earth flame with an insanely high temperature, while the runes and inscriptions on the sides would separate the minerals in the ore on their own.
All Yui really had to do was throwing the clumps of raw ore into the forge and then arrange all the resulting materials depending on their composition.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
The liquid metals would be split into molds to make various small and large ingots, other useful minerals like salt or spirit materials were separated in various pouches. Everything that could not be used or was not valuable or useful in some way just remained inside the forge and the flame burned away the remains without leaving anything behind.
The young shopkeeper just decided what ingot size she would be using or how to separate the materials in the end.
Meanwhile, the whole forge area had moved into its own separate room, connected to the main shop room with an arched doorway, without a door. The inside of the pavilion with the extra space on the side for the forge now looked bigger than from the outside, which was still a perfect hexagon shape.
Already used to the strange way of the pavilion, Yui no longer worried about these things and just arranged some more display cases for the various ingots and spirit powders.
The pavilion seemed to ignore the local measurement systems and just used its own, a system that reminded Yui a lot of her own worlds metric system.
"Finally, a stop to this mess of various confusing units at least. Who would know how much a catty or a stone would be here anyways." she mumbled while placing the ingots that they would sell properly on the displays.
Yui had ingots about 10 kilogram in weight, smaller ingots with about 1 kilogram in weight and some powders that were measured in gram. Most of the material was spirit copper, while there was also some spirit nickel, spirit iron and some aluminum, but for now she decided to sell only the copper and nickel.
A catty was pretty much 500 gram in this world, with quite a bit of a variance between shops, this made it easy to calculate prices. She also added a little info on the side about the weight with various conversion options.
Todays Special Materials for sale:
[Pure Spirit Copper Ingot 10kg] – 200 Spirit Shards
[Pure Spirit Copper Ingot 1kg] – 20 Spirit Shards
[Pure Spirit Nickel Ingot 10kg] – 300 Spirit Shards
[Pure Spirit Nickel Ingot 1kg] – 30 Spirit Shards
"Do all normal metals have a spirit variant?" she asked Tora, after she had finished placing her new products.
"Not all of them are known by such a name, but pretty much all of them have a spirit variant yes. There is spirit tin, spirit iron and so on and so forth. It is more common for some of these to have certain names though and not all spirit metals are more useful than their regular variant."
"For example, people usually refer to spirit silver as mithril, spirit copper is also known as orichalcum and you will hardly find anyone who has ever heard of titanium in this realm, let alone spirit titanium, but its other name adamantium is a quite well-known term."
"All of it depends on the translation charm you haver though. If it's the same in your mind, then there should not be any issues, but it is probably easier to call it by your own worlds names and just adding spirit to it, rather than confusing yourself with a dozen special names for each metal."
"The displays will let the customers read the names they know, and you don't really have to worry about it right now, but if you ever plan on learning the languages yourself it might be useful to be aware of it."
"That's great. Then I don't have to worry about all these odd names. Ahh I wish I could already make some items. Just imagine if we add some pretty gems. How nice would the jewelry be?!"
Yui was excited for the future. They just started and there were so many things she wanted to do. Learning to work with metal, gathering herbs, learning about alchemy, one thing seemed more exciting than the other.
-
Another day passed by and after a good night's sleep, Yui decided to go shopping for some ingredients. While they had quite a few spirit herbs in their forest, they had no garden for vegetables and fruits, let alone a way to make bread.
Keeping the larder from becoming completely empty, she had to go out again, even if she preferred to keep hiding inside of the pavilion.
Walking along a small alleyway that no one else seemed to be using, Yui was trying her best to stay unnoticed. Her big plans of getting to the bakery without drawing much notice to herself had some unexpected side effects, however.
Right before she left the alleyway, she heard some shouting and loud noises. When she wanted to move around the corner to take a look what was going on, someone came crashing right into her, knocking her over the little hedge that separated the path from someone's vegetable garden.
She felt the ground below her slip away and a moment later she was already flat on the ground with a young man on top of her.
A moment of dizziness passed by, then another moment of just staring into his eyes. She initially did not move due to the shock, but by now she was just mesmerized by this person, whose face was right in front of her.
"Where did the thief go? Catch him!"
She could still hear the shouting and with the suddenly nervous look of the young man, she quickly realized that these people must be looking for him.
Both of them started to blush and were trying to get up again when they heard someone running into the alley. Instead of getting up, he pushed himself flat toward the ground once more, doing his best to hide behind the little hedge, but it was obvious to Yui that such a small obstacle would never be able to properly hide them once the people got closer.
The scenery changed all of a sudden and both Yui and the young man found themselves transported to a forest area.
Yui transported them to the Old Vine Forest and was aware of what was going on. The young man on the other hand was totally confused and while he was still having a hard time making sense of what was going on, Yui's face turned more and more red from embarrassment.
"Ah, excuse me ... could you perhaps … I mean … "
As if realizing for the first time, that there was still a girl, not just next to him, but right under him, he jumped up right away, leaving both of them in an awkward silence.
"I'm very sorry miss. I did not intend to drag you into any of this."
"Don't worry about it please, I did not mind, … I mean no … ah yes … it's no problem really."
Yui was already bad with people, having someone she considered cute run into her made all of it even worse. This day's trip into the city to get some breakfast and groceries started with more excitement than she had bargained for.