The day before that chilly morning, I met with a quite peculiar boy.

While the same could be said for myself, I wasn’t exactly sure why he struck me as odd. He had a normal upbringing, a normal appearance and a normal personality but something felt off about him. Nonetheless, I would be foolish to ignore his usefulness just because of some imaginary feeling I might have had.

Since I hadn’t given him instructions yet, he was not yet selling insurance for the business that I was starting. This was fine because there were still a few things that I needed to get done before I could give him the green light.

The first thing that comes to mind is trying to create some sort of an advertising campaign. Instead of him having to painstakingly inform every single person about how the insurance would work, it would be better if I somehow got the word out so that they would come to him. In addition to making his life way easier, it would also allow him to reach people that would not have heard about it otherwise.

So for this reason, I had to decide on a method of spreading the word by the end of the day. But I wasn’t really in a rush, so I decided to accomplish my daily tasks as usual. Making matches, writing manuscripts— nothing that wasn’t out of the ordinary.

After I finished with the work, my eyes wandered— looking for something to allow my eyes to refocus after spending a long time with them glued on the manuscript. I once again came across a familiar set of documents— the ones that came from the Zi.

Before Halel’s house burned down and all the events that followed it, I found the opportunity to break into the Zi’s place of residence and take important looking documents that I thought would prove helpful. After the Zi left the village, I told Qaton that I went back to their base of operations and found them lying around.

That was actually a lie since I actually acquired them rather hazardously, but it wasn’t something that he needed to know.

Anyway he told me that it wasn’t in a language that he understood, but rather it was probably written in the tongue that the Zi spoke. Since he couldn’t help, he suggested waiting until I could meet someone who could understand the text. It was a shame since I was certain that whatever was written on those five pieces of parchment could be interesting, but I was forced to search for someone who could understand what was written.

When I took a glance at the pages, I remembered the fliers and pamphlets of my old world and I wondered whether I could do something like that for my insurance business. I had adequate writing materials and papyrus to make them, so I thought that it might be possible. It seemed like a viable plan, until one thought shattered my hopes in an instant.

“Can people even read in this village?” I wondered.

After trying to recall any instance of some kind of text or document outside the smuggling ring, I was quickly hit with the realization that this town was probably illiterate. I hadn’t even seen Darat attempt to read in my few months with him, which meant that Qaton was probably the weird one for actually knowing how to read and write. Or perhaps Darat did know and I just hadn’t been with him long enough to see him do it.

Either way, spreading information via the written word is out. I counted myself lucky that I didn’t do something dumb like invent a printing press as my first business venture. It would be way too expensive and tedious, and no one could read anyway. It's not like I was about to reproduce a bible anytime soon

“Speaking of which, is there religion in this world?”

When I thought that, I knew one thing for certain.

I couldn’t concentrate at all.

While I was supposed to be thinking of a way to spread the knowledge, I instead wasted my time thinking of things that weren’t really useful. I probably spent all my mental energy working, and I thought a break would do me good.

I really was curious whether there was religion in this world.

In my four months, I hadn’t even heard of anything that resembled some sort of belief system. But that was probably due to how sheltered I’ve been, since I hadn’t been going outside and have been instead living a rather solitary life.

So I decided to ask Qaton about it, since he was probably available at this time. It was around noon after all, which was when he took a break from doing whatever job he did.

“Are there people who believe things that aren’t really there?” I asked,

I didn’t really have a word for religion ingrained in me, so I tried to explain it in a way that he would get even if it would probably offend a lot of the people in my old world.

“Religion*, you mean? The systems wherein people believe in some greater entity which could help them?”

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“That’s right.”

“Well ever since the Yad had some quarrel with the clergy* in this village and eventually kicked them out, people have started hiding their beliefs. But people believe in them, they just don’t do it publicly.”

“Why haven’t I seen Darat, you or anyone related to your group do anything remotely like that then?”

“Well most people just don’t believe in things like that anymore. Maybe a ***** hundred years ago, but times have changed. So only a few people ***** do things like that, unless they’re ******* with the clergy or religious leaders .”

I thought this world would be more religious, considering its level of technology.

“Is it really like that everywhere?

“Maybe not much in the kingdoms of Spania, but more in the west in places like the kingdoms of the Kelete and the Chati.”

“How many people believe in religion there?” I wondered.

“Well they believe in ******* different things, but share **** with the religion of the east.”he explained, “Though the kingdom of the Kelete has around the same number of clergy that we have people in this kingdom.” he said wryly.

“What are ****?” I asked.

“Well they’re the beings that you mentioned earlier, “gods” is the word you’re looking for,” he replied.

“I understand.”, I nodded my head, satisfied with his answer.

As I pondered on what I had just heard, one detail stood out to me. If I heard right, he said that the western kingdom of Kelete had around the same number of clergymen as we had people. That couldn’t be right, unless I had made a grave misunderstanding about a basic fact.

“How many people even live in this kingdom?” I asked Qaton.

“Maybe around thirty thousand,” he stated.

What the hell?

I had to preface this by saying that the word that he used for kings was “supet”, so I assumed that the population of the two kingdoms were the same. However, I had just come to realize that he used that term for all major political entities, so I truly didn’t know how truly large or small the two kingdoms were until I asked him for myself.

“How much land does their kingdom occupy?”

“An unfathomable amount of territory. One could walk from one end for months and still not reach the other side. So maybe their size is more than a hundred times the size of our kingdom.”

This really shook my understanding of what I knew because I had thought that we had a decently-sized kingdom but that was clearly not the case. However it could still be true if this new world was incredibly large alongside the kingdom that he had just mentioned.”

“So if this kingdom is so big, and ours is so small. How many kingdoms like ours are in Spania?”

“I don’t exactly remember the number, but it's a lot.“ he answered bluntly.

“Do you have a map or something like a drawing of the land that I could see?”

“A map that covers more than just a town? That'll be tricky because aside from local ones like the one the Yad gave you, those don’t really exist for common people like us.”

This was honestly a bit disappointing, but it was not entirely unexpected. Even on earth, maps were rare until more advanced methods of manufacturing them were introduced. So I asked him something that would give me a better understanding of scale that I could actually imagine.

“Alright, so how large is the entire kingdom in comparison to this village so I can have a mental image of it?”

This question seemed to take him a bit longer to process, as if he had never thought about it before. It took him a good bit of thinking before he was able to give me an answer.

“Around four hundred times larger?” he guessed, with an uncertain tone.

This was something I could work with since this village was around three kilometers by four kilometers. So if the kingdom was four times that then the whole state would be around four thousand eight-hundred kilometers, or three times the size of the Greater London area. That was quite a large swathe of land, but it was a lot smaller than I thought it was.

So if the other kingdom he mentioned, Kelete, was a hundred times larger than ours that would total to four hundred eighty thousand square kilometers. So the size of a country like Spain or Thailand, meaning that even though Qaton called them the same name, they were on vastly different levels of power and prestige.

This was a lot to process for one day, so I ended by thanking him to wrap up the conversation.

“Thank you for indulging my curiosity.”

“You’re welcome, it's good to see that you aren’t one to just stay mentally idle,” he said, smiling.

As I walked away from Qaton, I felt like I had a throbbing headache because of what he said. Although I was grateful to Qaton for enlightening me on things that were common knowledge to him, I went away from that with more questions than I had answers. I thought that maybe if I thought of something else, I wouldn’t feel as mentally exhausted as I did.

So in an attempt to get my mind off the mess that was geography, I tried thinking of ways to spread knowledge of insurance like I did earlier.

So anything writing was off the table due to the town’s illiteracy, but I thought many word of mouth marketing could do the trick.

How would I even go about that?

The last time that I had information that I wanted to spread, it was about the Zi’s involvement in the fires that I started. But I relegated that task to the Yad, so I didn’t have to make or spread the message myself.

This time the message was pretty simple, “Buy the insurance because it will save you if your house gets burned by the matches.” However I wasn’t sure how I was meant to spread that message through the right people since I didn’t have that many connections amongst the townsfolk. I also wanted to have Hasbel, the boy I hired, to meet with the potential clients in the main street so I had to make sure that they also knew of his presence there.

I wondered how I could solve this issue for a while, until I found a solution that had been practically staring me right in the face.

Shur.

As a merchant he would probably know which of his contacts could spread the message that I wanted the people to know. While I feared that I might have been relying on him a bit too much for operations that were meant to stay secret, I didn’t have much option in this case. So I just hoped that he would be trustworthy for as long as I dealt with him, and that he would see the benefit in remaining my ally.

So, I had another meeting with Shur. This one was somewhat similar to the last time I talked with him, so I just confirmed that he had connections with people that could spread the message I wanted and paid him four gold for making sure that people knew about the insurance and where to find Hasbel. I also told him that he could take one gold so that he didn’t get nothing for his troubles.

I also went to Hasbel’s house after that to make sure that he was aware of what was about to happen, and he was confident in his ability to make sure that people bought his insurance. I also had him write down the name of anyone who actually bought insurance with whatever writing utensils he had, so I would know who was covered. So after I made all the preparations, I had nothing to do but wait and hope that Hasbel did well in his first job as my employee.