I began the next day by thinking about what types of coins we would use in the economy, and how much one would be worth.

There’d be 4 types of coins in my empire, at least for now as I only had access to iron and copper.

There’d be Small Iron Coins, Big Iron Coins, and then Small and Big Copper Coins.

A Small Iron Coin would only weigh 100 grams, and 100 of them would be equal to 1 Big Iron Coin, which would be 1000 grams, and 100 of them would be equal to 1 Small Copper Coin which would be 100 grams, and 100 Small Copper Coins would be equal to 1 Big Copper Coin which would be 1000 grams.

I initially wanted to make copper coins less valuable than iron coins as iron is simply more useful than copper. But then I ran into an issue of inflation.

If, let’s say, I made the yearly salary 100 Big Iron, which would be 1000 Small Iron, or 1.000 Big Copper or 100.000 Small Copper.

Then a single person would need only 27-28 Small Copper a day to live and get luxuries for themselves.

But then we encounter a problem with the tools we use being the same value as someone’s yearly salary of 100 Big Iron coins weigh 1kg, which is the amount of iron we use for iron tools.

Firstly, I tried to fix this issue by reducing the amount of Big Iron Coins needed to live a year to 5, which meant a person would need only 12-13 coins a day to live, and they could save 5 Big Iron Coins a year.

But the problem with tools just being worth a lot would persist. So, I’d have to increase the minimum wage.

So, I’d have to give into inflation and increase the yearly wage to 1000 Big Iron a year, which would make it necessary for people to spend 273-274 Small Copper a day to live and get luxuries.

Which would make Small Copper Coins nearly valueless as you’d need to bring 27 Big Copper coins with you that weigh around 2.7 kg everywhere and every day.

To say that it’d be just stupid of me to do that would be an understatement... and not to forget that the ore necessary for these coins has to be actually mined, which takes a lot of manpower and time!

So, it is just not worth it to cause that much inflation, as I’d need to put a lot more people into the mines just to keep up with payments!

So, I had to begrudgingly set iron as the metal with less value, even though it is worth more in the society I’ve created in the last 3 years.

No matter though, one day nobles would come to existence, as I simply couldn’t control a kingdom in medieval times by myself, and they’d use more valuables metals like copper, silver, and gold as decorations and the market would—

Quest Rock And Stone completed! Rewards, 100 Exp + 1 Research Point have been granted in the Empire System!

“...Do I really need to tell everyone in this goddamn empire to not cut me off midsentence by completing quests?” I muttered to myself and decided to ignore it as I needed another research point to research stone housing, which would teach me how to make stone buildings.

Not that I doubted that I could come up with how to construct stone buildings myself though, as I definitely could.

I mean... how hard could they be? At least for the first stone house we made, a simple foundation would be enough for the weight, and as that simple stone house would qualify me to bypass the research, I’d be able to start making better stone buildings in no time!

And I’d rather use my research points on things I really had no clue how to do, like Paper Making and Magical Language, which are one of the only researches that I have no clue how to do!

Well... I have no clue how to do quite a few more researches, but right now, I believe that I can discover most of the researches on my research tab in time.

Which I have an abundance of.

So, I’ll focus on the esoteric, while letting the other researches stay as they are, until I actually need them.

After a bit more thinking on the economy, I decided to leave 100 Big Copper Coins as the minimum yearly salary, leaving a person 27-28 Small Iron Coins a day, and decided that a single meal should be worth 6 Small Iron Coins, leaving people with 9-100 Small Iron Coins after they ate 3 meals a day.

And about taxes... I wasn’t really sure if I should even have taxes.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

In medieval times on earth, Peasants didn’t really pay taxes to the king, but tithes to the church. Then the church would give a percentage of the tithes they got from the peasants to the king, and that was it.

Other than that, they also paid their lords money for living and working the land, but I wasn’t into serfdom so that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

And all the money I’d be giving someone would return to me one way or the other, so I wasn’t really worried about taxing them.

Though, I’d be taxing any nobility I had in the future, and then they’d probably tax their people, and the nobles under them, to alleviate some of the burden off of their shoulders.

Though I didn’t mind that, after all nothing is certain except death and taxes, so taxes were always bound to come upon the people with full force.

Though there is a little thing I... may need to fix with the yearly wage, and that is how much a farmer would be paid.

Afterall, a farmer could grow enough food to feed 5 people by themselves, and assuming that those 5 people ate 3 meals a day, the farmer would make 32.850 Small Iron Coins per year from just selling 1 crop cycle’s worth of food, or 32 Big Copper Coins in other words. And, if we assume the farmer plants another set of crops after the wheat is harvested, he gets another crop cycle in.

Which gets him 64 Big Copper Coins a year!

Of course, the farmer wouldn’t be able to sell all of his crops, as he’d at least have to take 6.570 Small Iron worth of food for himself, and more if he has a family to feed, but we can say confidently that even a farmer with a large family of 5 could make 32 Big Copper Coins a year!

That is... a lot more than the minimum wage I thought of, but also not an amount so large that I couldn’t keep paying the farmers for their food.

But this large surplus of money they had would probably propagate through the classes and equate to growth and opening of new businesses.

For the economic system to stabilize, we’d need a few years, but in a few years, we’d have a relatively wealthy lower and “middle” class, middle class is in quotation marks because the middle class is not really a middle class, and instead is made out of the smiths, carpenters, and whoever else makes amenities and sells them.

Of course, no one would be as rich as me, as I held the mines, but the common worker in the field, and the one in workshops making amenities and tools, wouldn’t worry about finding food for winter too much.

And if anyone was ever in need of food, I’d try to step forwards, hell, I may even open a food bank if it became a serious issue.

“Hmm... I should pay my soldiers at least a few dozen Big Copper Coins more than what they’d get by being a farmer, right?” I muttered to myself, as another issue hit my head.

Wages of government personnel.

For the lowest of the guards, which would be just militiamen, I’d probably pay them 100-15 Big Copper Coins a year, while allowing them to do other jobs, as they were just going to be militia.

They’d be the brunt of the defensive forces of the capital, and any village, town and city really, but they’d also be mostly untrained, so I don’t want to pay them a lot unnecessarily.

The 100-15 Big Copper would entice people, but it’d be worth it as they’d have to risk their lives in the case of a strong monster attack.

And I’d like to remind you that we’ve only encountered tier 2’s for now, which are just like normal animals, even a weak tier 3 would shred through dozens if not a hundred people before it could be stopped...

So yeah, we were probably going to lose a lot of villages to monsters if I didn’t have a strong military, and that’s where the next tier of military service would come.

Regulars. They’d be paid around 40-50 Big Copper a year, but they’d only be allowed to work in the army and would go on regular missions to hunt monsters, and would train the other times.

30-50 Big Copper Coins a year would also be the lowest wage in a government position as anything lower than that, and they might as well go back into the farms.

But most government positions, and most of the people in the army would be paid 40-50 Big Copper a year, as they’d be anything from suppliers to the troops to simple repairmen.

Then there’d be officers and lastly commanders but... I am not sure how I should separate the army into chunks.

I mean... I know that in modern days armies are separated into Squads of ten, then a company of a... hundred, I think?

But I doubt that my knowledge of modern military organization... or lack thereof would be useful for this world.

So, I am just going to separate every regular troop into squads, and designate one of them as the squad commander, and make them take control of the other 9.

And from there, I’ll leave it to Jonathanne and her squires for now as I need a year or so to get around to researching basic military tactics.

Though I’d doubt we’d have any more than 50 regulars in a few years, and maybe that much more in militias in the guards, so I won’t have to worry about rushing the tech that much.

But now, onto the wages of the squires and the knights... Honestly, I think the squires should be paid and be taken care of by the knights. After all, a knight chooses who their squires are, so it only makes sense for them to take care of their squires, right?

But I forced those 2 onto Jonathanne myself, so I am going to pay them a bit more than regulars, so 60-65 Big Copper Coins for them a year, and Knights should be paid a whopping 1000 Big Copper Coins a year!

And yes, I am going to be glazing my knights. Problem?

Anyways, though I’d of course be paying only the knights directly under me, if any nobles or village mayors decided to appoint a knight for some reason, I wouldn’t step in to cover the knight’s expenses for them.

And the same for the nobles themselves, I wouldn’t be paying them a penny other than the initial money I invested in the settlements they controlled, and the few government-controlled facilities in their lands, on the contrary, they’d be paying me taxes like I said before.

Of course, when I got ministers and party members, I’d be paying them a lot more than 1000 Big Copper Coins, but for a knight, that was an... acceptable number, at least for now.

I might have to increase the pay for the knights according to their missions, as a knight who sits back in the capitol training recruits shouldn’t be paid the same amount as the one going out of its way to hunt down dangerous monsters.

And a knight grandmaster should be paid more than any knight, or... maybe not, as knighthoods and brotherhoods may be given their own land to protect, and collect taxes from, making their entire orders pseudo nobles... but that’s for later.

For now, I need to go to the smelters, and order them to start minting coins, and after I get a couple dozen thousand coins, I should be good to start paying people with them.

But... what should go onto the coins?