Naguchi Ryuji thought of himself as a normal high school student in most respects. He wasn’t at the top of the class in grades but he wasn’t close to the bottom either. He wasn’t the most athletic boy in his grade but he did his best and thought of himself as pretty good when it came to soccer. He didn’t have a girlfriend but he was friends with as many girls as guys. In almost every respect he was fairly average and there was nothing really different about him. That all changed in one night.
On that night he and all of his soccer teammates were having an in-school exhibition match between themselves, the B team, and the A team to decide who would represent their school. After losing the match they were headed home. That’s when everything changed. Naguchi Ryuji died that night saving a teammate from being hit by a car.
He met a Youma in a small office who told him he would be reincarnated in a new world with a choice of special ability. Between the epic weapon, epic magic, or epic finances he chose the third and received a coin pouch that would never run out of money, couldn’t be stolen, and had extra charisma to use it to the fullest. Then he was dropped at the edge of a forest near a large walled city.
He almost lost his second life moments after it started when he was attacked by a werewolf and had to run for his life. After entering the city, he decided to try his hand at adventuring and went to sign up with the mercenary’s guild. There he found he had no talent for any weapons but also that he was genuine nobility. A gold and silver pendant on his neck had all of his personal info in the form of school registration forms and the like stored as magic images in it. Fortunately, nobody but he could read any of it and they all assumed that it must have been hit by magic at some point and damaged.
After failing to enter the mercenary’s guild he made his way to a magic shop and used his knowledge of minerals to impress the wizard there into giving him an apprenticeship. He also began cultivating a relationship with the serving girl at the inn he was staying at. A beautiful human girl named Karen. He however was not reincarnated as a human but as a tall, handsome sun-elf.
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His appointment as the wizard’s apprentice sparked a lot of disbelief because the old dwarven wizard had refused every applicant for apprenticeship for fifty years. It also sparked jealousy and curiosity from a certain dark-elf who had been trying for three years to get an apprenticeship. Miyako, the dark-elf decided that she would find the sun-elf and get him to give her pointers on getting an apprenticeship. The problem was that instead of waiting at the wizard’s shop to catch him she tried to find him in the city and kept missing her chance.
After a couple days of living in the city, Ryuji got the chance to go on a date with Karen and the first stop was going to the moneychanger, a predecessor to banks. He had a huge pile of copper coins because that’s all he could pull out of his coin purse was a single copper coin at a time but without end. While changing in the pile of copper he began making plans to legitimize his apparent wealth. He would invest in several small struggling businesses and build them up to launder money through.
Over the next few days, he set his plan in motion and began investing in small street stalls and gave them all really low-interest rates. They were obviously suspicious but he had them write out the contracts claiming that it was a way for him to not be able to cheat them. In truth, he couldn’t read or write the local language yet. He then set in motion a plan to build a couple of the businesses up even more by buying them storefronts instead of lean-tos.
The first was a bakery, it went fairly smoothly and he was going to do the same with a leatherworking shop but got mixed up in a mess. A killer was on the loose in the city and Ryuji was the only one with the knowledge and skills to catch him. Drawing on knowledge gained from his love of detective shows, Ryuji was able to gain clues at the scene of the latest murder. He then used that knowledge to question the suspect and marked him as the killer. Using body language and tells he managed to find out where to get all the rest of the evidence needed. He then demonstrated the fingerprinting method for the first time ever to the astonished town guard and proved the killer’s guilt.
This and other feats of his earned the attention of the Duke of Lyrill, the walled city he was in. The duke awarded him all of the family assets of the merchant who turned out to be the killer. In total, he had gained six buildings for solving the crimes of the merchant. One of those buildings was unused and a bit dilapidated but rather large and that was where he settled a certain family of leatherworking cat beastfolk.