“I’m confused.” said Persy. “You said you started this clinic to help people, but now you are setting up a workshop to make aphrodisiacs?”
“Helping people costs money.” I said. I had realized that making magical viagra didn’t exactly fit with my plans of helping others, but also knew that the workshop could be a good way of having the rich pay to help the poor and outcast. “Whether I’m hoping to help people myself or hire people, it costs money to get the people what they need. If it didn’t then people would do it just for the good will. I plan on using the workshop to make aphrodisiacs, beauty products, and other things that the rich will be willing to pay for to make money to help out the people in the slums.”
“I suppose that makes sense. But if that’s the case, why not hire people from the slums or refugees to do the work?”
“If it was the kind of work that they could do, I probably would, but anyone from the slums with skills have usually moved out. And the skilled refugees usually work in the city and bring the money back to their families, so they are already employed, usually with the guilds. I can try to find the ones that aren’t, but it will take too long. Instead, I was thinking about paying the people to get certifications, then work for me under contract to pay me back.”
“Why not just pay for the education without asking for any form of repayment?”
This thought had also come to me in my walk back here, and my knowledge of psychology and politics from my last life had informed me that it would be a bad idea. “There are several reasons. The most obvious is that it would make what money I could raise disappear too quickly, thus severely limiting the number of people I could help. And if I didn’t place limits on such things, people would keep learning, being stuck in an infinite loop of learning new things but never contributing to society with their skills, thus becoming a further drain on resources.” It would be difficult to explain to her what a “professional student” was, but hopefully that would explain it well enough. “Secondly, people determine the value of something based on what it costs them and how useful it is. If I were to give people free education, asking nothing in return, that would devalue the education, and people would grow to expect it. Thirdly, giving out free education would upset the people that had to pay for their education. Imagine having to sacrifice to acquire something, then finding out that your neighbor was just given that thing. Yes, both of you had to work to learn it, but if you had to work an apprenticeship to learn Healing, then found out that people you already look down on got to learn it without having to work an apprenticeship, you would resent them even more.”
“I understand that part. One of the temp workers was complaining about how the rich, by which I assume they mean you, didn’t have to ‘really work to learn it’. They also kind of reminded me of how Taylor treated me before I saved his life, as they were mad that ‘a mere slave’ was able to easily gain access to knowledge they had to work to gain.”
In my past life, I knew this conversation would have angered people on at least one side of the political spectrum, but while I could sympathize, this society was far more unstable than where I used to live. I may not know who I was, but I know that we didn’t have slavery, and that refugees and the poor at least had some social safety nets and people standing up for them there, thus making them far more accepted by the majority of society. That and the fact that there was only one species of people on that world meant that, while the knowledge I gained from there was valuable, it couldn’t always be directly applied.
Persy went back to the Slave section of the clinic. Unfortunately, I couldn’t afford to fire the person that looked down on Persy and I, nor was I really sure I wanted to. They were too good of a healer, and their skills were in too short of a supply to get rid of them over something that hadn’t actually caused issues yet. Besides, the best way to show them that they were wrong would be to show them what we could accomplish and had accomplished.
With no customers in the Rich section, I started changing some formulas for my potions so that they could be manufactured at the workshop using excess essences which would normally be sold for a fraction of their true value. The formulas were purely theoretical for now, and I would need to test them once Reginald brought me the excess essences from the workshop, but I could at least come up with some theoretical ways to make these potions.
I also finished extracting the Anti-aging essence from the Silver Moon Tulip. It had a linked Regeneration essence, but that could easily be worked with to make the anti-aging effect fight the effects of aging more efficiently. Silver moon tulips cost a gold each, and only contained twelve to seventeen pedals each. As the amount needed to make an anti-aging potion was roughly equivalent to one petal, just that essence would cost one to two silvers per potion. This made it too risky to have anyone but an intermediate alchemist extract the essence. Sure, I could do it and only had basic certification, but I have specialized in extracting essences since I started learning about alchemy, as it was the only thing that made alchemy superior to the apothecary arts.
I actually had a legitimate patient that day, a knight that got injured in sparring session, but most were there for “relationship” issues. By the time Reginald brought the crates of excess essences at the end of the day, though, I had finished extracting all of the anti-aging essence from the Silver Moon Tulip, and had come up with several alternative formulas for each of the things I wanted to produce there. Those included the anti-aging potion, a female version of the aphrodisiac, fertility and infertility potions, and charisma potions. I would work on the more complex ones that helped you improve certain types of skills faster or would improve your stats later, after I had gotten my intermediate alchemist license. I was certain I would need to get it soon if I wanted to continue making high-value potions.
I tried several different formulas which only used the excess essences, and a few that used common essences that any alchemist could find easily. It was after dark before Persy came and knocked on the door. “We’re closed now. Do you want me to count the money?”
I shook my head. “No, I’ll do it. I need a distraction.” An hour later all of the money was in the safe and we left.
The next day was the Day of Coranya. Dedicated to the god of sleep, it was a day of rest for everyone, and even slaves and servants were usually given lighter work loads on that day of the week. This world also had seven day weeks, though their inner moon had a thirty five day orbit and the outer one had a forty two day orbit. I wasn’t sure if the days were as long as Earth’s days, but the year had twelve thirty five day months, each one dedicated to a different element. It was currently the last day of the month of Creation, just before the month of Water in which the rainy season would start. After that would come the month of Ice, then the month of Death. The clinic was mostly closed on Coranya, with only one person, generally Berry, in the Standard section of the office to deal with emergencies. If they needed my help, they could send a telepathic signal to me, though it probably would only send a simple concept due to how difficult it was for her to use.
I went with Persy down to the Slum area of the city. There was trash and human waste in the streets, which was leeching into the local water supply from damaged well linings. I sent Persy to all of the wells in town to start casting Disinfect on all of the water as I went around checking for damaged sewer lines and other ways sewage could get into the water table with my detection threads. A hundred years ago, when this part of the city was built, the masons and Earth mages had been careful to route all sewage out of the living areas of the city and to prevent it from contaminating the ground water, but that had broken down. To fix it would have cost the city over a thousand gold, so they had been ignoring the issue.
I doubted I would be able to do much more than temporarily patch things, but it should fix the problem well enough that the rain storms could clean the streets and not further pollute the water supply. Maybe by the month of Life, in the spring, I could raise enough money to have the situation properly fixed. I would probably want to have a serious business interest in the area, as without it the disdain the nobles and rich felt for the slum dwellers might be transferred to me as well. With a business interest, however, they will see it as just a way to try and help out my employees or to attract more talent.
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Every time my detection threads detected a crack or hole that the sewage might leak through, I used a bit of Geokinesis to solidify the sand or clay in the area into the rock, forming a temporary plug. By the end of the day, I had covered less than a quarter of the damaged areas, and only in one of the least damaged sections. I suspected that I would be working the rest of Water to finish the fixes unless I skipped work a few days to do this.
While we were working several people greeted us and thanked us for what we were doing. They even treated Persy with respect. I assume that was because they knew what it was like to be looked down on and used by others, and could somewhat sympathize with slaves. I made sure to bring my own field rations and eat them while working, as food was somewhat difficult to get in this area and of low quality. The few times the people tried to thank me with food I was able to honestly tell them that I wasn’t hungry.
When Persy rejoined me around sunset, we went to the mages guild in the nearby Crafter’s district. This was the same district where my workshop was, though it was closed today. There I hired four geomancers for two days each to go through the slums and do what I did that day, looking for and sealing any cracks that might let sewage into the water supply. I had to pay one and a half silver per day to hire them as temporary workers, but I explained to them that many of the slum dwellers that were coming to our clinic had illnesses that could come from contaminated water, and that I wanted to slow the infection rates and possibly stop the spread.
This was a good enough excuse to stop the rumors that I was trying to gaining the support of the poor for some nefarious purpose. When philanthropists in the past had tried something similar the rumors had ranged from being the head of the thieves guild to trying to raise an army for a rebellion. As the son of the count, I couldn’t afford to have such rumors be spread, so I told them a half truth. Ultimately, I wanted the people to be healthy, but I did also have a concern that the disease could spread from the slums into the rest of the city. Such a thing had happened a few years ago when one of the slum dwellers had contracted something similar to tuberculosis and had infected a blacksmith, who spread it to his apprentices and customers.
For the next two days the geomancers had sealed every crack they could find, and even had time to doublecheck their work. I suspected that they might have missed a few locations, but their work should at least slow things down.
Over the next week that theory turned out true, as the rates of infectious diseases from contaminated water plummeted. I made sure Persy and the other healers told everyone to boil any water they suspected of being contaminated, as that would kill any diseases in the water, but due to the cost of firewood, especially with winter soon starting, I suspected that most of them wouldn’t do so. Still, Persy or I would be going to the slums every Coranya for the rest of the month to double check that all of their wells were not contaminated.
At the end of the week Reginald brought me the totals for the workshop’s sales.
Cost of Equipment: 43 g
Wages: 58 s
Material cost, reagents: 37 g, 4 s
Material cost, bottles: 4 g, 1 s, 8 c
Potion sales, aphrodisiac: 75 g
Sales, excess essence: 3 g, 5s
Total costs: 87g, 3s, 8c
Total sales: 78g, 5s
Profits: -(8g, 17s, 4c)
At this rate we would lose money, but next month we shouldn’t have any equipment costs, thus causing us to earn around 34 gold in profit.
The next day Persy and I checked all of the wells in the slums, then went to the refugee sector to do the same. The refugee district only had a few wells, and over a thousand people, who mostly lived in tents. The few buildings were built from wood and mostly rotten, as this was a farming area at one point, and therefore only had barns and simple storage buildings. When the taxes within the city were increased a decade ago most of the farmers moved outside the city walls, abandoning the fields within the walls. This turned the former Farmer’s quarter into a large empty area where mostly homeless people and travelers camped until a few years ago when the southern border was invaded. Since then the refugees had been slowly integrating into the workers of the city, so there numbers were only half what they were when they arrived.
Only one of the wells appeared to be dangerous, as there was a dead rat rotting in it, but after we dug it out Persy was able to Sterilize the water. As much of this area was still viable farm area, I wrote down the plot number of one of the more fertile looking areas that didn’t have people living on it, as it was overgrown with weeds and briers, a plot that was against the inner wall. I would need to spray it down with an herbicide to use the soil, but the soil looked very dark and full of nutrients. The plot had once been attached to a set of stables that kept horses for the knights and traveling merchants, and so had been fertilized by horse droppings for years before being abandoned. In order to grow magical plants I would need to either mix manacite ore into the soil or place Cores within the field.
The only field that was already mixed with manacite was being used by the camp’s apothecary, an old elf woman that lived in a tent beside the field. She was one of the elves whose aging wasn’t slowed by much, so at around two hundred years old she looked like an eighty year old human. She wouldn’t part with any of her magical herbs, as they were too valuable to the community, but did agree to tend to the magic garden I was considering planting near the wall when the summer got here, assuming I wanted to go through with the idea.
Back in town I made a note in my office to visit the city land bureau and check on the cost of the plot. After checking that Berry was doing okay, we went home. Mother, Tanya, and Marya were having a tea party, and Persy and the servants were having a quilting circle while gossiping. I found Father and Sir Philip sitting in the library reading. “I don’t see you two in here much.”
“Well, there’s not much to do on Coranya.” said Father. “It’s either this or sleep all day.” Obviously he couldn’t do that, as people would just think he was being lazy.
“In that case, do you two want to play Conquest?” Conquest was a board game that had its rules literally set in stone eight thousand years ago when the central continent was controlled by the Precursor empire. Much like weight, material, and value ratios of the coins we used, the rules for its creation and play had been passed down since then. Imagine if someone combined Risk, Settlers of Catan, and a collectible card game and you would have something similar to Conquest. The only thing that kept such a strange combination from varying wildly from country to country was its historical nature, and that nature meant that everyone in the Northern and Southern countries, including the Golden Archipelago and even the Demon continent, played by the same rules with only an occasional house rule popping up.
To understand how it worked, the first thing you need to know is that every country controlled the production of all county tiles within its territory, from metal to stone to even the cheapest wood, and those tiles had to match borders with the surrounding ones. Every tile was marked with three pieces of information, the manufacture date, the resource it produced, and the population in thousands of people. The manufacture date was in case you wanted to set the game in a historical era. The resource it produced, either wood, food, iron, or mana, had to be present in that county in sufficient quantity to be a major export. To produce food, you have to have farm land. To produce wood, you have to have forests. To produce iron, you have to have iron mines. To produce mana, you have to have a manacite deposit. For this reason, Father’s county, the only silver tile he owned, had both mana and wood versions, though he preferred the mana version, as it was a rarer resource.
At the beginning of the game, all players claimed counties one at a time until all were claimed. There were four unit types, with each one costing five units of their controlling resources to produce. Soldiers used iron, mages used mana, archers used wood, and scouts used food. Each unit type had a special ability. Scouts could move two counties per turn, soldiers could reflip half of their failed coins when in combat, as they had armor, archers got a free roll at the beginning of every engagement, and mages could spend one mana per squadron to heal up to half their fallen troops after engagement.
For every tile you controlled, you got one unit of its resource per thousand people at the start of your turn, and could then raise up to one squadron per thousand subjects you had. Ten squadrons could be combined into a century, ten centuries into a millennium, and ten millenniums into a Legion. On your turn you can move each unit up to one tile, two for scouts, and if they are on a tile with an enemy, you can also attack. Each side traditionally flips one coin for each unit, and then loses a unit equal to the one the enemy rolled for after each stage of combat. In modern times we tend to roll dice instead of flip coins, with one to three being the same as tales, and four through six being the same as heads. You can attack as much as you want on your turn. At the end of your turn you and the person you attack must spend one resource of the units type for each squadron that participated in battle, thus making depleting the enemy’s resources a viable tactic, and making it worthwhile to not defend with your whole army.
“Conquest is a young man’s game.” replied Father, scratching his chin in thought. “I think I was twenty five when I last played it, though I still have my tiles and armies.”
“I was twenty three at the time, and I think the only reason you quit is because I kept defeating you.”
“I stopped playing with you because your tactics were dishonorable. Using archers to harass my troops isn’t an honorable way to play. However, if you promise not to use that tactic, I will play against you again.”
Sir Philip closed his book. “Very well, I shall defeat you using only scouts for offense this time just to prove that I am the better player.” Father nodded and got up to get the box of tiles from the storeroom.
“I would prefer a fourth player, though. More players make the game more fun.”
I nodded. “I’ll go see if Reginald wants to join us.” I responded. “You check on Sir Thomas, and see if he can drag himself away from his women long enough for a game.” Everyone, including his wife, knew that he usually spent his time off in bed for a very different reason than sleeping. Why she put up with it, I don’t know.