I spent much of my own time through the following weeks mass producing more magic meters, stripping some gaudy gold pieces of decor from the throne room to use as base materials. Forming all the chains and clasps was too much additional work, as I needed to focus my MP on making the core artifact, but I created attachment points on the item so we could outsource the actual fasteners—chains or straps or custom methods of wearing the item—to various crafters.
By spring, I wanted to have at least one hundred units shipped to each of the walled cities’ Churches, so I had a lot to manufacture. I planned to continue to make more and send follow-up shipments, having the Church be the ongoing provider of the artifacts to their cities.
As I had told Seranedra, the plan was to provide these in order to support public healthcare by providing tools for the healers to better perform their jobs, both in terms of output and also safety. Like many occupations, Churches accepted ten year olds as apprentices, although it was very difficult to safely raise them into capable priests and priestesses. It required an initial magical education on the somewhat safer schools of 4-point and 5-point magic before they would start training in 6-point magic.
I was reasonably confident ten year olds had the capacity to learn percentages, and felt like that was around the time I must have been taught percentages and fractions in my first life. It might mean that the first year of an apprentice healer would be rather math-heavy, but math was an important life skill, in my opinion. I planned to also encourage the Churches to provide more training to children aged five to ten on Literacy and even mathematics—sadly, not a skill insofar as I understood it, just something one had to learn how to do—so that ten year olds were better primed to step into apprenticeships that required it.
The Church would provide a healer apprentice with a loaned magic meter to help expedite and improve magic education, which would stay on-site. Upon graduating their apprenticeship, it would become theirs in exchange for a five year contract to continue with the Church and provide healing as part of public healthcare, in addition to the usual expectations and benefits of a job with the Church.
Part of this contract would require a healer to provide a certain percent of their magic towards public healing either each day or a larger percent every few days, allowing some healers to recover for longer so they could provide healing for larger issues as needed. The Churches or healers themselves could work with potion makers to ensure that they were recovering enough MP to do their work.
Beyond that, if a healer wanted to leave with their magic meter and use their magic for other things, that was their prerogative. Traveling healers for hire would only benefit the people, and they were in no position to price gouge if the Church provided all the healing that they could for more reasonable prices. The opportunity this apprenticeship and short-term contract provided people would result in more priests and priestesses joining the Church and causing an increase in the capabilities of the Church to heal overall.
The price of healing would be scaled down dramatically, but the increase in the amount of healing that the Church could provide with insight into their magic as a resource and the positive change in the affordability of healing to the masses should allow the Church to bring in a comparable income overall, with early apprentices who had yet to grow enough to provide healing still continuing some of the other tasks the Churches provided, like simple childcare.
The magic meter artifacts would also be an avenue for income, to ensure the Church continued to be able to operate with all their expenses and bring revenue in for the Kingdom, which also had expenses. I could easily fashion two artifacts out of a gold coin worth of material, but they would be set to cost ten gold coins to purchase outright by mages who wanted them without joining the Church.
Ten gold was a very high price for the average person, but those that were educated as mages tended to come from wealthy families, and mages had a higher average income potential. Over time, they would likely start being passed down within families across the generations, but that was far into the future. The enchantment was actually fairly light and should easily run on simpler metals, so at some point in the future perhaps I would potentially create a budget option as well to level the playing field for poorer, upstart mages. The real reason I was sticking to gold was that I was keeping the manufacturing method a secret, due to the secrecy surrounding 3-point magic—and the potential it could have for abuse in the wrong hands—and I wanted the artifacts to outlast me and continue to benefit the world for a long, long time.
There was a risk that someday, someone would be willing to collect enough of the artifacts and cut into them until they managed to slice one so exactly that they could examine the actual engraving. I had made the actual engraving as shallow as I could and the whole artifact was quite thin when assembled, making perfectly slicing one open incredibly difficult, all in order to make that discovery relatively infeasible. It was not impossible that someone could one day access the source of the enchantment, but I deemed it really, really unlikely.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
I was sure the reality of the change would not happen as smoothly as the ideal, but it was positive progress towards a better future, for the abilities of healers and mages as well as their potential to provide their services to the people.
* * *
Spending so much time working on the artifacts for the Church let me to get into a rhythm which allowed my mind to wander to other organizational problems in the Kingdom. My work trying to improve public healthcare made me wonder if I should attempt to revolutionize public education, but as much as I valued education I conceded that it might not actually be the best thing for the Kingdom at that moment.
The Kingdom, overall, had a relatively small population. Looking at the census data from the Churches, and even trying to account for those that were missed by it, this corner of the world only appeared to have around half a million people, total. I had no idea if there were any more humans or other sapient beings living elsewhere, either in secret or just out of sight. It could be that we were the only pocket of civilization across the whole world.
Historical data suggested that these numbers had grown substantially since the unification of the Kingdom, which allowed grain farming to flourish significantly. Better healthcare should help reduce infant mortality, improving the well-being and happiness of the citizenry and the safety of the roads by focusing the army internally should result in less people dying out in the wilds, and properly integrating the Al’Tiolese and possibly even Velgein people into the Kingdom all should result in a bit of a population boom.
Maintaining the food supply was already an issue in the Kingdom, many poorer families being kept afloat purely on cheap grain and what they could grow themselves at home, but due to the concentration of people living within walled cities, garden space was limited, and in some cases nonexistent, as was the case in parts of Roko. Meat was supplied by butchers to those who could afford it, but they in turn were supplied by hunters.
I had no intention of creating modern animal agriculture to factory farm meat in this world. I had begun to raise dairy beasts, and that involved some culling of excess males and females who no longer produced which did bring in a small amount of meat to the community, but I made a point to keep the beasts as healthy and happy as possible and largely grazing on brush and pasture, only using grain to overwinter and supplement the diet of mothers by using it as a treat to ease the milking process.
Converting grain to meat through factory farming was inefficient. There was a loss in total calories through the conversion process, and people could eat grain just fine. Producing dairy and some meat on pasture was a luxury, but not an efficient use of space.
Space was not particularly an issue with vast wilds at the Kingdom’s disposal, but the wilds were also full of beasts which could provide meat. Hunters already provided this meat, but it was difficult and sometimes dangerous work. While it was an absolute necessity in settlements, it was also easier with the proximity to the wilds. The larger walled cities forced hunters to range further, making the turnaround more difficult, and there were comfortable jobs inside the cities that they could do instead.
Since space was not the issue, expanding the farms by training and leveraging more and stronger tamers was straightforward. Training up people who could use stronger beasts would allow farms to plow and seed more, and grow the number of fields. Evolved oxalire required a bronze rank tamer to safely control, and they were no good for pulling wagons—a moot point with tarands—but they could probably still plow, and do it faster and with less fatigue. By organizing taming, we could improve farming.
Except there were also people struggling in the cities to make ends meet. If they had the resources and organization, hunting could provide that, earning income while providing meat. More farms would push out the ranging area even further, which would make it harder to get started on one’s own, but so long as there were systems in place to help train and guide people—a bit like I had done with the Tamers Guild—there was a way to improve the lives of people without other options while also providing for all.
At the moment, hunters were all independent freelancers who provided meat but had to go about everything on their own, save for possibly learning from another hunter as an apprentice, with no structure or system in place to guide or help. They took all the risk solo, and if a hunter encountered a beast they could not deal with through their preferred method of hunting—like a bow hunter encountering a beast that was too fast, or too well armored—it was incredibly dangerous. Ultimately, the issue was organizational.
The Tamers Guild was only a partial solution. I was incredibly fond of what I had built, and it had done amazing work and would continue to do great things for the Kingdom, but it was only a proof of concept within a specific domain.
Once the Church had trained up priests and started to see them exiting their contracts, freelance healers would be on the rise. Continuing to hire and train new soldiers in the army was important to keeping the Kingdom as a whole safe, but maintaining a large standing army was problematic, so there would be reserves or retirees who were trained combatants and only limited numbers of guard positions in the walled cities to utilize their skills. Existing independent tamers and hunters could hugely benefit from grouping up with freelance healers and mages and fighters, forming parties to set out, bringing back forage and meat and scouting the wild and uncovering more secrets of this world.
Perhaps these parties could even handle the dungeons that threatened regions of the world. Perhaps they could deal with large threats, if they appeared, like the dracosaur my own party had handled before I left Freehold. There were any number of adventures that these parties could undertake, if only there were a guild to organize it all.
After all, I thought with a wide grin as I continued to plot for the future. What’s a fantasy world without an Adventurers Guild?
I just need the right people to run it.