‘Now this is how personnel appointments should be done.’
Ahh, yes. This was it.
The corners of Aiden’s mouth trembled with joy.
What a long-awaited organizational restructuring proposal this was.
A team leader who knew how to do nothing but change his words every day and shout?
A section chief whose only work after coming to the office was wiping orchid leaves with a dry rag?
Or perhaps a bureau director whom no one could even tell was sitting in his office or not?
If someone hated working, was it not only natural that he should also give up his seat?
Aiden’s world had finally been set right.
Work should indeed be given to the people who wanted to work.
‘And it’s even better if that person is good at the work.’
Mm, mm.
Whether he looked at it from the front or the back, this was right.
Therefore, the correct answer was for him to serve as the head of all five departments.
“Um, Administrator.”
“What?”
“Then I....”
“You’re my aide.”
“To be precise, my title is administrative aide to the acting lord.”
“Then also concurrently serve as the aide to the heads of each department.”
“Pardon?”
“Why? Do you want me to write an official appointment notice?”
“......”
Unlike Aiden, who could not hide his joy at the fact that the work he could personally take charge of had increased, Jamie, an ordinary person, felt as though everything before his eyes had gone dark.
Even now, it was faster to count the days he did not work overtime. If he had to serve not only as administrative aide but also as aide to every department....
“That is....”
“Nominally and practically, you’d be the second-in-command of the north.”
A sweet temptation reached Jamie’s ears just as he was seriously considering resigning and changing professions to become a hunter.
Whip!
His head snapped up at once.
“Second-in-command...?”
“If I’m the only one above you, then you’re the second-in-command.”
“That was already the case before.”
“Which do you think gives you more authority, assisting the administrator or handling practical work as the aide of each department?”
“Well, that would....”
After turning it over in his head from every angle, Jamie finally reached a conclusion.
“Then should I start rounding up people to handle the practical work?”
He was a man with more lust for power than expected.
“Will there be any? We can’t pull away all the officials from the lord’s castle.”
“If we round up fellows who know letters and numbers and teach them diligently, I think it will work.”
“Where are these fellows who know letters and numbers?”
“......”
To repeat, this was the barren, utterly barren north.
It was a place where even finding a proper shop was difficult, so naturally, there was nothing that could be called a merchant company, and educated people were even rarer.
To be precise,
“Anyone who seems a little smart all runs away south....”
“When making a living is on the line, there is no helping it.”
Aiden had no particular intention of criticizing them.
That was how places where people lived worked.
If there were no jobs, one had to leave. What else could be done?
‘I’ll have to think about securing talent too.’
He could not know for certain, but if someone else had fallen into a similar situation, they might have felt a suffocating pressure.
Even if they tried to do something, the foundation was so weak and they had so little that even beginning would feel hopeless.
However, a flush began blooming on Aiden’s cheeks again.
‘Hah...!’
A pleasant tension wrapped around his entire body.
Even his toes tingled. It was thrilling.
‘The higher the difficulty, the more rewarding it is to clear.’
When playing tycoon games, Aiden had never once received help from cheat codes or editing programs.
***
A few days later.
“Now, now. This way! No, I told you to put the window on this side!”
“Ah, this side?”
“Yes. You don’t need a window there. How many times have I told you it connects to the external space for the stable and freight wagons?”
“I’m sorry!”
The flea market that had lasted for a full four days finally came to an end, and construction began immediately.
In truth, if Aiden had not stopped it, the flea market might easily have continued for a week.
The northerners’ sense of time was far more disorderly than expected, and their skill at quietly offering bribes to the soldiers blocking them was also outstanding, so Aiden had once again been forced to grab the back of his neck.
Fortunately, the level of the bribes they offered amounted only to leftover jerky, one glove that had lost its sheen, and a few unpackaged loaves of bread. One wrong move, and they might all have been headed to the dungeon.
“Now that we sent out the calendars, it should get a little better.”
“That remains to be seen.”
There was no way people who had lived that way all their lives would change so easily.
“At least when it comes to dates and time, don’t allow exceptions. If you start thinking, ‘This much is fine,’ or ‘This much should be all right,’ you’ll never establish discipline.”
“Yes.”
“How long will construction of the Administrative Welfare Office take?”
“For it to be properly completed, wouldn’t it take at least two months?”
“Too slow.”
“If we build it roughly, it won’t withstand the snow that piles up in winter.”
Jamie answered with uncompromising eyes.
“Even so, too slow is still too slow.”
But Aiden was not the sort to back down at that.
“We are gathering as many grown men as possible, but this is fundamentally a two-story building, and since various things are mixed into it, the construction difficulty is not low. Two months is already an extremely tight estimate.”
“Tsk. No choice, then. Still, complete at least the trading post connected to the Administrative Welfare Office first.”
“That alone will take two weeks....”
“Too slow! It must be completed before the next market opens. There’s no need to think grandly. It only needs to be good enough for us to handle work there. Can’t that be done somehow?”
“If it is only to that extent, I think it is possible.”
“Put the remaining departments in empty rooms inside the lord’s castle for now.”
“Then many people will be entering and leaving the lord’s castle.”
“Is there a problem with that?”
“Uh....”
Jamie was about to say, “Still, that would damage your authority, Administrator,” but he decided not to.
After all, his superior was someone who did not greatly cling to things like authority or honor in the first place.
“Still, it would be better for the flow of movement to be convenient, so keep them together. The western side of the first floor would be good.”
“Yes, I will arrange it that way.”
While the leadership (two people) was in the middle of talking as they watched the construction site, a guest arrived.
“I greet you, Administrator.”
It was Kalisa.
“I was late because I had to finish trading with the farthest village. I heard the market opened, so it is regrettable that I could not participate.”
She said that, but with the cold still wafting from her expression, she did not look like a regretful person at all.
“It seems your trade was successful. Congratulations.”
Regardless, Aiden smiled brightly and offered a handshake.
That was simply how the relationship between a civil servant and a private company representative worked.
Though both sides sought benefit from one another, from the perspective of a civil servant who did not accept bribes, whether the merchant liked him or disliked him was no problem at all. Thus, there was no reason to feel inferior or read her mood.
Someone who wanted nothing from you was this exhausting.
“...Thank you for looking at it favorably. However, our profit rate has decreased quite a bit. After all, from this year onward, we are in a cooperative relationship with public office.”
“Is profit rate the only measure of successful trade?”
Kalisa’s answer was sharp, but Aiden was not the sort to take the bait and say something like, “We appreciate your company’s cooperation.”
“From the looks of it, you seem to have urgently acquired more horses and wagons.”
Aiden jerked his chin toward the merchant company workers beyond Kalisa.
Indeed, it was just as he said.
Where Aiden pointed, there were several wagons that looked freshly prepared by the workers of Kalisa’s merchant company, still giving off the unmistakable impression of being new.
“I still do not know much about the power structure among the merchants who travel to and from the north, but I have heard that Jenkin’s merchant company is the largest.”
“......”
“Since public office removed that merchant company for you, the share that Jenkin should originally have taken must have been swept up by a capable merchant.”
When he said this much, Kalisa’s lips slowly curved upward.
Seeing that expression, Jamie, who stood behind Aiden, felt that the Kalisa he had seen for years seemed somewhat unfamiliar.
“If you had become a merchant, Administrator, you would have achieved great success.”
Aiden thought that merchants were the same here as they were there. Mixing up words like sales, profit, proceeds, and profit rate while speaking in whichever way benefited them seemed to be their passive skill.
“The volume from the places that had been trading steadily with Jenkin was quite large.”
“It seems you secured a considerable portion of it.”
“Thanks to you.”
Kalisa acknowledged it more readily than expected.
It was not that she had decided to become an honest merchant. Rather, the official who had been attached from the lord’s castle as an observer had recorded the scale of the transactions in detail, so she had likely judged that lying would only make her guilty of offending him.
“There are also quite a few items that need to be newly reported. In a few unregistered villages that Jenkin had all but monopolized, there were not only animals, but quite a number of monster corpses as well.”
“The tax is higher for monster byproducts. You know that, yes?”
“...Yes.”
Just because Kalisa had become somewhat friendlier did not mean Aiden’s principles had changed.
“With that amount....”
“According to our calculations, it is more than four times the tax we originally wrote down as the estimate.”
“Oho.”
“However, I believe this part may require some negotiation.”
“Why is that?”
“Monster byproducts are very different from those of ordinary beasts. Storage, transport, and processing are all difficult. There are not many places that handle them either.”
At Kalisa’s explanation, Aiden nodded silently, as though telling her to continue.
“I will speak frankly. For our merchant company, rather than paying taxes according to the current tax rate in the north, it would be better to treat these byproducts as items we did not acquire. When you adjusted the tax rates by item, it seems you used the capital as the standard, but should circumstances not differ by region?”
In other words, she wanted to negotiate the tax rates on those items.
If they failed to reach an agreement and Kalisa’s side gave up the monster byproducts, it was obvious that the lord’s castle’s tax revenue would also decrease greatly.
‘If we receive it as it is, it’s four times the original estimate.... But it seems we won’t be able to collect all of that.’
If they negotiated, he felt he could still get about twice the amount.
For the first time, Aiden found himself at a loss for words.
In truth, he had known this himself.
However, when adjusting taxes by item, he could not check each and every one individually. He had carefully examined only the animal hides and furs the merchants were expected to trade, and had applied the existing capital rates to the rest as they were.
It was a problem created by a lack of both time and manpower.
But wait.
Something was a little strange.
A merchant operating a small traveling business on the outskirts of the empire had memorized the capital’s tax rates for monster byproducts, items she did not even handle?
This was not the twenty-first century, where all kinds of information popped up with a single search. Was such a thing possible?
‘Even the merchants were ignorant of item-specific tax rates.’
Because the tax rates in the capital and each fief differed from one another, even merchants did not pay much attention to item-specific tax rates unless they concerned their own bases and main products.
“Have you memorized the capital’s item-specific tax rates?”
At that, Kalisa was visibly shaken.
Her face went pale, just as it had when she was caught with the map marked with unregistered villages.
Aiden was certain.
This reaction was connected to her personal background.
Thinking about it, it was strange.
‘She is too young to have risen to the position of merchant company head as a woman. Yet the loyalty of her workers seems very high. She has an excellent understanding of the capital’s items and tax rates. Above all, judging by her usual bearing and manner of speech, she clearly seems like the child of a well-to-do house.’
No matter how barren the frontier was, it was not easy for a merchant leading a small-to-medium merchant company on the borderlands to remain neither servile nor intimidated before the acting lord, who controlled military authority.
Even in the twenty-first century, that would be true. And this was a world where the status system was alive and glaring with both eyes.
‘No matter how I look at it, she seems like the child of a well-to-do house.’
However, such a household would not have allowed its precious daughter to lead workers alone and trade in the dangerous north, especially with unregistered people, which could become treason if anything went wrong.
‘Then the most likely possibility is still....’
Aiden smiled gently and opened his mouth.
“Restoring your family? Or revenge?”
“...What do you mean?”
Kalisa’s burning red curls looked even deeper today.
“Ah, or is it both?”
“...I do not know what you are talking about.”
Her answer came one beat late, and her voice was cracked with tension.
Maintaining a poker face after being struck at the heart was harder than one might think, but how could she be that bad at it?
‘You shouldn’t gamble either.’
In an instant, Kalisa had been treated as being on the same level as Jamie.