The village chief immediately convened a village meeting.
“This is something the Lord is doing, so shouldn’t we all take part earnestly?”
“Of course, we should!”
“But can we really bring used things with us?”
“It says so clearly in the official notice.”
“Ooh....”
People who could read were rare in the village.
In smaller settlements, even the village chief did not know how to read, so the soldier who brought the official notice had to explain everything aloud one by one.
Fortunately, this village (it truly did not even have a name) had a village chief who had studied a little in his youth to become a lower-ranking official, so he could read and even calculate numbers fairly well.
“But the question is whether we have anything to bring.”
“If I’d known this would happen, I would’ve kept some hides and furs instead of selling everything.”
An unusually large man scratched the back of his head.
At least within this village, Aiden’s popularity was on par with a reasonably powerful god.
This was the north, where some children’s lifelong dream amounted to nothing more than “eating bread made from wheat flour to their heart’s content.”
For the heads of households who had, countless times in recent days, watched their children sleep soundly with their bellies full and round from eating, the newly arrived Lord was far better than gods who never answered no matter how desperately they prayed.
“Let’s think it over slowly.”
“Yes, Village Chief.”
“We’ll look around too!”
And so the villagers all firmly joined their wills together.
No matter what it took, they would roll up their sleeves and throw themselves into the work the Lord wished to do.
They looked needlessly solemn for the opening of a single flea market.
Even Aiden, had he seen it, would have waved his hands and said, “Ah, this isn’t that kind of event....”
However, similar scenes repeated in every village the soldiers reached with the official notices.
That was how important the matter of making a living was.
***
“......”
Meanwhile, when Aiden came out to the empty lot where the flea market would be held, he was rendered speechless.
“Explain.”
“Ah, you said we needed tables, did you not?”
“I did.”
In truth, it would have been fine to lay a single cloth on the bare ground and set up a rough stall.
However, he had no sense of when the weather would truly become warm.
Of course, the people of the lord’s castle, who were born and raised in the north, were already saying the wind had grown quite mild and were gradually dressing more lightly, but not Aiden.
“It’s still cold! Don’t put out the fireplace!”
How fiercely had he battled Jamie, who tried to put out the fireplace whenever he had the chance, asking whether it was not too hot?
So Aiden had said this.
It was too cruel to make people do business with only a cloth laid over ground that gave off cold air, so they should try to procure some tables.
But then,
“Jamie.”
“Yes.”
“Do those look like tables to you?”
Aiden looked, unable to hide his disbelief, at the logs piled high across the empty lot.
They were long, straight trees that grew naturally in the north.
He did not know their name, but at a glance, the dense wood did look suitable for making furniture.
The problem was,
“You’re going to make tables from scratch? Are you serious?”
Only a few days remained until the event. What the hell was this supposed to be?
“Ah, how long would that take? Just leave it to me!”
“?”
But Jamie was full of confidence.
Smiling good-naturedly, he spat once into his palm, then picked up the axe lying beside him.
‘That thing is actually used?’
It was so large and thick that an ordinary person like Aiden would not even dare think of lifting it, so he had assumed it was some sort of decoration. Apparently, it was an actual tool.
Indeed, his aide was suited to being the physical type rather than the brains type.
“Hup!”
Jamie raised the enormous axe high and snorted once. In time with that, his already thick arm muscles seemed to swell to twice their size.
CRASH!
Then came a sound that no axe swing should have been able to make.
CRAAAACK!
At the same time, the enormous tree, which two grown men would barely have been able to encircle with their arms stretched out, split apart with a sharp crack.
“See? If we make them like this, the tables will be done in no time! Haha!”
“......”
Aiden seriously reconsidered things.
Maybe he should not think so grandly about developing the north and whatnot. Perhaps he could just gather the grown men and roughly establish a lumber mill.
‘No, no. A twenty-first-century civilized man has been put in charge of administration, so what are eighth-century Vikings doing here?’
Thinking that one wrong move might make the entire north run on a plunder economy, Aiden desperately tried to shake off the thought that had surfaced in his mind.
CRASH!
CRACK!
CRASH!
CRAAAACK!
The more the sound of Jamie’s axe blows continued, the more that resolution wavered. But the north did not border another country, so even if they plundered, it would ultimately be another fief of the empire.
‘Then it’d be a punitive expedition.’
And what about him, who would be no different from the ringleader of the plunderers?
‘That’s a guillotine ending.’
No. Absolutely not.
CRASH!
SPLINTER!
“...Ha, shit.”
Today, what that damned aide was doing felt especially unsettling to Aiden.
“Bwahahaha!”
Whether he knew Aiden’s feelings or not, Jamie, finally releasing stress after a long while, merely burst into wild laughter.
“...Northerners need to release their strength like that once in a while. If they do not, sickness forms inside.”
Brikal, the head cook, who had approached at some point, spoke as though comforting the troubled Aiden.
“...Liar.”
“...The aide is a bit extreme, even among us.”
“But what brings you here?”
It was almost lunchtime.
In other words, it was Brikal’s busiest hour.
Only Aiden and his aide, Jamie, ate in the lord’s castle dining hall, but Brikal was the person in charge of all the meals for the servants inside the lord’s castle.
“Well, the castle workers asked me to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“They wanted to know whether they could open stalls at this flea market too.”
“The castle servants?”
At Aiden’s puzzled look, Brikal quickly added,
“They are not trying to smuggle the castle’s supplies outside. They simply wondered whether they could sell things that are no longer used, or things that were abandoned because they were damaged and unusable, and add the proceeds to the castle’s household.”
“Oho.”
The objects inside the lord’s castle could not, in principle, be removed without the acting lord’s permission.
However, the administrators who had been assigned here until now had all been worthless louts who treated the north itself as exile, so there was no way they had cared about the lord’s castle’s household.
“There is quite a lot piled up. To the eyes of the highborn, it may be nothing but odds and ends, but in a household with nothing, some of them might be rather desirable.”
“That sounds good. I was worried there might not be enough goods even though it’s called a market, so that’s a relief.”
“Then I will tell the workers.”
The north’s first market was slowly beginning to take shape.
CRASH!
CRACK!
“...Jamie, Jamie!”
“Bwahahahaha! ...Pardon? Did you call me, Administrator?”
“It’s troubling to watch, so stop that and help me. Leave that to the soldiers.”
“Still, I’m the best at axe work.”
“Soldiers can replace axe work, but an aide can’t be replaced.”
“......!”
At Aiden’s words, Jamie instantly made a moved expression, his lips jutting out as tears welled in his eyes.
Of course, Aiden immediately turned his head.
The sight of a man like a Viking warrior acting like an emotional teenager was frightening enough to appear in his dreams.
“Don’t get moved by strange things. I only stated the facts.”
“That makes it even more moving!”
“Ha, damn it.... Tsk! Now, now. Let’s focus on work. You see that area over there?”
“Ah, yes! You said not to set up stalls there because you had a separate use for it.”
“Yes. That area will become the food zone.”
“The food zone?”
“Can a market be without food? Right?”
“...Is that so?”
“That’s how it is. If you don’t understand, just memorize it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, you’re going to list the menu items that could go in there. Include the people in charge too. Around ten stalls? You know the items can’t overlap, right? The prices absolutely must not be expensive either.”
“We’ll need a standard, then. We’ll also have to check portion sizes.”
“Correct.”
“If possible, they should be things people are likely to enjoy, so a preference survey should come first. Since they will be stalls, food that is simple to make and easy to eat while walking around or outdoors should receive extra points.”
“That’s right.”
“We’ll need to consider profit distribution and safety issues too.”
“You know safety is especially important, right? If a fire starts, it’ll be a disaster.”
“We should first find out whether temporary fire pits can be made.”
At Jamie’s words, Aiden finally looked satisfied.
‘A guy who knows how to do this was rampaging with an axe earlier?’
He truly could not understand it.
In any case, it seemed he could set aside one worry regarding the food zone.
‘A market must have food.’
There was nothing that broke down the barriers in people’s hearts as easily as food.
When one’s stomach was full, one became gentler. That was an eternal truth.
There was a reason every kind of festival and event prepared a separate food zone.
‘Jamie seems like he’ll manage this well, so I’ll leave it to him.’
The empty lot where the event would be held was still a vast open field, but in Aiden’s eyes, he could almost see the crowd that would fill it on the day of the event.
Once people’s bellies were full, it was human nature to seek amusement.
Until now, the primary desire of filling their stomachs had taken precedence, so all other desires must have been pushed aside. But Aiden intended to somehow make this village into a place where people could live like human beings.
It was not because he had some grand sense of mission.
‘It’s fun.’
Aiden was an operations-simulation otaku who had even chosen his job as a civil servant for that reason.
The fact that something changed under his hands, then developed in a positive direction—that itself was his purpose and his delight.
“Heh heh heh heh....”
As the administrator looked around the land where the central operations tent would be set up, swallowing his saliva and grinning to himself, the workers unconsciously stepped backward.
‘He really is a good person....’
‘Why does he laugh like that every time there’s a lot of work?’
‘Let’s avoid him for now. Don’t make eye contact!’
The sight of workers built like descendants of Vikings sweating in fear before a single frail scholar with not a trace of muscle to be found was quite the spectacle.