Wriggle wriggle.
Perhaps the “Sense-O-Feel Ring: Intelligence, Resistance, Dexterity +30%. Sensory Perception Amplification (large)”, the ring I’d almost unceremoniously dumped when I’d done a double take and read the name properly, was to be thanked for my greater control and accuracy over my Magic Hands. My production output and quality had made a noticeable jump. I was whizzing through products now. Exciting stuff! I’d have to run no end of tests on this hypothesis this evening. Yes, I’d have to get all handsy—I mean, Magic Handsy.
“Look at you go, whiz kid! This is top-notch stuff. Everyone’s going to want it when they see it, and then there’ll be no end to the development of new goods. Oh, before I forget—I’ve had an influx of furniture orders recently. Be a dear and whip those up for me, will you? Lots of cute girls are buying them up. Make ’em at cost and then beat it. I’ve got more orders for you to work on at home. The Kingdom branch is outta stock too.”
“Didn’t I just top them up when I was there? Yeah, I totally did. I remember the shop girl was totally in manager mode. The look in her eyes terrifies me to this day.”
More and more people were coming to the city from the villages to do their shopping. Magical farming tools mechanized the tedious task of clearing land, and all this work to cut back the forest had opened up huge swaths of fresh farmland. I’d invested in the magical farm tool industry, convinced that was the next big money-making opportunity, and placed as many speculations on future vegetables crops as I could. Funny how, for all the money I seemed to have, I’d wound up fresh out once more. Turned out there were a lot of veggies to buy.
“And I hear my natural fertilizer plans are going well. That’s sure to be a big money-maker too—and yet again, I wonder why the nerds insist the Norfolk crop rotation system is so essential.”
Wiggle wiggle.
“Your guess is as good as mine, Slimey. What’s the big obsession? I ask ’em, and all they say is that every isekai has to have a crop-rotation scene. I’m not gonna argue, though. So long as we have plenty of folks farming, I’m happy.”
Bounce bounce.
Livestock was the bigger issue, really. Cows and sheep were a lot harder to pull out of thin air. Immigration could make the human population boom, but cattle weren’t exactly lining up at the border to go through customs. I would’ve shipped in more myself, but the Kingdom didn’t have enough to meet demand. I needed to do something, though. Meat prices were starting to soar.
“Why is everyone and their mother ordering shelving units? Wardrobes, kitchen cupboards, the works… Ah, I see. This is what happens when you go from owning nothing to owning lots of things.”
Used to be, folks on the frontier could work from dawn to dusk and still barely scrape by. When there was too little to eat, basic survival was the greatest luxury anyone could afford. No one had anything but the bare essentials. Why have a shelf with nothing to put on it? Why craft anything but the absolute necessities?
“Industrialization can’t come fast enough. I just wanna be free of this endless freelance grind! A second of my teenage nightlife is worth more than an old man’s whole lifetime! Give me my nights and evenings free, please!”
Bobble bobble.
Furniture filled once-empty houses. This visible marker of success was a symbol of the frontier’s new golden age.
“The blacksmith gave me a huge list of orders too, but I’ve got plenty of loot from the Theocracy I can pawn off on him. Any extra can be given to the Adventurers’ Guild for their rental service. And if I still have spares, I can always cut them down to size and hand ’em out to the local kiddos.”
Jiggle jiggle.
There was no end to my workload, but if not for the work, then there would have been a very definite end to my money. I needed the work! Sleeping Beauty was much too expensive of a servant otherwise!
I saw her now, she and the rest of the gang, visible as a sentient mountain of shopping bags staggering down the city’s main streets. Clothes, accessories, and hair care products bulged from every bag. There were more than enough skirts and scarves and shirts and socks to go around. That, and smiles. Every exhausted yet happy girl had a smile just peeking out above her mound of purchases. They marched through the streets with their spoils of war proudly on display. You know you can put all that in your item bags…right?
“Whoo! We have officially shopped till we dropped.”
“Yup. I did a whole half months’ worth of shopping. I have graduated retail therapy with a clean bill of health.”
“I can just barely hear the weeping of our resident teenage manufacturing line over the sound of my non-stop impulse purchases.”
“Well, who can blame us? He pops out cute items one after another. We need to buy them all.”
A good 90 percent of the items in those shopping bags were made by yours truly. I was in the black, and the girls were teetering on the cusp of bankruptcy.
Sleeping Beauty had been shy and sheepish at the start of the shopping spree, but then she’d said, “Can I buy, all things, Miss Armor Rep and Dancer Girl, have? So we, match?” And it was all downhill from there. Now she had a giant pile of new possessions, and an even more giant grin to top it off.
“Is that gonna be enough? Miss Armor Rep and Dancer Girl have a ridiculous number of outfits in their wardrobe. Most of which just get taken off at night anyway… And to be fair, I’m the one making and gifting them to you girls anyway.”
Which meant it was high time I got home and made matching outfits for Sleeping Beauty! She would feel left out if she didn’t get to match after she joined in on the nightly necking about. She was, in some sense, a more frequent nudist than Nudist Girl, so it was only right that I buried her in clothes.
So, back to the inn I went. We had a meeting in the dining hall, which was approximately 10 percent debriefing on the dungeons and 90 percent the girls showing off their new threads. The nerds reported that they had been at the duke’s palace all day and would head out to do a dungeon now before it got much later. The idiots had spent the morning schmoozing with their girlfriends in between crushing monsters in a dungeon of their own. At this point, I should blow up the whole damn dungeon!
And little did I know, as I sat there suffering through the tedium of our daily discussions, that tragedy (one that starts with an l and ends in an ecture) loomed just over the horizon. Yes, even now, the glares were popping up and readying me in their sights.