“So you want to use Gate Mirrors to allow regular citizens to be able to reliably deliver letters, huh?”
Relisha went silent as she fell into thought for a moment. Was there something that bothered her about the idea?
“How do you intend to profit from this as a country?”
“By only loaning the mirrors to the guild. We’d probably ask for you to pay an annual rental fee.”
“I see. This is under the assumption that we’d get profits from the delivery service, right? Well, assuming we can iron that all out later...”
When Relisha dropped a letter into the Gate Mirror on the table, it popped out of the one next to it. She then smoothly snatched it out of the air.
“We already get commissioned to deliver letters at the guild, though they’re generally only domestic deliveries.”
All the client had to do was entrust their letter to the guild, and the guild would then pass it on to adventurers who would be traveling to the destination or a nearby town. Essentially, the letter would go from guild to guild until it reached its recipient, but apparently, that cost a lot of money and time.
The more stops along the way there were, the more adventurers they needed to get involved, increasing the commission fee. In the worst case, where no adventurers were heading to that area, the letter would simply remain at the guild until someone going in that direction showed up. If the recipient lived in a village with no guild, the adventurer would be expected to deliver it to the village itself directly.
If the guilds began making use of Gate Mirrors, it would become possible for the letter to be sent to the closest guild and for them to only rely on adventurers from there. It would still be tough if the recipient was in a location with no guild, but for cases where the recipient was in the same location as the guild, the delivery would be local, so it was both safe and would let an adventurer get some nice pocket money, perfect for adventurers just starting out who needed to make money to get their starting gear.
“Oh, you’ve caught onto a good point,” Relisha remarked. “I’m sure new adventurers would love simple jobs like these. We’d have to make sure we had countermeasures in place for any potential trouble, though.”
Right, there was still the possibility that letters never made it to their destination or got lost somewhere along the way. We couldn’t just act innocent in those scenarios.
“We’ll also need to select ideal locations to put the Gate Mirrors. We obviously can’t put one in every town and village in the world.”
Even just assuming one hundred towns, you’d have to make a separate ninety-nine paired Gate Mirrors for every town, and that would almost bring us well into needing ten thousand mirrors.
“Something we could do is have all of the letters be delivered to the capital’s branch, and they would then distribute them to the individual towns.”
That was a good idea. That way, only the capital cities would need several Gate Mirrors made, making that process much simpler. It did mean I’d have to make enough Gate Mirrors that the capital would connect to every town, though.
“In any case, allow me to bring up this matter to the council first. I can’t make the decision myself. There may even be countries who outright refuse it.”
“I do think countries in the alliance would be open to the idea, but I know the guild still hasn’t quite managed to expand into the Western Continent yet, so there’s nothing we can do about that.”
I’d heard that over there, those rich enough used bird Gollems to deliver letters, but Gollems themselves were expensive, so it was probably limited to nobles. The common citizens did have horse messengers and regular mailmen, but they didn’t seem to make much use of them, both due to their lacking literacy rates and also because of how expensive it no doubt was.
It would be nice if we could make it easier for people to send letters to faraway friends or family. It’d be great if we could help increase literacy rates as well, but maybe that was aiming a little too high.
In any case, I left the rest to Relisha and headed back to the castle. Something seemed to be going on in the courtyard. Peeking out from the second-floor window, I noticed a stall that hadn’t been there before I went to the guild. On a red flag was “Ramen” written in white.
“The hell’s going on down there?”
I made my way down and, perhaps unsurprisingly, who else was manning the stand other than Lu and Arcia. Next to them were Quun, Parla, Uncle Kousuke, and Karina setting up another.
“Oh, you’re back, Touya,” Karina cheerfully greeted me.
“Uhhh, would someone mind explaining what’s going on here?”
“Long story short, I ended up hunting a bunch of boars. Thought I’d ask Lu if she could do something with them.”
“It just so happened that I also had the same idea with some fresh veggies from my fields. When I asked if she could whip somethin’ up with ’em, the lass suggested that...”
“We make ramen! A new ramen!” Lu declared, raising a ladle toward the sky. Her eyes were burning with the flames of passion.
They were just obsessed with curry the other day, and now we’re rushing straight to ramen?
“Haven’t you made ramen a ton before?”
They’d made regular ramen, bizarre ramen, and even chilled ramen. Why were we back here?
“It’s because of this,” Quun answered, handing over a thin magazine.
“Ramen Kingdom?”
Flipping through the pages, it seemed to be introducing a bunch of famous ramen places. It was literally a ramen magazine. Was this something Lu had bought while we were on our honeymoon on Earth?