About one year ago in early autumn, on the western border of the Kingdom.
A pink carpet covered the grassy plains. It was a natural field of wildflowers native to the Kingdom with a pink tint to them, which I went on to arbitrarily name lotus flowers. The sound of buzzing honeybees busily flying about could be heard above the flowers in full bloom. And as the little girls filled their bellies, they went and returned to a beehive-like stack of boxes on the embankment.
To the west laid the Loewer Wald, a crimson forest located right on the border. I lived in a small village that almost nobody in the Kingdom even knew the name of. And this grassy plain between the village and the forest that nobody ever visited was the production area of our Weinder Company’s flagship product.
“Mm, it’s looking good.”
I dipped my little finger into the amber liquid, produced by centrifuge using a water wheel, and took a taste. A rich and sweet flavor without a single hint of eccentricity or bitterness to it tickled my tongue. This was honey, an extremely high-class product here in this world, where refined sugar didn’t exist.
Wildflowers are capable of growing with vigor, even in lands with poor soil and no source of water nearby where any form of agriculture is normally impossible. And the fruits they bear, their pale nectar, can be collected, concentrated, and processed without any human intervention. This is the fundamental energy cost behind the theory of apiculture.
The beehive I reproduced here using modern beekeeping knowledge is overwhelmingly superior in terms of production output and productivity compared to the way my rival collects honey in the wild. Moreover, the unit cost of my honey weighed to its quality is without peer. It can even be stored long-term. In other words, I can make a profit even if I’m secretly manufacturing it all the way out here in a border region.
To exaggerate a little, it’s close to turning a worthless grassy plain into a gold vein. It could be said to be the perfect enterprise for the Weinder Company, who were nothing but smalltime peddlers who dealt with the local villages. That’s precisely why I spent four years of hardship to bring it up to this state.
“It’s not really my own achievement, though,” I mumbled. The structure of the beehive is one thing, but even the economic model I designed this enterprise on all came from the other world.
A triangular cloud floating through the sky reminded me of the beard on my old professor from university. I barely managed to squeeze into my local university and chose a course in the economics department for no particular reason. The professor there happened to be quite the eccentric. His catchphrase was “Economics is the physics of the individual, the chemistry between people, and the ecology of society.” Normal economists simply classified things in the boring categories of micro and macroeconomics. To my professor, on the other hand, “economics” meant nothing more than viewing the entire world as a model and optimizing the flow of money.
Even after three years of studying under him, I was still just a worthless student who never even showed my gratitude. I didn’t even get the chance to apply all the profound knowledge and concepts I learned from him to the real world.
Knowledge that remains in one’s head but is never properly fostered in practice is literally like a bladeless sword on a battlefield; a weapon with zero attack power. All I could do after going into the working world barehanded was try my best every day. And those days simply passed by in a haze, one by one, as I pushed both my body and mind to their limits.
Crushed by the volume and variety of work pushed down on me, I lost my ability to control my personal relations, meager as they were to begin with. I was labeled as useless, and couldn’t even deny it, having never produced any real results. In my desperation, I even tried to read some “How to Succeed in Business” books, but all it did was give me more knowledge that I couldn’t even put to use.
The last memory I had over there was the pain from striking my brow against my desk, which brought back my consciousness for an instant, and the sensation of a mountain of unfinished papers piling over my head. One could say that I was literally crushed by my work.
When I came to, I was lying here in between this village and the Loewer Wald. Perhaps because it had just finished raining, there were puddles on the ground, and in the reflection of those puddles I saw myself, rejuvenated to a young boy who couldn’t even be through elementary school yet. I looked just like I did in a picture from an elementary school sports meet when I slammed into the ground and had a swollen cheek. Be it by teleportation or reincarnation or whatever it was, when I got here, I apparently slammed right into a tree.
However, at the time, I didn’t have the leisure to think of any of that. That’s because there was a beehive in that tree, and I desperately ran away from the angry swarm of honeybees.
“Thanks to that, I did end up remembering the time I helped my granddad out with beekeeping over the summer break to make some loose change. I never thought all that time I spent in elementary school making a miniature mockup of a beehive would actually come in handy...”
The weight of the jar in my hands brought me back from those memories of Earth, which now seemed like a distant dream or illusion.
Ironically enough, what made it possible for me to tie together the knowledge I had in my head from university with the weight of the goods in my hands was my coming here to this world. I feel like it was precisely because the environment around me was so different that I was able to digest each bit of knowledge one by one and turn them into reality. The weight in my hands was proof that they were no longer empty theories.
“We’d be able to raise our production output if we got a little closer to Loewer Wald though...”
“We’re already pushing things out here, sir.”
After I muttered upon coming back to reality, a petite girl had come up next to me before I knew it and replied. She had her black hair in braids and held a ledger in one hand. She pointed at the trees sprouting red leaves in the vicinity. They looked like autumn leaves, but they weren’t. They were this color all year round.
It was proof of Loewer Wald’s influence over the area. The honeybees didn’t care, but the villagers were too frightened and never crossed over this embankment.
“But you know, Mia, nobody’s ever seen a monster around here, right?”
I stubbornly looked to Loewer Wald, and Mia silently shook her head. If this cool-headed girl wasn’t yielding, then my only choice was to give up. Even if I’m accustomed to being here, I’m dragging over twenty years of knowledge from the other world with me, so my common sense isn’t reliable.
“Well, I guess the more important matter to resolve right now isn’t the output, but the market. Berthold is approaching its limits already.” Even the city which lay in the center of the Kingdom’s western region had a depressingly small market for high-class goods. What’s more...
“The merchants over there are beginning to get irritated at honey being delivered at fixed intervals when it’s supposed to be something we ‘found by coincidence.’ That’s the president’s assessment,” Mia pointed out.
“There’s no mistaking it if my father’s the one saying so. If that amount is already considered a storm of shares, then we have no choice but to expand our distribution area. We managed to gather enough funds to enroll in the capital’s academy anyway.”
The plan wasn’t quite hiding a tree in the forest. We were going to blend in with students to gather information in the capital, and slowly expand our personal connections and market. In any case, my final plan for honey output doesn’t just stop at ten or even a hundred times the current output.
“...We’re going out of the way to send a mere village girl like me all the way to the Academy. I’ll put in the work so that it isn’t a loss for the company. That includes managing your usual careless self, sir.”
This girl was once my student in mathematics, but she had long surpassed her teacher, and was now joyfully flipping through the ledger in her hands.