“Yumiela-san! This way!”
Eleanora came running up to me, waving her hand. Her hands were blackened with dirt. Her face and dress were also stained with mud. What’s going on?
“What were you doing?”
“Digging for potatoes! And not just any potato, but sweet potato!”
“…That’s wonderful.”
“There’s this field a little ways out of town that the church manages, and we’re having a roasting potato contest with the potatoes we grow there!”
“…Sounds like fun. Are you going to do it now?”
“Not today. …This is a secret, but I’ll tell Yumiela-san. Afterwards, we will have a roasted sweet potato party just for those who participated in the digging. If you dig hard, you can have roasted sweet potato twice.”
I’ve heard some top-secret information.
About ten children gathered at a distance behind Eleanora. They all had black hands, and their cloth bags were probably filled with sweet potatoes. I noticed that Eleanora seemed to be the messiest of them all. It is unclear whether it is because her original appearance is beautiful or because she was more excited than the children about digging for sweet potatoes.
I send her on her way, happy she is satisfied with her downfall.
“The kids in the back are waiting for you. Please go to them.”
“Yes! I’m going!”
She runs off and joins the children without any sense of discomfort.
She’s a former Duke’s daughter, but looking at her current appearance, I’m starting to think this is true. She is much more at home with the people of the town, especially the children, than I am.
I left her and walked for a while, thinking about the Eleanora exchange theory, when I heard my name called again.
“Is Yumiela going home, too?”
“Patrick, too?”
“I just finished. You looked serious, …it’s nothing, right?”
“Yeah, it’s nothing.”
He noticed that I, who always has a blank expression, had a serious expression on my face. +2 points. He realized that what I was thinking wasn’t that important. +3 points.
The total is +5 Yumiela points. As expected of Patrick Ashbaton, steadily racking up points.
In the mind of Eleanora, who hadn’t been replaced, I tried playing a new game. He seemed to notice that and walked away without saying anything.
With my feet in motion, I, too, headed home alongside Patrick.
“Was it Archiam today?”
“Yeah, Archiam territory. I carried big logs back and forth.”
“When you turn around, I’m afraid you will hit someone.”
“You’re late.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I barely didn’t hit.”
Patrick never mentioned it again, as long as I hadn’t hit anyone. It’s like the bar against me is getting lower and lower every year. There may be a time when I will be praised for not breaking anything in a day.
“Is Patrick using his earth magic again?”
“No, I was helping to put up pillars today. Heavy lifting.”
Today, I’m the truck; he is the crane, and a heavy machinery couple was born.
At level 99, Patrick will work on a job requiring several people to work together. However, the carpenter doing the work also claims to be at a high level.
“He couldn’t do it? He’s supposed to do the work of 20 people.”
“I don’t think he could do that kind of load on his own.”
“You know what—”
“Stop!”
The man being talked about is a level 20 carpenter dispatched by the company. When we first met him, he boldly stated that he could do the work of 20 people by himself, so I asked him, “Would you be interested in doing the work of 99 people?” As a result, I was kept away from the work site even more than before.
In his previous job, he earned a living by collecting magic stones in dungeons, even though he had good prospects.
“Is level 20 that different? Isn’t it the same as someone with more muscle at level 1?”
“You and I both have our senses out of whack, but 20 is pretty strong.”
“Then why did he quit being an adventurer? I think you can make more money going into the dungeons.”
“He said he was thinking about retiring from dangerous work when he got married and was recruited by the Archit company.”
I was amazed that Patrick and he were comfortable enough with each other to have such a conversation.
Patrick seems cold or blunt with people he meets for the first time, but I wonder why he is so easily trusted. Despite watching him from next to him, I am unlikely to imitate his communication skills.
“He was in his thirties, wasn’t he? Does that mean he hasn’t been a carpenter long?”
“I don’t know. The way he talked about it sounded like about three years. If he were in his thirties, he would have a good reason for deciding to retire.”
“Did something happen?”
“The magic stone prices have gone down, haven’t they? Especially the higher grade ones. The adventure industry has been in a bad shape for the past few years.”
The price of magic stones is indeed lower than it used to be.
Only after I entered the academy did I grasp the market price of magic stones. Before that, I didn’t care about the price because I only needed an allowance to buy the bare minimum. Another reason is that I was working so hard to level up that I felt the time spent defeating monsters in the dungeon and picking up magic stones was a waste of time.
After discovering that my level was capped at the entrance ceremony, I started buying and selling the magic stones because I didn’t want to worry about having money. The purchase price dropped every year.
Should the decline continue, the Dolknes family’s finances, which are maintained by the profits from the sales of the magic stones, might be in danger.
“How could it be? There is no reason why the demand for magic stones should decrease.”
“I guess an ever-increasing supply of high-grade magic stones showed up.”
“……So it’s the downside of Patrick being level 99.”
“No, Yumiela is… well, I’m the one to blame.”
When I tried to blame Patrick, I felt responsible. Maybe 80% of it was my fault, you know?
I understood that the price of the most difficult dungeon in the 50-layer class, the huge magic stone dropped by the bosses there, was falling due to oversupply. Since only Patrick and I can obtain them consistently, it makes sense that the market would be affected. But I never imagined that there would be an oversupply of even regular-sized magic stones.
Wouldn’t this be a serious problem if we don’t take countermeasures?
My voice was getting slightly quieter as I began to get seriously worried.
“Is it going to be okay…?”
“Since magic stones have become cheaper and more people seem to be using magic tools—”
“Does this mean that the consumption of magical stones used for magical tools will increase, and the market price of magical stones will stabilize? We can avoid the situation where they become so cheap that they are as good as rocks.”
“What?”
“If it gets cheaper, everyone will buy it, and if everyone buys it, it will get more expensive. Markets are a reactionary dynamic…. If demand increases in line with supply, the equilibrium price won’t change.”
We have to be prepared for some loss of revenue, but it’s not hopeless.
I looked up at him and saw Patrick looking at me with wide-open eyes.
“Eh, what? What’s wrong?”
“Are you sure you’re Yumiela?”
“…Well, it can’t be helped. The real Yumiela is in my stomach.”
“Yeah, that’s the real Yumiela.”
“What identification did you use? Or, where did you get the idea that it was a fake?”
“I had discussed this before with the officials in charge of finance and decided that the value of the magic stone would settle at some level. After hearing about it, I quickly concluded that… Yumiela is brilliant today.”
It was a great compliment. I don’t think I’ve said much, but I’m glad for the rare high praise.
I’m not sure how much economics I learned in middle school. Ah, I used to attend an educational institute that specialized in economics.
I’m in a smart-ish vibe… well, smart-ish vibe sounds stupid. Well, something like that.
“I went to college and majored in economics.”
“College… a school that offers the highest education? …Huh? Yumiela, didn’t you once say that you can learn broadly and shallowly but not gain specialized knowledge?”
It was my past that blocked my path to becoming an economist.
Because, you know. I was only a freshman. I had no intention of seriously learning about economics. Now that I’m a lord, I wish I had studied it, but it’s too late.
I’ve given up on the intellectual route and will come clean.
“But you know, it’s not that I was an unserious student. Eighty percent of economics students aren’t interested in economics.”
“Isn’t that an exaggeration?”
“I was a freshman, so I did some of the introductory part. Of course, there were serious students, too. They had decided which seminar they wanted to enter and began going to their professors to ask questions.”
“If those were the serious students, maybe Yumiela wasn’t diligent enough?”
That’s the thing, Patrick, it’s called quibbling.
There seems to be a difference in our perceptions of seriousness and unseriousness. Let me show him what a typical college student is.
“If I go to class, take notes, and study only before exams, I’m classified as a serious college student.”
“…Isn’t that obvious?”
“Some people stop coming to school because they get addicted to board games with Ron and Tsumo or work in sales.”
“I don’t understand.”
Patrick cocked his head. He doesn’t understand what it means to miss an opportunity to gain specialized knowledge.
Even though I was attending properly, I can’t say that I was eager to learn, either. I should have been serious about learning, not thinking that macroeconomics is irrelevant until I die. It would have made all the difference if I had known what I was doing.
“If I had known I was coming to another world like this, I would have studied. It would be helpful.”
“As long as you live in a human society, is there anything economics can’t help you with? Whatever job you do, your perspective changes depending on what you know.”
“So, Patrick, are you the type to tell people who complain about how hard their job is that they need to change jobs or improve the labor conditions?”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know much about the world that Yumiela was living in, and I said it out of my mind.”
Patrick had hit the crux of the matter, but quickly retracted his assertion. The sound argument was painful.
We’ve gotten very far off topic. How did we get into this conversation?
Back to my memory. Was the discussion of the dropping market price of magic stones that plunged us into a discussion of the economy? That caused the adventurer community to go into recession, and a level 20 carpenter showed up. That’s funny.
We ended up talking about it and had new questions.
Then, we arrive at the estate. We went straight to the tea break together.
Her train of thoughts detailed, there were no survivors.
Thx for the chapter!
It’s a nice change of pace hearing about Yumiela past life