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Luo Wei came down the stairs. Balc and Barton heard her footsteps, turned, and rose to their feet.
"Respected Miss Luo Wei, good day!" Barton hurried forward and bowed.
"Mr. Hawkins, good day."
She crossed to the carved wooden chair by the fireplace, settled into it, and gestured. "Please sit, Mr. Hawkins. You too, Balc."
"No, no, we're fine standing." Barton quickly held out the sheepskin ledger he'd been clutching. "Miss Luo Wei, this is the full breakdown for last month's cashmere business. Please take a look."
Luo Wei opened it. The numbers stopped her cold.
Over a thousand cashmere skirts sold. More than two thousand shawls. Inner garments, cashmere socks, cloaks of every size , even more of those. The tally went on and on.
Siria Magic Academy's entire noble student body didn't even reach four hundred people. She had clearly underestimated the purchasing power of the Western Plains nobility.
"How did you move this much?" she asked. "The Hawkins factory's production capacity , there's no way it turned out this much cashmere cloth in a single month."
She tapped the figures. "Some of these are unfulfilled orders, aren't they?"
Barton beamed. "As expected , nothing slips past Miss Luo Wei. Half the garments listed haven't gone into production yet. Many noble ladies put down deposits at the end of last year."
"That makes sense." Luo Wei flipped through toward the back. "Which means roughly a quarter of this profit actually belongs to next month." She reached the final page and her gaze stayed there a while.
Total sales: thirty-five thousand gold coins. Gross profit: thirty-three thousand. Profit margin: three hundred percent.
Even a seasoned capitalist would wince and mutter something about cold-blooded arithmetic.
When Barton had first approached her, he'd pledged her three-tenths of the profits as a gesture of goodwill , ten thousand gold coins.
Of the remaining thirty-odd thousand, after the Church's tithe, the Duchy of Rencos's movable and immovable property taxes, and the Rotation Tax set by the Lord of Siria, Hawkins shop's net came out to just over nine thousand gold coins. From that, subtract the losses carried over from earlier months, then set aside capital for the coming months' order costs and tax obligations, and Barton Hawkins, who had been running himself ragged for the better part of a year, had managed to keep perhaps a fraction of what he'd earned. Most of it had flowed straight to people who'd never lifted a finger.
Seeing it laid out like that, she genuinely felt for him.
Then again , the wool always comes from the sheep. The tax-inclusive pricing structure meant those costs had already been baked into the final price all along. Her original coat was priced at ten gold coins; the city lord's one-coin levy was simply folded in and sold to customers at eleven. The extra ten thousand Barton handed over in taxes? That was the nobles' money. They'd paid it themselves, without ever knowing.
Luo Wei set down the ledger. "Mr. Hawkins, you've worked hard these past few months."
"As long as there's money to be made, I'm not tired at all!" Barton said, face glowing.
He stepped back, bent down, and unlatched the copper chests lined up on the floor one by one. Gold coins caught the light, filling the room with a warm, rich gleam that made even the brick walls shine.
One gold coin weighed roughly fifteen grams. Ten thousand coins , about a hundred and fifty kilograms, three hundred pounds of gold, packed into four fifteen-inch copper chests.
Gold purification in this era was crude, but each coin was at least seventy percent pure.
In other words, she had just received two hundred pounds of gold in a single afternoon. Back in the modern world, that was fifty million in cash.
And the timing couldn't have been better. She'd been quietly stressing over the cost of building the mulberry garden and the timber factory. Ten thousand gold coins would carry her a long way.
She saw Barton and Balc out, then called a few servants to haul the chests up to the second-floor vault. She kept the key herself.
"Bella — the wasteland plot in the suburbs. Has it been sorted?"
"Yes, Master! Already rented." Bella produced the deed with both hands and presented it, eyes shining. As expected of her master , she spent freely and earned even more freely. Truly an idol.
Luo Wei took the deed and scanned it. Twenty acres in the southern suburbs, just enough for a modest manor.
She set the deed aside and studied the map.
The Lord of Siria was a cunning one. Of the twenty acres he'd rented her, most were rocky hillslopes and damp riverbank , land that would ruin any farmer trying to grow crops. For developing layered, three-dimensional agriculture, though, it was almost ideal.
The Western Plains were rain-heavy. Mulberry trees hated waterlogging. And yet here was land full of slopes for drainage and channels for irrigation, naturally solving both problems at once.
She supposed she had him to thank for that.
"Hire a crew to turn the soil," she said, tracing her finger across the map and marking a few locations. "We'll need to transplant the mulberry seedlings soon." She stopped, then reconsidered. "Actually, hold off. Let me survey the terrain and soil conditions first and put together a proper plan before we break ground."
"Then should I still start recruiting workers?" Bella asked.
"Go ahead. Both long-term hands and seasonal laborers. The manor will need over a dozen large tile-roofed houses built, and we'll need a fishpond dug as well. I want to raise fish."
The mulberry-dyke-fishpond model had centuries of proven success behind it. Only a fool ignored working precedent , and she was no fool.
"Understood, Master." Bella scribbled quickly.
"One more thing — is the backyard plot ready?"
"Yes. The manure fertilizer has been bucketed in, just as you instructed."
"Take me to see it."
Bella hesitated. "It's... quite pungent, Master. Perhaps—"
"It's fine." Luo Wei pulled out the small handkerchief she kept on her and headed for the door. Bella scrambled to follow.
The backyard hit them before they were fully through the gate. Two acres of field, thoroughly coated in excrement, radiating a smell that had absolutely no business being this aggressive.
Luo Wei stood at the edge, handkerchief pressed to her nose, and took in the disaster in silence.
How was it this bad? Manure heaped here and smeared there, lumped at random across the whole plot. You couldn't set a foot down without stepping into something.
"Master," Bella ventured, voice small, "maybe we should, "
"This is on me." Luo Wei inhaled to speak, immediately regretted it, and clamped the handkerchief back down. "I didn't explain clearly."
"First: cow dung is best. Lower water content , it won't go everywhere."
"Second: the manure needs to be piled together, not spread across the field."
"Get a few people to build up a proper compost heap. Two meters high, three or four meters long. Cover it with wheat straw or packed soil , not spread thin. The heap needs to trap heat to break down."
"And keep it at the edges of the field, not the center. It takes at least forty days to ferment properly and kill off the bacteria and larvae inside."
Bella nodded steadily, charcoal stick flying across her small wooden tablet to keep up.
Being her master's most reliable steward meant knowing how to write , and she'd spent the past six months learning from Roman. She could now record a full set of instructions without missing a word.
Watching Bella scratch carefully at the rough wood surface, Luo Wei paused mid-thought.
She'd been using parchment for a full semester without a second thought. She'd forgotten that most people in this world couldn't afford it , that for most people, a small piece of carved wood was as good as it got.
She was already planning to build a mulberry garden. Mulberry bark was a core raw material for papermaking. It wouldn't take much extra effort.
She might as well make paper while she was at it.
➤ Next: No Defecating or Urinating in the Field
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