I Shall Survive Using Potions! Volume 1 Page 10

  I’ll let you do the asking, Fabio, so think nice and hard about what you wanna make it about.

  Wh-What are you saying all of—

  She appeared.

  “I heard you’re going for five silver coins today, Allan? Aimee was back over there doing the ‘money makin’ mamba.’”

  What type of dance is that?!

  “Well, as you can see, I came here with some friends today. This one’s Fernie, and the other one’s Fabie. This guy said he had something he wanted to ask, right?” Allan said, passing the baton to Fabio.

  “U-Uh...”

  Fabio was in full on panic mode as he desperately tried coming up with a question.

  Kaoru had a second job she worked in-between being a waitress—with the blessing of her manager and fellow waitresses of course. That job was running a sort of counseling service. She would listen to whatever questions her clients had, then answer those questions and give them advice. She only had a short time to run it, since the only free time she had as a waitress was after the call for last orders was finished.

  It cost a pretty penny to even get inside the library, and trying to buy a book was basically a pipe dream here. That’s when Kaoru decided to open up her counseling service, since she was trying to save up every little bit she could. Being able to talk with a whole rainbow of people could end up being pretty useful too, after all.

  When she was running her counseling service, her fellow waitresses would have to take over whatever work she had left over, which was why she was giving them a forty percent cut of what she made. If two people ended up covering her, then they would get twenty percent each, and so on and so forth. If they were lucky enough to hit upon a customer with deep pockets like Allan, that meant they were getting one silver coin a piece. The girls weren’t exactly making money hand over fist, so this definitely wasn’t an amount to be sneezed at. They would be so over the moon about it they’d start doing the “money makin’ mamba.”

  Kaoru had learned her lesson from last time, and she wasn’t going to start selling anything; she was going to be a clever girl and use her wits to make her money. Her job even came with a place to stay, and food on top of that, so she was in no rush to amass her savings.

  Of course, no one wanted to take Kaoru up on her counseling venture at first. After all, who would come to a girl who looked to be about eleven or twelve and tell her all their troubles, or ask for advice? The advertisement hung near the corner of the wall would just look down glumly at Kaoru...

  But one day, she reached a turning point. Maybe it was just because he wanted someone to talk to, but a middle-aged man had asked for Kaoru’s services. Not only did he pay for the counseling fee of five small silver coins (about 500 yen), but he even treated her to something to drink as well. His problem was that he wanted to pass on his business to his two grandchildren, but no matter how he tried splitting up the work between them, they always said it was unfair somehow. The man’s son had already passed away, and he just didn’t want there to be any bad blood between his grandchildren.

  Piece of cake! I’ve heard of this before! was the first thing Kaoru thought after hearing him out.

  “Well, first you should ask one of them how they would split the work to make it fair. Afterward, you ask the other one to pick which split of the work they want to do that the first grandkid divvied up, and I don’t think either of them should have any complaints about it.”

  The man stared blankly back at Kaoru. Kaoru’s fellow waitresses and the customers who all just happened to overhear her first ever job were also staring at her in shock.

  “““So that’s how you’d do it...”””

  When news of her first job spread, Kaoru started getting a slow influx of customers, half of which were messing around with her, and half whom were seriously asking for advice. There were some who just wanted to do nothing more than sit and chat with Kaoru, but a customer was still a customer. It cost a minimum of five small silver coins to use her service, with no limit on how much the price could go up. There were times Kaoru would decide how much a session would cost depending on the topic, and there were other times the customer would name their price, and Kaoru would tell them only what she thought was appropriate for that amount.

  “There are two villages arguing over which one of their sacred trees is bigger than the other, and can’t climb up to measure them...”

  “Measure the length of their shadows at the same time of day.”

  “I’m trying to figure out which of these has the larger volume: this wooden goddess statue, or this iron one...”

  “Just submerge them in water and measure the... Wait, why do you want to know that in the first place?”

  “My boyfriend cheated on me...”

  “Break up with him.”

  Over time, it finally got to the point where customers like Allan would come to ask for her services.

  I had two of my regulars coming in to ask me for advice today: Bohman and Allan. Allan looked like the son of some merchant mogul whose business collapsed or something, but he dressed like a hunter. At first, he would only ask me things half-jokingly, but now we’ve gotten to the point where he regularly asks me questions and advice on things. Allan was a generous customer with deep pockets, and my fellow waitresses Aimee and Agathe were practically jumping for joy when he came. They were already dancing that “money makin’ mamba” thing they’d made up earlier.

  It looked like Allan was being extra-generous today, since he was putting down a whole five silver coins. I wondered if he was just showing off since he was with his friends?

  After finishing up Charles’s request, the son of the merchant who’d been kind enough to give me a lift to the capital (definitely got a good feeling Charles was going to make a great merchant someday), I headed over to where Allan and his friends were sitting.

  “So, what do you want to ask about?”

  Allan’s friend Fabie seemed a little flustered when he heard me ask that. He took a second to try and get his thoughts in order, then finally asked me a question. I thought the reason they called me over in the first place was because they wanted advice on something?

  “W-Well, um... I was just wondering what the nobility could do to increase the tax revenue they get from their territories.”

  I couldn’t say I was expecting that one, but I pulled myself together and asked a question of my own.

  “What angle are we talking about here? Agriculture? Trade? Maybe a place that has some industry going for it? Also, are you looking for long or short term gains, or something else entirely?”

  Fabie didn’t seem to be expecting these types of questions from my end. After hesitating a second, he gave his answer.

  “Let’s see... How about the fastest way to expect returns for just your plain old, completely average territory?”

  “Hmm.” I thought it over for a bit before answering the question. “That’s a bit much to cover for five silver coins... But I’ll do it specially for you, since Allan is the one who brought you in. First, you have to lower taxes. You want to get them down about twenty to thirty percent lower for all your merchants and farmers.”

  “What? But doesn’t that mean less tax revenue?” Fernie suddenly butt into the conversation with his own two cents.

  “If you’re just taxing them to the point they can barely get by, then that’s all you’re going to get. But what do you think happens when you lower taxes?”

  “You get less money from taxes.” Fern gives his best impression of a broken record and says the same thing again.

  “On the contrary. If taxes go down, you end up with a surplus on your hands. Farmers can use that extra bit of money they saved to buy better tools, like iron hoes or sharper scythes. Those improved tools mean farming becomes more efficient, and the farmers now end up with a surplus of time on their hands. They can use that time to do things like gathering edible plants from the mountains, make art or other handicrafts at home, and all sorts of things. They
’ll suddenly find themselves with much more free time on their hands.”

  “While that sounds great for the farmers, that just means less tax yields for the city though.” This time, Fabie was the one cutting in.

  “I’m not finished yet. The taxes on the merchants should be lower at this point too, right? From what I’ve heard, it seems like territories have all sorts of taxes they charge merchants: taxes for bringing goods in, sales tax for anything sold, and even a tax for taking merchandise out of the territory. But let’s say you have one territory where the taxes are incredibly low compared to everywhere else. Which territory do you think a merchant on their way to the capital would want to go through?”

  ““Ah...””

  “Though taxes may be lower by about twenty percent, what happens when you get twice the amount of merchants coming through? Or even three times that much? On the other hand, what would happen if taxes were higher than the other territories around it? Do you think they’d get more revenue from those taxes?”

  ““...””

  “That would make sales tax within that territory cheap as well. The people living there wouldn’t only have more flexibility in their lives, but would have more buying power as well. Any merchant would love to sell their wares in a place like that, especially since they wouldn’t have to pay any import or export taxes for anything they already sold off. The more they sell, the emptier their carts become, and you can’t make money off an empty cart. They’d want to try replenishing some of their stock somehow, even if it means a smaller profit margin than bringing it in themselves. And then, oh, what’s this? It seems like there’s a ton of handicrafts these farmers made themselves! Buying these on the cheap means that I don’t have to pay as much taxes on them either... You see what I’m getting at?”

  The three of them just stared at me with their mouths open... What’s up with them? Oh well. Anyway, I’d say I’d done enough to cover what they paid.

  “Going the agriculture route isn’t exactly the fastest way like you asked, but I guess this is enough to cover five silver coins, right?”

  “““Th-That’s plenty...”””

  “Just who was that girl?!”

  “Uh... A waitress who works at a restaurant in town?”

  “...”

  The three guys were talking about Kaoru after making their way back to the castle. As of yet, governors may have thought about just how far they could raise taxes, but none had thought of lowering taxes on their citizens when they were already low enough for them to get by. It had always been said only the most talented of governors could find the exact amount to set taxes without pushing the people past their breaking point.

  That young girl had laughed off that way of thinking as if it were nothing. How could anyone have such knowledge and wisdom at an age like that...

  Of course, her suggestion was something that couldn’t quite work in reality. Any plan to draw in merchants to a certain territory would just be pulling profits away from the other territories under the kingdom’s control. The total tax revenue from all those territories would just go down from how much taxes were lowered, which meant less profits for the country. Not to mention that if anyone began siphoning profits from a neighboring territory, there was no doubt it’d lead to a flood of complaints and disputes. Her idea was more than enough for getting results as fast as possible though, just like Fabio had asked. Something like this had just never been taken into political consideration on a national level. She had to have a terrifying amount of talent to come up with that at her age.

  “I just noticed something...” Fabio started.

  “What’s up?” Fernand asked back.

  “That girl was saying five silver coins would only get us that much, and how agriculture wasn’t the fastest way to go about it, right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So let’s say we ask her to go over agriculture again, but pay her even more, like, say...five small gold coins? What do you think she would tell us then?”

  ““Whoa...””

  “It makes you want more of her, right?”

  “Yeah, definitely more...” Allan chimed in.

  “Wha... She’s still just a young girl!” Fernand chided.

  ““Not like that!””

  Around that same time, the waitresses of the restaurant were busy raising a toast to Kaoru (with tea of course). They were, after all, getting one whole silver coin out of the deal.

  They rarely got much from tips from their commoner patrons, and working at a fairly cheap restaurant meant the waitresses had fairly meagre wages to match—and here they were getting a silver coin each without even doing anything. It was safe to say they were grateful to Kaoru for that. Incredibly grateful.

  “Hm-hm-hm! Even without cheats, this is easy peasy!”

  Kaoru was feeling pretty full of herself. She was so full of herself, in fact, that she forgot the one small detail of having an adult’s brain with modern day knowledge while looking like a child was a pretty big cheat in and of itself.

  Chapter 5: Getting It All out There

  “He’s back again...” I muttered, furrowing my eyebrows.

  That Fernie guy Allan had brought in before had been showing up here more often lately. He’d always show up right when things were getting busy, calling me over to his table to ask me a whole bunch of questions out of nowhere. If he kept this up, my boss wasn’t going to let me run my counseling service anymore. I mean, I was only supposed to do it during the off times when the crowd had thinned out. It wasn’t like Aimee and Agathe couldn’t run the restaurant by themselves during rush hour. Allan knew the rules, so why not this guy...

  Right now, that troublesome customer was staring straight at me while slurping up a bowl of Big and Soft Soup Noodles (one of the dishes I got the restaurant to officially put on the menu—it’s udon, by the way). His hair was a nice shade of blond, and it was true he didn’t look half-bad... Still, my only thoughts on him were as follows:

  What a creep...

  Prince Fernand had become very, very interested in Kaoru, and would frequently come to the restaurant to watch her work. It wasn’t like he was the king (yet), so as long as he didn’t slack off too much and let work pile up, it wasn’t like he had much to do in the first place.

  For some reason, Fernand wouldn’t invite Fabio along, having snuck out to the restaurant all alone, and Allan had gone back to his hometown the other day, meaning he was out of the picture for now.

  While it wasn’t as if Fernand was completely ignorant to the ways of the world, the concept of not bothering other people was foreign to him. Being the prince, there was no one around him who had work that took priority over him after all. It was because of this fact that he simply forgot about why Allan had taken them to the restaurant way past the lunch rush, despite how Allan specifically mentioned only going after the last order was called and the waitresses had less work to deal with. People were meant to work themselves around his schedule. To Fernand, that was just common sense—and that was exactly why he committed faux pas after faux pas.

  He would call for Kaoru when the restaurant was packed. Even when Kaoru had other people reserved her for counseling, he would push his way ahead of them so he could see her first. His questions began heading into territory that Kaoru didn’t want to talk about, like how he started asking her for more personal information.

  At first, Kaoru had made sure to handle it as well as any person would. He was a friend of Allan’s after all, so she put up with him somewhat. She diligently answered all his questions on political policies for the country, even though she couldn’t tell if he was testing or messing with her. But Fernand’s questions and actions began escalating over time, getting to the point where Kaoru couldn’t even answer them anymore. He was even beginning to cause trouble for the other customers as well.

  There was a limit to these sorts of things. It was true he paid well, but the way he was going about it made it seem like he was saying Kaoru would d
o anything as long as he gave her money for it, and that attitude was ticking her off. Even when he threw in a gold coin to show off, it only made her be even more on guard.

  Finally, Kaoru went to her boss to ask him for a favor. The manager and the other employees already knew Kaoru was having trouble with Fernand, which was how she received permission to say two specific replies to him...

  “I’m sorry, but I can no longer be your waitress, Fernie. If you need to order anything, please ask one of the other staff.”

  The next day, Fernand went out of his way to ignore the fact that Agathe was right near him and call Kaoru over, and such was her response. It was practically written on the other customers faces that they were wondering when this was going to happen.

  A blank expression hung on Fernand’s face, as if he couldn’t come to terms with what he’d just heard, before suddenly flying off the handle.

  “Wh-What are you saying?! Why not?!”

  “I already told you why, didn’t I?” Kaoru began answering cooly. “Over and over again at that! You’re causing trouble for the other customers, and I’ve had enough. Someone else will be in charge of taking your orders from now on, and I won’t be taking any more of your requests for counseling either.”

  Fernand’s legs almost gave out when Kaoru glared at him. Granted, most normal people would tremble in fear if Kaoru truly put everything into glaring at them, especially since she already had that harsh look in her eyes to begin with.

  “B-But I’m a paying customer! You can’t do that to a—”

  “The manager told me he’d be fine without your business if you tried getting involved with me any further.”

  The other customers murmured their surprise that even the owner of the restaurant had gone this far.