Chapter 161: Piling Up Gold Coins
Hearing my utterly, utterly outrageous remark, Tris looked completely bewildered…
“Eh… Ah, ahh, yes. Assets, you mean. I’ll bring the ledger right away.”
After saying that, she moved the empty dessert plate aside, then retrieved a locked ledger from a locked shelf…
“Here it is.”
“Let’s see, what’s this…?”
…Huh?
…According to the ledger, it seems I’m a noble who owns seven villages and has two Knights under him.
Two Soap Factories, grazing rights on the Fizz Plains, logging rights and exclusive hunting rights in the Faeca Forest, two hundred twenty cows and one thousand one hundred seven sheep on the plains. One hundred twenty-four draft horses as labor for the Fief. Pigs, chickens, goats, and the like managed by each household for food.
Fishing and irrigation rights in Lake Ashido, formed from a tributary of the Promelos River, high justice rights over the entire Fief, the right to hold markets, partial tax exemption, and permission to collect tolls…
An unbelievable amount of rights were in my hands.
“Uwoah…”
“Lord Andrews said to ‘just handle it appropriately,’ so after consulting with Count Missgancia-sama’s subordinates, I have been managing the Fief. Monetary rewards became too much to receive, and Count Missgancia-sama also mentioned difficulty in paying with currency, so I tried to maintain a balance of wealth by purchasing rights, but…”
Yeah… yeah.
This is… my fault, isn’t it!!!!
I have absolutely no interest in that sort of thing, so I just dumped it all on Tris.
Honestly, I didn’t really care about the rewards from Count Missgancia, either; I never paid attention to the amounts. I figured I wasn’t receiving “money,” but rather Count Missgancia’s “sincerity.”
But, a little thought would tell you that the rewards I received from Count Missgancia had long ago become far too much to hold just in Gold Coins.
It’s not like Earth’s fiat currency system, where value is based on credit itself. The amount of currency circulating in the market is equal to the total amount of gold, I guess.
That’s why hoarding gold in one place is a bad thing. Even Count Missgancia, who promotes economic policies, would want to avoid the concentration of wealth as much as possible.
Because… it’s astonishing, but there really isn’t much currency in the market.
Perhaps the total amount of gold in this Missgancia region, converted to Japanese Yen, wouldn’t even reach ten billion yen? No, even the national budget couldn’t possibly be ten billion yen.
There’s only maybe a few hundred million yen worth of gold circulating in the entire market, isn’t that incredible?
So how do they buy and sell things like Full Plate Armor or warhorses, which would cost tens to hundreds of millions of yen? Payment in kind! Jewelry, cloth, or maybe something like, “With 5% of next year’s wheat harvest from the territory!” Is that how it works?
That must be why I also own things like cows and draft horses.
“I received payment in money, and at first, I just piled up bags of Gold Coins in the safe… but I was told I’d accumulated too much and there weren’t enough Gold Coins circulating in the market… I thought it was wasteful to just let it sit there, so I exchanged it for livestock, art pieces, and the like. I did report this, but…”
“Yeah, sorry. I wasn’t listening at all…”
“N-No! Lord Andrews is not at fault! However, um… the profits from the Soap Factory and the agriculture using draft horses and pack animals seem to be quite lucrative, and the money just keeps piling up… For now, I always keep about ten thousand Gold Coins (around five hundred million yen) stored as Gold Coins and jewelry, but assets beyond that are held as rights or livestock.”
Hmm?
I continue reading the ledger…
…Roughly speaking.
Ignoring bad or good harvests, on average, the income from a small village with a population of around two hundred people is about “forty million yen” in modern Earth currency. Oh, by the way, this population is my estimate, okay? There are tons of inaccuracies like serfs not being counted in the population, so this is just a rough guess.
So, since I own five villages and have given two villages to my Knights, the income from the Fief is roughly “two hundred million yen” per year.
Adding the profits from the Soap Factories, the profits from lending livestock to the villagers to improve efficiency, and the profits from agriculture, forestry, and fisheries… it comes out to about “three hundred million yen,” huh?
Furthermore, there are sudden surgery requests from Count Missgancia, for which I receive several million yen per surgery, at least twenty times a year.
Adding that in too… my final earnings are probably “just under four hundred million yen”?
In a world like this, where not even ten billion yen worth of currency circulates in the market to begin with, that makes me a super-rich tycoon.
And in such a world, demanding someone collect four hundred million yen worth of Gold Coins every year! Yeah, I’m the strange one here.
So that’s why Tris skillfully made adjustments and managed the Fief in my place.
“Sorry about that, Tris. It must have been tough…”
“No! Being able to work for Lord Andrews is my everything! Just thinking that I was useful to Lord Andrews makes me very happy!”
Good girl~!
For now, after washing the dishes, I took the ledger and went to the study.
I plan to include Rosalinde and hear more about the Fief.
From now on, I want Rosalinde to handle the management of the Fief and assets instead of Tris.
In return, I’m thinking of having Tris focus solely on being my assistant.
Lately, she’s mastered healing magic, magic to kill specific bacteria, and anesthesia magic, becoming a more capable surgeon than a newly graduated doctor.
It’s probably about time I could entrust simple surgeries to Tris.
Besides tending the Apothecary shop, I think I’ll also teach her how to make medicines.
Tris absolutely never complains, but that’s precisely why I need to be considerate of her…