Chapter 298: New Thorn Garden

Translator: imperfectluck Editor: Pranav

Thorn Garden, Amelia’s hundred-plus-year-old store on Stonecrystal Street, was now unrecognizable to its former self.

Now, it was a cute store that was decorated like a small forest. The products were housed in small treehouses, numerous vines and trees were the store’s pillars, and green grass constituted the most natural of floorboards. The cute wood spirits worked busily as the hardworking employees, while the tall strengthened outer-shell treants became the store’s security guards. Incredibly, this unconventional decorative style had already attracted many customers on its own.

“Thank you for your purchase! Please come again.”

As the cashier, Rosa was very busy, but she made it a point to smile at every customer, who were all, quite evidently, satisfied.

The wood spirits were busy as well, dashing around and smiling warmly as they served the customers. From some female mages and acolytes, high-pitched exclamations—”So cute!””Let this big sister hug you!”—reached my ears.

“Yesterday, this place was clearly nothing but rubble!”

Jinya’s muttering made me turn around and glare at the bastards I had to bail out of Mage Country’s jail. I compared them to the hard-working wood spirits and, once again, seriously considered whether or not I should toss all these bastards into an ocean trench or tie them to a gnome rocket and shoot them into the sky.

Why was there such a huge difference between the wood spirits and these bastards? I nodded in satisfaction as I continued observing the wood spirits, but when I entered the store…

“Ah, Father, you’ve returned.”

The moment Rosa greeted me, everyone glanced in my direction. The looks of disbelief and shock from the customers were too awkward for me to handle.

“Daddy!!”

“Dad, Little Red 232 has worked very hard today. Did you see me?”

“Father, we made a lot of profit today.”

Full of joy, the wood spirits scampered up to me and hopped up and down as they showed off their accomplishments. Meanwhile, all the customers were looking at me in more and more of an unfriendly fashion…

Apart from their somewhat strange plant parts, wood spirits greatly resembled young elves. Since I hadn’t yet started spreading news of the existence of this miraculous new species—I was intending to save it for the Truth Symposium conference—most people would believe that the wood spirits were young female elves who simply preferred to dress up in nature’s style. Some sharply perceptive individuals, however, noticed that they weren’t entirely the same as elves. However, that was a bad thing because…

“He’s actually making such young daughters of his work? What a scumbag.”

“Take a closer look. Some of these elves don’t have sharp ears. They’re probably all half-bloods. With so many daughters, the word scumbag isn’t even sufficient to describe him anymore. Just how many elves has this bastard fooled?”

“He’s such a playboy father? I’m so jealous!”

“They actually have numbers in their names? That means he has at least several hundred daughters? Wow. What a super mega scumbag.”

“Two Emblems of Endless Truth indicating that he’s a master of two different types of magic? Even if he’s a super powerful archmage, that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a scumbag.”

Strange comments such as these could be heard everywhere; my reputation now began developing in this strange direction. And, at such a moment, how would my System possibly forget to add fuel to the fire?

I had, once again, activated a Reputation Quest.

[Mage Country, Karo City: Venerated 20000/20000, Playboy Who’s Finally Reformed. Your Reputation has now been transferred to Mage Country, Arlo: Respected, 168/50000. The playboy shall never reform. Congratulations! You have obtained the new title, “Professional Oni Chichi.” [1] 1 Equipping this title will greatly increase your attractiveness to young girls. The classical line “Would you like to come with me for some candy?” will have its success rate massively increased. But, at the same time, adult women will be massively repulsed by you. System Notification: Stop always blaming others for making you suffer. You’re the source of all gentlemanly evils!]

The scandal I had made up in Karo City—with great difficulty, mind you—in order to increase my Reputation was no more. My reputation was now distorted even further and was destined to become stranger and stranger. While I was almost wanting to cry at this development, a certain bright and cheery obedient girl spoke up and sprinkled some extra salt on my wounds.

“Father, when Mother sees that you’ve done such a good job running her shop, she’ll surely be delighted.”

“Mother? The original owner of this store? …Amelia!” The moment the customers heard Rosa’s innocent comment, I knew everything was over for me.

“Wahhh, my angel!”

“The heavens shall smite such a scumbag!”

“Let me go! Don’t stop me! I’m going to do everything to kill that scumbag! Nothing will get in the way of my revenge! Who cares if he has two Emblems of Endless Truth? Even if he’s a two-hundred-plus-year-old ancient zombie, even if he can casually kill us with his little finger, even if he can make us fail our classes forever at his whim—hey! Why are you letting me go? Be a little more pragmatic; come back and restrain me.”

Should I say that it was to be expected of someone who had her own support group even within the Truth Symposium? As a mega-popular mage teacher, the angelic Amelia’s faked wonderful reputation was far more known to everyone than her true personality. And due to Amelia’s overt favoritism for female students, she had both male and female fans. There were now people everywhere spitting blood upon hearing my name, and countless more really wanted to beat me up. How nice that my Reputation was increasing once again… and how speechless I was.

Even though everyone was cursing me, I could only helplessly look at little Rosa who was still smiling happily, apparently not realizing what she had just done.

“You must be black-bellied underneath that pink appearance of yours.”

“Rosa isn’t black at all. It’s our duty as your daughters to watch you well and make sure you don’t get up to no good with other women while Mother isn’t here.”

Alright then, that perfectly innocent brilliant smile of hers made me be at a loss at how to punish her for the trouble she had just put me in. After all, she wasn’t like the group of bastards behind me, with ridiculously thick skin that could endure anything—including being shot out of a gnome cannon. If I did such a thing to Rosa, my infamous reputation would gain the title of “loli abuser,” adding to my list of crimes.

So, I could only helplessly shake my head as I picked up this pink little troublemaker who was definitely secretly black-bellied and entered a private room in the store. As for all the cries of “demon father!” and “lolicon!” behind me, I could only pretend to ignore them.

As for the way my reputation was turning out? Forget it, I didn’t have any hopes for my reputation helping me anyways. Even when I was studying here, I didn’t manage to get a single girlfriend, so this time was probably the same. And since the result was going to be the same, who cared if my reputation kept getting worse and worse? At least I didn’t think I had any regrets. I definitely wasn’t disappointed because I couldn’t disguise myself as planned in becoming a teacher to flirt with the female students that didn’t know anything about me—nope. Definitely not.

As for those tears forming in my eyes? That must just be a mistaken impression.

“Forget it, forget it. That’s just my life.”

[It’s 99% your fault.]

“It’s 100% your fault.”

Alright then, the System and the silly cat’s comments came simultaneously. Should I be thankful that, at least, the System had a better impression of me?

[Relax. There’s no such thing as an absolute, and based on my logical calculations, there’s still at least a miniscule chance for you to obtain a girlfriend, although it’s a decimal with many zeros. Would you like for me to help calculate it for you? 0.000…]

“No! Stop spreading salt on my wounds!”

I decided to ignore my System and the silly cat, as I was rather interested in a different topic.

“Rosa, what are you all selling? The products I’m preparing haven’t arrived yet. Are you all doing some type of wood spirit coffee house here or something?”

Yes, that was what mystified me. I had just finished purchasing a new workshop as Amelia’s experimental laboratory was now nothing more than rubble. The magical engineering technological products weren’t ready yet, so how did these young wood spirits make the store so popular?

“Although Mother wasn’t skilled at business, the products of her research are excellent, and her Emblem of Endless Truth in plant magic helps her reputation. For those who have needs for her plant products, she’s actually considerably popular. It’s just that Mother’s pricing system and product availability were too unreasonable. Her magical plants have great combat strength and are actually one of her most popular products we’ve been selling, but Mother actually priced the magical plant seeds at 15,000 gold coins apiece, when they cost her less than 10 gold coins to make. That made the plant seeds into a mega-luxury item that few could afford. Of course she would be unable to sell any of them. The reverse is true as well. She priced many items too cheaply, and they always sold out instantly. However, she priced them so low that she barely profited, and Mother was too lazy to restock those products.”

After hearing all this, I understood. Actually, Amelia did not have a dearth of successful research products that she could profit from. As a top-level plant magic expert, how could she possibly lack research results? However, Amelia lacked people she could trust, so there was no one around her who could advise her on how to manage her finances. She priced all her products at whatever she wanted, and it were the random byproducts from her research that were placed on the shelves of her Thorn Garden store. Whenever she started a new research project, she would never consider how she could make back her money. It was only natural for her to be in such a huge amount of debt.

“So you and the other wood spirits repriced all the items Amelia left behind in the warehouse.”

“Yep. We used our new techniques to enchant or improve them and also added our wood spirit products as well. Today’s the first day we tried this, and it’s so popular already. There’s also the fact that Mother’s store has been closed for so long, so there’s a large demand on the market for high quality plant magic goods. The new customers probably heard about us from the returning customers.”

Seeing the little financial expert Rosa speak so confidently on this subject made me truly feel that Amelia needed to start learning from Rosa. With Rosa’s assistance and my special products that should be ready for sale soon, this hundred-plus years old store—famous for never turning a profit—might soon become one of the top ten most profitable stores in the Cloud Tower. It could maybe even challenge some of the biggest mage organizations’ stores which had been open for more than a millennium.

Was it supposed to be unusual for mages to open up their own stores? It did seem wrong that academics needed to be concerned about money, but that was the difference between ideals and reality. Since tuition fees and researching new magic all required large amounts of money and resources, even the richest person would eventually go bankrupt if they only spent money without having any income in return. Mages had to learn how to make money first in order to spend money.

Low-ranked mages had their ways to earn money. They could copy and sell magical scrolls or simply work for mid and high-ranked mages. After all, low-ranked mages had less expenditures, so that was plenty for them. Meanwhile, top-ranked mages would typically require several hundred thousand gold coins for a research project, where failure meant they would lose their entire investment. Any mage who didn’t know how to manage their money would eventually become deeply entrenched in debt, just like Amelia.

Actually, just like the researchers in my previous world, it was quite easy for mages to turn their research results into mountains of gold coins. Rechargeable enchantments for weapons and equipment, cannon fodder-level magical familiars, potions, newly invented weapons and equipment, various applications of magic in daily life and so on were all fields that were highly profitable.

For example, I knew of a mage organization named “Dance of Darkness” which mostly consisted of mages interested in summoning magic. They were particularly skilled at taming magical beasts. Apart from selling various summoned creatures and contracted magical pets, their horses were so popular that they dominated over seventy percent of the horse market. That was a long-term, consistent source of income for them.

Enchantment specialist mages would open up enchantment stores, while alchemists would never lack money as they were experts in creating magical products and equipment. If you were an archmage with a monopoly on some special technology or product, then you could simply lay in bed and count your money.

The archmages who didn’t have any research results to sell could hire themselves out as mercenaries or adventurers, and copying high-level magical scrolls was also a well-paid job. As long as a person paid even the slightest attention and, when they were out of money, stopped their research and went to find work for a while, no mage would starve to death.

Alright then, I might as well make fun of Amelia a little here. Although she was someone who possessed the Emblem of Endless Truth in plant magic, not to mention that she had a monopoly over the highest-level plant magic products, it was quite abnormal how she managed to be so pathetically poor and riddled with debt.

And now, with a little helper like Rosa, I wouldn’t need to worry about the store anymore. Originally, I had been concerned about whether that group of bastards would be able to run the store…

Since I didn’t have to worry about the store’s daily operations, I could now focus on preparing the products for sale and what new products to develop. But, of course, my goal had never been something as simple as opening a store to make some money.

Notes:

[1] TL/N: Oni Chichi is a rather famous Japanese hentai about a father and his daughters.

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