When I got back to the house, I found Ma-chan looking for me.
“Where the hell did you go, Leopin-kun? You didn’t come back for a long time, so I was running around looking for you!
“Oh, I was just setting up some stuff, are you done with that?”
“Yeah, look at that!”
In the field were piles and piles of wheat sheaves.
“All right, then, let’s load this wheat on the cart …… and get on with it.”
As soon as I say it, the merchant who is about to run out is called out as if she was stupid.
“Puh-lease?”
As I looked, I saw a group of three people walking towards me from the entrance of the forest, including a male student wearing a nobleman’s jacket, the headmaster and the vice principal.
Ma-chan asks in a mixture of surprise and disgust.
“Oh, Master Payper, how did you get here?”
Then the boy called Payper thrust a paper bag at me, giving me a look.
“Here, I’ll give you some of this, it’s flour we carry in the store.”
The more I ignore him, the more obnoxious Peyper’s attitude becomes.
“Pay, I mean you, there, trash.
I’m offering you a special gift of the finest flour you’ll ever eat.
Why don’t you get your ass over here and get it, or are you so pathetic that you can’t even understand a word I’m saying?”
Still, I ignore him, and Payper approaches, mumbling.
He clenched his fist around the paper bag and thrust it at me, right under my nose.
“I think we have a deal.
I’ll trade one kilo of this flour, which is sold at the purchasing department for 10,000 Yen, for some wheat grass here.”
Ma-chan is giddy.
“Wait, Mr. Payper!
There’s enough wheatgrass here to fill a whole field!
I can’t believe you traded that for a measly kilo of flour. ……!”
“‘Oh, I know, Ma-chan, I know.
You’re trying to tell me that the top-quality flour that our wealthy merchant association deals in is completely out of proportion to the low-quality wheatgrass that the garbage grows?
Don’t get me wrong, I am paying it forward, including the wheatgrass that will be growing in the fields.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah!”
I listened to the exchange between the payer and the merchant as if it were someone else’s business, and somehow tried to “appraise” the contents of the paper bag in front of me.