Chapter 122: Chapter 115 – Behind the Scenes

"Wait, say that again?!"

A giant of a man, wearing a single white sheet over his shoulder and wrapped around his torso over a simple tunic and pants, complete with sandals, rose up and slammed his hands on the desk in front of him.

"She failed."

Sitting with a straight back, mostly unresponsive to the sudden outburst of the man across from him was a man wearing the same outfit. But this man man's sinewy figure caused himself to look shrunken in his loose outfit, compared to the large man who's pecks were barely contained in his own tight clothes.

"I gave you a champion! Just like you wanted! And she was even the best I could find on such short notice!"

"That was your best? Really?"

"You think I can just wave my hand and conjure a champion like it's just water? Even in all the words we receive souls from, one truly good only appears once every few decades! I did everything I could to provide you with the best champion available! What about you? Did you really supply her with everything she needed for the job?"

"No, sorry. I didn't mean to, umm...anyways, it doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter?! This is our godhood we're risking here! How in the multiverse does it not matter?!"

"Sorry, right. It's not that it doesn't matter. It's that her failure was a good thing."

"How?"

The large man, to the unexpected response, forcibly held back his boiling anger. If he didn't, not even he knew how he would act at this point. At the very least, he himself wanted to avoid such an event.

"Since she failed, it means our target would have relaxed her guard."

Thankfully for the two men, the thin man's words managed to avoid making the large man's blood from boiling over.

"I see..."

But even then, it was just barely. The giant of a man was still furious, and he made no attempt to hide that fact.

"It's only unfortunate that she seemed to have betrayed us."

"What?!"

"Like I said, she seemed to have betrayed us. Maybe she realized that you were lying to her."

"She seemed a bit too stupid to notice. And excited when I sent her down."

"Maybe, but the target convinced her to quit. At least we got a decent recording."

The lean man touched a few buttons on a screen hovering in the air above his desk. In a few short moments the figure of a person in a pitch black hooded cloak appeared. The only clear thing about the figure was that she had silvery white hair draped over her left shoulder and tied with a pastel pink bow dangling at her thigh.

"Oh, very good. We know that she likes to wear black."

"Shut it."

The smaller man quickly rebuked his larger partner for his mocking tone and pressed a few more buttons. The blurry background quickly grew too light to distinguish any remaining details, but in turn the shadows under the figure's hood receded, revealing the face of an unmatched beauty.

"Looks like she maxed out the beauty slider. Maybe she's pretty vain?"

"Maybe, but I doubt she'd be too vain. Her soul is quite close to being fully matured."

"Guess you have a point."

Now that he could fully see the woman's face, the large man's anger had mostly passed, and instead his professionalism had taken over.

"I hope the reason why you're not so concerned about our failed assassin isn't because we finally have a picture of our target."

"No, of course not. But this picture makes things quite a bit easier. It'll allow the real assassins to get a positive ID on the target."

"Real assassins?!"

The large man couldn't help but yell at the information. He had not been aware that the champion he had gone through so much effort to provide wasn't the real attempt in the first place.

"That's right. The one I had you send was a dummy. Her job was only to make the target complacent and to get us information on her so the real assassins would have a better chance at doing their job."

"And?"

While he was still upset at being left in the dark, he knew his priorities and pushed down those feelings.

"Well, it doesn't look like she did a good job of making the target complacent. If anything, she might be even more cautious than before."

"Let me guess. She wasn't even aware we might be after her?"

"I can't say for sure, but the chances aren't zero."

The large man sighed, but things were too late for complaining about that.

"On the other hand, we have a lot of good information regarding her. Her appearance, a bit of her powers, and a not insignificant amount of location information."

"And, you think it's enough?"

"I think so. I think I know where she's based at."

"We knew that much beforehand!"

"No, we speculated. Now we can say with confidence."

"Fine. And?"

"And, I can send in the real assassins with this information. I'm making sure they're as ready as possible as well."

"Fine. Everything's on this. If it doesn't work, it's only a matter of time before we're both caught."

"I know. I'll make sure we don't get found out."

With those words, the thin man turned his focus back to the still image in front of him. The target, which had given him and his partner in crime no end of grief for simply existing.

 

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I was in pure grief. It was like I existed for that purpose.

"Here's some more."

"Again?!"

A demon came in to the simple room I was currently occupying. There was only a desk and a bunch of boxes stacked on shelves. Each box was labelled and contained various sheets of wood or bark. Documents, or what passed for them in this world.

They were bulky, inconvenient, and just plain a pain to use, but parchment was way too expensive to use in the quantities we needed and there weren't any decent paper substitutes. I had tried my hand at making pulp paper on the side, but the faded brown cardboard wasn't exactly usable. The pulp was just too dark and would be a serious source of eye strain when the surface colour wasn't different enough from the ink used to write on it.

Without any bleach, there was no way to get this to work. There was the Kraft process, but setting up something like that would take a lot of work, which I didn't exactly have time for.

Fortunately ink wasn't an issue in itself, as charcoal ground up into a fine powder, then combined with vegetable oil made surprisingly good ink. And it was easy to mass produce to boot.

Combined with light coloured wood and bark, the end result was good enough for the short term, though I really hoped that we could find a better solution. This wasn't a status quo I would like to continue for years on end.

But what was making me miserable wasn't the quality of writing tools at my disposal, but what was written on these documents.

Requisition requests, compensation, and all the paperwork in between.

During the day, my life ended up being filled with that.

After the establishment of the Hourai Commonwealth, one of the most important projects that had been set up was reorganizing the system to gather materials from the dungeon.

The system itself was based on the adventurers' guild in the light lands.

From monster materials to food ingredients, all of it was requisitioned through this new organization, and all the hunters and gatherers worked by taking the requests posted by this group.

We ended up calling it the Hunter's Guild, as that was an apt description. And as it was both my idea and was the most familiar with its function, I was volunteered to lead the project. If I realized how busy managing it would become, I wouldn’t have accepted this position.

Nobody had to use the Hunter's Guild to get things from the dungeon, or to even gather their own materials, but the streamlining process of it made it so easy for people to get the materials they wanted as well as hunters to get jobs, that it quickly overshot the traditional way of doing things for most people.

There were still some stubborn holdouts that preferred the old way, but I wasn't concerned about them. If people wanted to hire specific people to get their things, they could do that on their own. That wasn't the purpose of the Hunter's Guild, nor did I want to take over those duties either.

The main reason being because we were swamped.

With two settlements being built up from almost nothing but an already existing large population, the sheer number of requests for materials was staggering. And the fact that the dark people naturally had a high hunter population in the first place, meant that the personnel to do the available jobs also existed, causing an incredibly fast turnaround for the requests.

This meant that the number of requests that came to the guild to be approved and posted, then completed and delivered was extremely high.

Added to the fact that the dark lands didn't really work on a monetary system of any kind and instead bartered for everything, while the fairies mostly only bartered favours between each other and only used money when dealing with outside groups, we had to build our own monetary system.

Or to be exact, I just copied the one used by the light lands as closely as I could. But since we didn't trade with them in the first place, combined with the fact that we needed to make our own coins, meant that the prices of things were probably wildly different from the outside world.

And that didn't take into consideration that the coins we minted were different as well. Copying existing coins didn't make much sense, so I instead fashioned a new set of moulds out of some adamantium ingots and hired a few artisans to smelt the coins for us.

It took some time to get the dark people to accept the idea of using coins, but once we convinced the people that it was just an easier way to deal with payments when an intermediary like the hunter's guild was involved, it ended up being accepted once they realized how complicated negotiating prices without a currency became.

Just by having hunters be able to take any request they wanted without having to negotiate what sort of product they would be compensated with meant that those two groups quickly got on board with the idea. Once things got that far, with the Hunter's Guild being responsible for nearly all of the materials being brought out of the dungeon, pretty much everyone else was forced to start using the coins as well.

Most complaints were dealt with once the idea of wages and payment for services, not just goods, were accepted.

So, with two buildings, each right beside one of the entrances of the dungeon, the Hunter's Guild was established as the main tool to extract the riches of the dungeon.

But at the same time, this sort of thing was way beyond most of the people who lived in either settlements.

To the dark people, physical writing was for preserving important moments of history or delivering messages long distance. Not for quickly disposable notes and requests. And obviously the fairies entirely did away with physical writing for anything but art, so the idea of a practical use for them was pretty alien. It was something other people did, not themselves.

And while I did get help, I had to teach them all everything about paperwork from the beginning. And even after they were trained, I had to oversee it all as letting them loose on such an important duty without any supervision was bound for trouble.

Which was quickly proven with all the errors in the paperwork I had been catching.

Really, it felt like my job was more about catching everyone's mistakes and lecturing them about what was wrong and how to do things better.

So, for the third time this day, one of the workers plopped down a crate full of bark sheets. Each one was a request application that needed to be approved or a completed one that needed to be confirmed on.

We had been operating for a few months already, yet it was still necessary for me to check every request both on the way in and out. The sheer number of errors, and ones that I can fix without even consulting the involved parties, were so numerous that it was depressing.

I had seriously considered countless ways to improve and streamline things, but as things stood, I didn't have the time to implement any of them. Not when every one involved either training the existing employees on something new or hiring new hands and training them.

Not when my current subordinates made as many mistakes as they did.

It was quite amazing for a society that had a hundred percent literacy rate to be completely inept at handling paperwork.

I didn't know if my starting standards were just too high in general or that the people I got were just too muscle headed. It could be both. I had enough evidence for both options after all.

Putting aside the pile of documents I was working on, I picked up the first sheet from the new pile. With deft movements of my aura, I marked all the mistakes I found and burned in etchings to correct them. Once I ran my eyes across the sheet a third time and felt confident there weren't any serious errors left, I stretched my aura over to a large box beside my desk and lifted up a brand new sheet of bark.

Once that was in my hand, I ran a finger across its surface as I stared at the original sheet. The scent of wood smoke rose up once again as I etched a copy of the document onto the new sheet, complete with all the corrections.

In just a couple of minutes, I had fixed all the mistakes in the document, and reformatted it into an easy to read format on a new sheet.

The old sheet was tossed over my shoulder and went into a massive garbage bin, which one of my subordinates would empty later on. Usually two or three times a day.

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(I really need to get that printing press working.)

That one thing alone should cut down a third of the work I was doing in an instant, but the progress wasn't going too well. The main problem was that the bark sheets we were using were inconsistent when it came to all sorts of properties, from thickness, size, shape, and even its cut. Lots of the sheets had holes in them due to the knots the trees the came from having. Despite it all coming from the dungeon, waiting for the trees to regrow wasn't too feasible as we relied on using the near white inner layer on the paper thin bark of a particular type of tree.

It seemed to be a specific variety of birch tree.

The problem was that it was not a very common tree in the dungeon floors we had found it on as it stood, and it took a while to respawn. The quantity of paper that was being used, not just by the Hunter's Guild, but throughout both of the settlements, was huge.

Not just as documents of various types, but as package wrappers, decorations, kindling for those who can't use [fire magic], and countless other uses, many of which I wasn't even aware of and kept discovering every few weeks.

Lots of bark was being passed through the guild, and only a fraction of that I was able to acquire to make all the documents we were using. This meant that we couldn't be picky when it came to what sheets we got and had to use.

It was an unfortunate problem, but that alone wasn't the only reason why the printing press wasn't working.

The bark sheets were also just too small to be efficient. The press was most efficient. if it could be used to press multiple sheets at once, but pressing multiple small sheets was a nightmare when they all had a tendency of curling up. And that didn't take into consideration all the time it took to seal them into place so they could be pressed.

If we could get large sheets and cut those up after they've been pressed, it would be idea, but the birch trees they come from aren't even that large in diameter in the first place, so such a thing wasn't possible.

 

"Mmmmm...!"

I stretched my arms and spine as I leaned back in my seat.

[Are you finished?]

"Yea. Even if any more requests come today, it's too late to have them processed. They'll have to wait for tomorrow."

I wasn't really tired, physically at least. My vampiric body dealt with exhaustion quite well, and along with my high strength stat I wasn't suffering any muscle strain anywhere in my body.

But the mental strain was quite immense. It felt like the paperwork was constantly increasing, no matter how hard I tried to make it go away, I'd only manage it sometime around the time the scent of food drifted in along with the red sky.

Working from dawn to dusk made me want to complain to a labour union, but such things didn't exist.

Once I tried to drag one of the elders to help me out.

I had learned my lesson after I was forced to work well into the night that day due to the mess Frigg made. I had thought she would be at least competent when it came to procedural things, but her talent at doing any sort of paperwork was about as bad as anyone else.

Elli on the other hand...I couldn't see her being any good at it either, and the rest were all even bigger muscle heads so they were right out.

It seemed like leadership skills and paper skills had nothing to do with each other in this world. At least when it came to the dark people.

And when it the fairies and fluffballs...

The image of Aurae getting bored before finishing the first sentence and start bugging me for a snack was the image that came to mind. I'd probably be lucky if she read even two sentences before falling for the temptation.

And as for the spirits...I seriously wondered even with the hidden literacy skill if they were capable of reading. Claret might have been able to do some work, but relying on her on paperwork worried me, and it was only a temporary solution at best.

In addition, she seemed happier when I sent her to do errands in the first place.

Having her do paperwork all day would likely be much less satisfying compared to being at my beck and call to do menial work. It sounded bad, but it meant that she would feel that she was doing work that I specifically asked her to do, rather than just doing something on the side because I needed it to be done.

That perceived degree of separation would be a lot to her after all.

So thus, once I realized that much, I hadn't worked up the courage to even ask her of it. There was no way she would refuse in the first place after all.

Before anything else could stop me from leaving, my ever loyal spirit familiar wrapped her arms around my shoulders and settled into her usual spot on my back. On my way out, I waved at the one remaining employee who stayed in case something happened when everyone else was gone, and quickly exited the guild building.

But it seemed that my plans weren't to come to fruit after all.

"Oh, Scarlet!"

The one who turned to call for me right as I closed the front door was Elli.

She had made it look like she was walking past and coincidentally noticed me, but [Sense Presence] told me that she was only standing around across from the building before I opened the door.

(I wish if she wanted to ask something of me, she'd put her pride aside and just ask me straight.)

"Did you just finish?"

"Yea. Today's work is done, and I doubt anything special'll come up when everyone's on their way home for dinner."

"I suppose that is true."

(She supposes?)

It was the same for everyone aside from me who usually only ate once or twice a day. As someone who was in charge of coordinating the major projects of her group and parts of the town she was in charge of, she was especially aware of this fact. She too had to send most of her subordinates home by this time.

"Is there something wrong?"

Suppressing a sigh, I gave up and asked her. It was probably something small which she didn't want to blow out of proportions, or maybe something too embarrassing to let people start talking about.

"Oh, actually, if you do not mind, there is something."

But before asking her question, Elli waved her arm and we started to walk together through the noisy streets.

"I was trying one of your recipes to serve at dinner, but it wasn't turning out very well at all."

After a minute of hesitation, Elli finally admitted to what it was she wanted to talk about.

"Maybe we should hurry then."

"Thank you!"

Reading my implicit agreement, her eyes narrowed as Elli's cheeks rose up.

We transitioned into a quick jog as we made our way to Elli's home.

 

In the end the problem wasn't quite that bad at all.

The breaded charge boar was coming out too oily because she wasn't letting it rest properly before preparing it to make katsudon. The end result wasn't very satisfying, or at least that's what she claimed it was like when she tested the recipe for her breakfast.

As to why she would eat something that heavy for breakfast, I refrained from asking.

By providing a simple rack to allow the deep fried meat to stand on its side to drip, the resultant meat was able to be quite crispy without tasting like it was still swimming in oil.

"Thank you very much Scarlet! It truly is incredible how using these seeds and eggs could make meat taste so much better!"

"No problem. You guys had your own circumstances when it came to food, so it's no surprise that you didn't know."

As the dokkalfar, or all the dark races for that matter, hunted for all their food, the concept of farming, and thus raising cereal crops was quite foreign. Even now they had no idea how farming even worked, but it wasn't really very important as we could gather all the grains we wanted from the dungeon.

And these grains were used to make a wide variety of differing foods. While bread, noodles, and rice was still something most of the dark people refrained from using too much, if I made it a necessary part of a meal, they would wholeheartedly go for it.

Katsudon was one of those types of foods. The abundance of rice was something they found awkward to eat, but together with lots of juicy meat, they gobbled it all up.

Though this hesitation when it came to grains wasn't universal. The demons liked the portability of sandwiches and filled buns, while the titans came to love grains due to how well it scaled to their size. Thick noodles, giant loaves of bread, or even massive bowls of rice or porridge were all game to them. Especially when they were mixed with something flavourful.

It seemed that the titans had trouble when it came to cooking in general, as their need for a larger amount of food was limited by their ability to cook them due to their size.

Processing the food they hunted was problematic at the best of times despite how dexterous their hands were. For their size at least.

Watching them work was quite amazing, handling things that were meant for being much smaller them, while often using tools much too big for the task just so they fit in their hands. It was especially apparent in their artisans when they were making or maintaining things for the other races.

But that amazing dexterity still fell short when it came to food. Especially when they had to make quantities that suited their larger bodies, both processing a monster carcass and cooking it up adequately withing a reasonable time frame was difficult to say the least, and in the end they resorted to simply eating third rate food.

Things were different if they could just deal with it on a larger scale more suitable for them, and that was where the dishes I had introduced found themselves. Most grains could be crushed before being further processed into an end product. They scaled quite well as long as you were willing to cook them more slowly at a lower temperature. But even that longer cooking time wasn't so long that it was troublesome for the titans, and the results were well worth it.

"Anyways, I think you'll be fine from here on, but I'll give you something else just in case."

Out from my bag came a pair of bottles filled with liquids.

"These are some new things that were recently finished. You can experiment with them later, but for now, try them like this."

I pulled out a sheet of bark and burned in a simple recipe onto it, using the two new ingredients.

"They're still prototypes, so tell me what you think of them."

"Is that fine? For us to be the first to sample them?"

"Well, it's a risk I'm willing to take. I'm pretty sure they'll be decent, but how good they are you'll find out tonight."

I gave her a wry smile before turning to leave.

With the quantity of ingredients prepared, it was obvious that Elli was having guests over, so it was better to exit before they arrived. The worst case would be if they thought that I had made the meal and thought Elli was trying to steal credit.

"I am sure with your [cooking] skill rank, it would be wonderful. Thank you! As always, we are in your debt!"

"It's fine. You're going to be my guinea pigs after all."

I tugged my hood down as I through a wave over my shoulder.

The liquids which I had provided were prototypical soy sauce and mirin, or a type of cooking rice wine. They were the most important ingredients to make the soup to boil katsudon, but up until then I was forced to teach the recipe without them. Even just from the scent I could tell that the resultant food was second rate despite my best efforts, but thanks to Claret's diligent work to accelerate the fermentation process using her magic, I finally had a prototype version of those two, along with several other sauces ready to be tested.

Fermentation which would've taken months for the mirin, or as much as two years for the soy sauce was done in only a fraction of that time.

Her skill in [dimensional magic], something which I was still struggling to learn, wasn't high, but it was enough to accelerate time in a single spot by ten times. While she couldn't do it all day or something due to both her MP as well as her desire to stay by my side, but a bunch of barrels in a corner while I worked on other things in the same room overnight was possible.

And in three months they were finished, along with several other sauces.

Whether they were any good or not though, that was something I needed to rely on others for, but hopefully it would be a hit with Elli's friends.

The recipe itself was quite simple. Fish based soup stock, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar simmered together until incorporated, then add chopped onions. Once cooked, add chopped the breaded and deep fried pork cutlets and top it all off with eggs then cover. Once the eggs were half cooked, serve on top of a large bowl of rice.

It was pretty amusing though.

Ever since the meetings discussing the new nation's creation was finished, several of the dark people had suddenly expressed interest in learning to cook. The fact that Elli was one of them was especially surprising, though I had no reason to deny her.

Overall though, this was quite a good thing for me. Good food meant that the people would be happier.

It wasn't like good food alone would change a depressed populace into a happy one, but it alone could raise the people an entire grade up, as long as that good food was easily accessible by the majority of the population.

Having plentiful raw resources to make that food was obviously the first step, but without having plenty of producers to turn that raw material into products ready to be consumed would make the availability in the end pretty low.

Fortunately there were plenty of people to both gather the raw materials and willing people to learn how to cook, and along with plentiful recipes, the only thing left was some of the more difficult to produce things like fermented sauces.

Taking a glance down a wide road that split from the main road I was walking down, the sight of street shops selling all sorts of food ingredients as well as some stands which sold simple ready made foods reached my view.

Such a thing didn't exist when I had first found out about this town, yet now such a market was thriving like it had been there the entire time.

All this really drove home just how important the Hunter's Guild had become, as if it wasn't for that, the ease of which the raw materials reached the producers wouldn't have existed.

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