On the twenty-first of September,
The ransom for a single Firebird Legion soldier was ten gold Fordes. Fifty thousand men came to nearly five hundred thousand gold coins, and with Grand Duke Fausta added in, along with those Gold Knights, Silver Knights, and the like, a bundled price of one million gold Fordes was, it could be said, a fair and impartial price. Fatty Shi hadn't cut any corners, and Duchess Windsor hadn't leveraged their past relationship to gain much of a bargain either.
However, Grand Duke Fausta had made a suggestion to Fatty Shi. Since the Firebird Legion's surrender, the Norton Family's forces had confiscated all of the Firebird Legion's weapons and equipment, meaning the soldiers ransomed back by the Fausta family would return empty-handed—all their weaponry had been seized by the Norton Family to equip two newly formed city defense regiments in
Had it been anyone else looking to buy weapons and equipment, Fatty Shi would have been overjoyed—this was a massive deal. A single soldier's set of standard-issue equipment cost at least sixty gold Fordes, meaning a complete equipment deal for the entire Firebird Legion would run at least three million gold Fordes. Simply put, a set of standard-issue equipment was worth far more than a sturdy soldier. But since it was Grand Duke Fausta making the purchase, with the question of friend or foe still unsettled, Fatty Shi didn't dare make the call. He planned to bring Grand Duke Fausta and Duchess Windsor back to Morant City to meet with Lorist before discussing the matter further.
In addition to this matter, Fatty Shi reported receiving word from the family's territories—Princess Sylvilya and the two consorts Fenagali and Daisy had boarded a ship at Northsea City and were heading for Shelwas Island, expected to arrive in two days. So Fatty Shi planned to wait on the island for two days, and once all three ladies had arrived, they would return to Morant City together.
Why had Sylvilya suddenly decided to come? Lorist rubbed his temples, feeling a headache coming on. Could it be that Sylvilya had heard some news about Duchess Windsor being his first love, and was getting jealous—throwing a little tantrum to come and measure herself against the woman? That shouldn't be the case—he had refused to meet with Duchess Windsor, and he'd been on his best behavior in Morant City, doing nothing that Sylvilya could hold against him...
After thinking for a while, Lorist still couldn't make heads or tails of it. Forget it—if the heavens want to rain and mothers want to marry, these are things no one can stop. He'd just wait until Sylvilya and the others arrived. At worst, he would have to be extra attentive and coax her a bit. Who told Sylvilya to be ten years his junior? Since marrying him, they had always been apart more than together, with him constantly off at war while she clung to him so dearly, worrying herself sick over his safety—it must have been hard on her. This time, with them coming to Morant City, he would spend proper time with them and treat it as a vacation.
Two days later, Manager Spell requested an audience. During this trip to Morant City, Manager Spell had been put in charge of managing the POW camp in the harbor district, and had been racking his brain to squeeze money out of the more than one hundred thousand residents of the inner city. After Fatty Shi and Count Cait of the Commercial Alliance had reached a comprehensive agreement regarding the ransom and transportation of those residents, the past two months had seen the plan nearly carried out to completion. Over ninety thousand inner city residents, having spent their last copper coin at the POW camp, had been granted their freedom and transported in batches to Mawefulin Province. The Norton Family had raked in nearly seven million gold Fordes in cash revenue, along with countless jewels, premium furs, jade, and luxury goods...
But this time, Manager Spell had come to lodge a protest. There remained over ten thousand of the most stubborn misers in the camp who refused to spend freely. Every day, beyond the two free bowls of thin porridge so watery you could count every single grain of rice, they spent as little as possible, buying only a bit of bread to stave off hunger—even when Manager Spell had jacked the price of bread up tenfold. Facing the relentless stream of protest documents that Count Cait had been firing off for over a month, Lorist finally grew fed up and ordered the release of all these misers who still retained most of their personal wealth.
"Your Highness, please give me one more month. I can definitely squeeze every last gold coin out of those misers. Just one more month, and our family will extract an additional million gold Fordes from these people..." Manager Spell thumped his chest, his eyes red with determination as he made his promise.
"Release them all. To us, a month is worth more than a million gold Fordes. We have more important matters ahead, and there's no need to delay our plans for this petty sum. You should also extricate yourself from the POW camp — you can't keep wasting all your time there." Lorist shook his head and refused Manager Spell's request.
Lorist had his reasons. Although Tagal had dispatched capable men to create the illusion for the Commercial Alliance that Morant City was still engulfed in bloody chaos, with so many people involved and time dragging on, inadvertent slips would inevitably arouse suspicion among those who were paying attention. For instance, the request for the Commercial Alliance to dispatch more capable personnel to sneak into Morant City and incite even greater rioting had succeeded twice more — the Alliance had been fooled into sending two batches of nearly a hundred men. After Genorio and Reddy dealt with them, however, the Alliance seemed to have caught on to something being amiss, and no further requests could convince them to send more.
Having already gained control of the entire city's situation, everything was developing in a better direction.
Moreover, before long, the private shipowners from the southern seas would flock to Hidden Gold Bay to land and enter the city to purchase goods and conduct trade, and Morant City would once again become bustling and lively. Although Count Cait and the released inner city residents were confined to the grain storage base outside the eastern gate, even the most tight-knit Norton Family guards posted there could not block out the nighttime sounds of singing, laughter, and celebratory toasts from within Morant City drifting beyond the walls. Besides, what riot-stricken city would have brilliant lights and drifting music at night? Anyone who saw it would grow suspicious.
That was why Lorist decided it was best to escort these inner city residents and Count Cait out of the territory sooner rather than later. Sending them away from Morant City now could keep the Commercial Alliance fooled for a while longer, preventing them from discovering the truth and, in desperation, mounting a do-or-die assault on the Norton Family's forces. Lorist had no intention of letting the family's elite troops be ground down uselessly on the Mana Hill Plains.
"The Morant Self-Governance Committee has submitted a proposal to me. They will apply to our family for a loan of ten million gold Fordes to sustain Morant City's commercial development and establish an armed force. I've agreed. Once you've wrapped up affairs at the POW camp, go negotiate the loan terms with the Morant City Self-Governance Committee. The terms don't need to be harsh, but they shouldn't be too generous either — standard commercial lending rates will do." Lorist said to Manager Spell.
To put it in more realistic terms, what they called a commercial loan was essentially usury — lending nine and demanding thirteen back, and the like. Take the Temple of Goddess Sejin, patron of commerce and wealth, which amassed its riches through currency exchange and issuing high-interest loans. The gold yuan notes, for example, were issued by the Goddess Sejin Temple. Previously, some of the Commercial Alliance's merchant guilds would deposit gold Fordes at the Temple of Goddess Sejin and pay a one-percent custody and handling fee, in exchange for gold yuan notes of equal value. After that, anyone who brought a gold yuan note to the Goddess Sejin Temple could exchange it for the same face value in gold Fordes free of charge.
In a sense, the Temple of Goddess Sejin functioned like a financial institution from Lorist's previous life — one that combined issuing, storing, safeguarding, and issuing high-interest loans. All the ransoms and expenses paid by the Commercial Alliance this time had been in gold yuan notes. Perhaps the Alliance had believed that the Norton Family's forces would plunder all of Morant City, and that even the temples would suffer. That was why they had hurried to spend their gold yuan notes while they still held value, lest the Norton Family's forces raid the Temple of Goddess Sejin and render all those notes worthless paper.
When Fatty Shi and Manager Spell took those gold yuan notes to the Temple of Goddess Sejin to withdraw gold Fordes, the High Priest of the Goddess Sejin Temple said with great reluctance that redeeming these notes had swept nearly clean the gold Fordes stored in their vaults. Although Fatty Shi and Manager Spell both doubted whether the High Priest was telling the truth, the rationed distribution system for grain and daily necessities that the Commercial Alliance had enforced in Morant City over the past few years had indeed dealt a severe blow to the Goddess Sejin Temple. The commercial downturn had left the Temple unable to even find borrowers for its usurious loans.
Manager Spell leaped up as if his tail had been stepped on. "No, Your Grace, how can you make such a decision! Our family has already lent the four million gold Fordes we seized to the Morant City Autonomous Committee as working capital. How dare they be so greedy as to ask our family for another ten million gold Fordes in loans! There's absolutely no way they can repay it — you'd be throwing gold coins into the water without even hearing a splash!"
If this were a normal commercial loan with collateral, borrowing for two or three years at the standard rate of lending nine and demanding thirteen back, the ten million could yield four million in high interest. Manager Spell would never oppose such a good deal. But the Morant City Autonomous Committee's loan request this time was somewhat excessive — they wanted the Norton Family to lend a round ten million, for a five-year term, with annual interest of one million. Most importantly, they had nothing to offer as collateral, because Morant City and the Mana Hill Plains, if you calculated carefully, should be considered the Norton Family's spoils of war.
Manager Spell believed that the loan application submitted by the Morant City Autonomous Committee was a textbook example of catching a wolf with bare hands. If the Committee suddenly collapsed, the Norton Family wouldn't even know who to collect the debt from. Yet despite such an unreliable loan application, Lorist agreed to it without hesitation.
"Your Grace, think about it — our family's armed forces risked life and death to conquer the Mana Hill Plains and Morant City. It took everything we had to earn this bit of profit, and now you want to spend it here? This is nothing short of squandering the family's wealth!" Manager Spell pleaded urgently, his heart aching.
"Oh, Manager Spell, then tell me — how much profit has our family actually made in Morant City..." Lorist's voice began to turn cold.
This was something Manager Spell knew well, and he rattled it off without hesitation: "After capturing Morant City, our family's forces seized four million gold Fordes in the inner city, along with jewelry and other valuables worth around two million. Most of what we seized in the outer city was basic raw materials — although their total value was nearly ten million gold Fordes, they're of little use to our family. For instance, coarse hemp raw materials alone made up two-thirds of the haul. Shipping all that back to our family's territory would not only tie up a huge number of transport vessels, but I suspect the shipping costs would exceed the value of the raw materials themselves.
"Additionally, there was a batch of timber piled up at the seven shipyards in Hidden Gold Bay, worth nearly a million gold Fordes. Beyond that, there were miscellaneous high-end materials, wines, military equipment, premium foodstuffs, and other valuables — altogether worth another two to three million.
"Then there was the one million gold Fordes paid out, and the seven million two hundred thousand gold Fordes plus nearly two million in valuables earned from the inner city residents held in the prisoner camp.
"Your Grace, the total cash comes to just over eighteen million gold Fordes. You've already lent four million to the Morant City Autonomous Committee. On top of that, expenses like purchasing meat livestock and grain from the Christo Hills and paying Morant City residents for their services came to nearly one million gold Fordes. If you lend another ten million to the Morant City Autonomous Committee, our family will have less than three million gold Fordes remaining.
"Your Grace, I remember you once said that wars are won by logistics. Our family's armed forces have been spending enormously since joining this war. Setting everything else aside, the salaries, benefits, and subsidies for the four great field armies and the Northern Sea Fleet — nearly 140,000 men — over these three months, plus wartime bonuses and rewards, and logistics supply costs, totaled roughly one and a half million gold Fordes. Especially when you ordered five million gold Fordes transferred from the family reserves two months ago to expand the Northern Sea Fleet, and the pensions for fallen soldiers and rewards for the Northern Sea Fleet alone reached five hundred thousand gold Fordes..."
"There's no need to say anymore..." Norrist waved his hand to cut off Superintendent Spell's rambling. "I understand what you're getting at, Superintendent Spell. You're about to say that if we give the Morant City Autonomous Committee this ten-million-gold-Fordes loan, our family will be operating at a loss, aren't you? But what use do you have for ten million? You'd just ship it back to the family estates and lock it up in the treasury. Have you forgotten what I've always said? Gold coins only realize their value when they circulate through the market. Stored in a vault, they're nothing but dead weight — a number on a ledger.
What I want to remind you of, Superintendent Spell, is whether you've forgotten about our other streams of revenue. Take, for example, the profits from the grain we've been shipping and selling in Morant City. Then there's the mountain of goods and produce from our family estates piled up on Shilovas Island, which private ship captains from the Southern Seas have been snapping up at premium prices. And what about the booming business opportunities that have sprung up in Morant City ever since we lent the Autonomous Committee four million gold Fordes? To my knowledge, the bulk of the raw hemp materials our family's armed forces seized from those merchant warehouses have already been purchased by textile workshops — to the tune of nearly three million gold Fordes, isn't that right?
I trust in your loyalty to the family and to me as head of the Norton Family, but, Superintendent Spell, I regret that your eyes remain fixed on the gold coins right in front of you while overlooking far more important interests of the family. You should be well aware of what we intend to implement in Morant City going forward — that is, to support the Morant City Autonomous Committee in establishing a Free Alliance and severing ties with the Commercial Alliance.
This ten-million-gold-Fordes loan application is, if anything, a test from the Morant City Autonomous Committee toward us, the Norton Family. Their greatest fear is whether our support for them truly runs deep enough. They worry that we might secretly negotiate a peace with the Commercial Alliance and abandon them. This ten million in gold Fordes is the guarantee our family is offering them.
Superintendent Spell, you don't need to question my decision. All you need to do is carry out my orders. Of this ten-million-gold-Fordes loan, five million will go toward expanding the new legion's armed forces, giving the Free Alliance we're preparing to establish a reliable military force capable of repelling attacks from the Commercial Alliance's armed forces. This will allow our Norton Family's forces to pull out of the Mana Hill Plains theater of war entirely. The remaining five million will continue to be invested commercially in Morant City, accelerating the Free Alliance's path to self-sufficiency so that commercial tax revenue alone can sustain its ongoing development.
For me, spending ten million gold Fordes to secure a reliable transit market for the goods and produce of our family estates is the greatest thing that could happen. Today I spend ten million, but within two or three years, we'll earn back twenty million or even more from here. What you need to do, Superintendent Spell, is not oppose my decision, but go and negotiate with the Morant City Autonomous Committee on how to oversee this loan — ensuring the funds are invested where they're supposed to go rather than being embezzled or misappropriated. Do you understand?"
"Very well, I understand." Superintendent Spell sighed. "As you wish, Your Grace. I will handle this loan according to your instructions."
...