Prologue 2

Clink...

A quiet, gentle, yet stiff sound reached my ears: the sound of a teacup being placed on a saucer. It was elegant and refined. If I had done the same action, the sound would’ve been far more crude.

The ground occupied about sixty percent of my field of vision as I knelt there, gazing at a butterfly resting on the calm spring grass in front of me. A schoolgirl carrying a silver tray walked past me towards the source of the sound. I carefully looked up right about when she began lining two glass bottles atop a white table sitting in the middle of a gazebo.

The bottle on the right contained an amber liquid, my household’s merchandise. The one on the left contained a yellow liquid, my rival’s merchandise. Next to them was a plate of rectangular baked sweets. Judging from the color of the batter, they were biscuits made of refined flour that didn’t make use of any brown sugar. I see... so they planned to compare the taste of the honey by dabbing it on those biscuits.

To think I would be taking such a big risk at a tea party in the courtyard after school—one that could influence my entire future. This is why high society is so...

The girl waiting on them bowed before excusing herself, and the one sitting at the center of the table came into sight: a girl with platinum hair that went down to her waist. This was a classmate of mine.

The ones sitting beside her were noble girls wearing the same Catholic school-style uniform as the one who was waiting on them, but they still gave off an elegant air which made them look like they were from a completely different world. To use a term from my previous world, they were like idols. Setting that aside, the image of them sitting together was like a work of art.

The girl at the center was the source of this competition. Strictly speaking, she was my classmate, but classifying her so simply would probably get me executed. I fundamentally lacked any social connections to begin with, and adding on the fact that I was not a native of high society, she’s far too volatile a person to deal with.

That was exactly why I kept my distance. She had all sorts of official duties to handle and didn’t attend school much, so I never even talked to her to begin with. Owing to that, I had a critical lack of information regarding her during this critical moment. What reason does she have to intervene in a quarrel between two commoners, anyway?

And just as I looked up as far as I could to confirm what sort of expression she was making...

“How about composing yourself a little, Ricardo Weinder? You’re being ill-mannered.” The one criticizing me with a sharp gaze was a fellow male student, on his knee on the grass right next to me in the same posture. He wore a uniform made of far nicer fabrics atop his plump body than what I had on. His chestnut hair was well kept to the point where it didn’t move an inch, but I could see a slight contortion to his expression.

He surely didn’t like this situation at all, either. As the heir to the Dreyfan Company, the representative of the Culinary Guild, which also happened to be the largest of all mercantile guilds in the Kingdom, just having my merchandise lined up next to his on the same table was surely an unforgivable disgrace.

Even so, I was in complete agreement that this sudden competition was a bit of a nuisance. Actually, this was way more serious for me than it was for this rich boy. This wasn’t because I lacked confidence in my own merchandise—our Weinder Company’s “copper honey” and the Dreyfan Company’s “gold honey” differ in retail price by a factor of ten. However, there was no actual difference when it comes to the pure quality of the merchandise itself. That was because I carefully guided its reputation to be like that on purpose.

I don’t care if you’re a royal princess, or an oracle, or an oracle princess, or whatever, you got some nerve to mess with my business strategy on your own like this...

And so, I recalled the hardships of starting up a beekeeping business here in “this” world.

*

About one year ago in early autumn, on the western border of the Kingdom.

A pink carpet covered the grassy plains. It was a natural field of wildflowers native to the Kingdom with a pink tint to them, which I went on to arbitrarily name lotus flowers. The sound of buzzing honeybees busily flying about could be heard above the flowers in full bloom. And as the little girls filled their bellies, they went and returned to a beehive-like stack of boxes on the embankment.

To the west laid the Loewer Wald, a crimson forest located right on the border. I lived in a small village that almost nobody in the Kingdom even knew the name of. And this grassy plain between the village and the forest that nobody ever visited was the production area of our Weinder Company’s flagship product.

“Mm, it’s looking good.”

I dipped my little finger into the amber liquid, produced by centrifuge using a water wheel, and took a taste. A rich and sweet flavor without a single hint of eccentricity or bitterness to it tickled my tongue. This was honey, an extremely high-class product here in this world, where refined sugar didn’t exist.

Wildflowers are capable of growing with vigor, even in lands with poor soil and no source of water nearby where any form of agriculture is normally impossible. And the fruits they bear, their pale nectar, could be collected, concentrated, and processed without any human intervention. This is the fundamental energy cost behind the theory of apiculture.

The beehive I reproduced here using modern beekeeping knowledge is overwhelmingly superior in terms of production output and productivity compared to the way my rival collects honey in the wild. Moreover, the unit cost of my honey weighed to its quality is without peer. It could even be stored long-term. In other words, I could make a profit even if I were secretly manufacturing it all the way out here in a border region.

To exaggerate a little, it’s close to turning a worthless grassy plain into a gold vein. It could be said to be the perfect enterprise for the Weinder Company, who were nothing but small-time peddlers who dealt with the local villages. That’s precisely why I spent four years of hardship to bring it up to this state.

“It’s not really my own achievement, though,” I mumbled. The structure of the beehive was one thing, but even the economic model I designed this enterprise on all came from the other world.

A triangular cloud floating through the sky reminded me of the beard on my old professor from university. I barely managed to squeeze into my local university and chose a course in the economics department for no particular reason. The professor there happened to be quite the eccentric. His catchphrase was “Economics is the physics of the individual, the chemistry between people, and the ecology of society.” Normal economists simply classified things in the boring categories of micro and macroeconomics. To my professor, on the other hand, “economics” meant nothing more than viewing the entire world as a model and optimizing the flow of money.

Even after three years of studying under him, I was still just a worthless student who never even showed my gratitude. I didn’t even get the chance to apply all the profound knowledge and concepts I learned from him to the real world.

Knowledge that remains in one’s head but is never properly fostered in practice is literally like a bladeless sword on a battlefield; a weapon with zero attack power. All I could do after going into the working world barehanded was try my best every day. And those days simply passed by in a haze, one by one, as I pushed both my body and mind to their limits.

Crushed by the volume and variety of work pushed down on me, I lost my ability to control my personal relations, meager as they were to begin with. I was labeled as useless, and couldn’t even deny it, having never produced any real results. In my desperation, I even tried to read some “How to Succeed in Business” books, but all it did was give me more knowledge that I couldn’t even put to use.

The last memory I had over there was the pain from striking my brow against my desk, which brought back my consciousness for an instant, and the sensation of a mountain of unfinished papers piling over my head. One could say that I was literally crushed by my work.

When I came to, I was lying here in between this village and the Loewer Wald. Perhaps because it had just finished raining, there were puddles on the ground, and in the reflection of those puddles I saw myself, rejuvenated to a young boy who couldn’t even be through elementary school yet. I looked just like I did in a picture from an elementary school sports meet when I slammed into the ground and had a swollen cheek. Be it by teleportation or reincarnation or whatever it was, when I got here, I apparently slammed right into a tree.

However, at the time, I didn’t have the leisure to think of any of that; there was a beehive in that tree, and I desperately ran away from the angry swarm of honeybees.

“Thanks to that, I did end up remembering the time I helped my granddad out with beekeeping over the summer break to make some loose change. I never thought all that time I spent in elementary school making a miniature mockup of a beehive would actually come in handy...”

The weight of the jar in my hands brought me back from those memories of Earth, which now seemed like a distant dream or illusion.

Ironically enough, what made it possible for me to tie together the knowledge I had in my head from university with the weight of the goods in my hands was my coming here to this world. I feel like it was precisely because the environment around me was so different that I was able to digest each bit of knowledge one by one and turn them into reality. The weight in my hands was proof that they were no longer empty theories.

“We’d be able to raise our production output if we got a little closer to Loewer Wald though...”

“We’re already pushing things out here, sir.”

After I muttered upon coming back to reality, a petite girl had come up next to me before I knew it and replied. She had her black hair in braids and held a ledger in one hand. She pointed at the trees sprouting red leaves in the vicinity. They looked like autumn leaves, but they weren’t. They were this color all year round.

It was proof of Loewer Wald’s influence over the area. The honeybees didn’t care, but the villagers were too frightened and never crossed over this embankment.

“But you know, Mia, nobody’s ever seen a monster around here, right?”

I stubbornly looked to Loewer Wald, and Mia silently shook her head. If this cool-headed girl wasn’t yielding, then my only choice was to give up. Even if I was accustomed to being here, I was dragging over twenty years of knowledge from the other world with me, so my common sense isn’t reliable.

“Well, I guess the more important matter to resolve right now isn’t the output, but the market. Berthold is approaching its limits already.” Even the city which lay in the center of the Kingdom’s western region had a depressingly small market for high-class goods. What’s more...

“The merchants over there are beginning to get irritated at honey being delivered at fixed intervals when it’s supposed to be something we ‘found by coincidence.’ That’s the president’s assessment,” Mia pointed out.

“There’s no mistaking it if my father’s the one saying so. If that amount is already considered a storm of shares, then we have no choice but to expand our distribution area. We managed to gather enough funds to enroll in the capital’s academy anyway.”

The plan wasn’t quite hiding a tree in the forest. We were going to blend in with students to gather information in the capital, and slowly expand our personal connections and market. In any case, my final plan for honey output doesn’t just stop at ten or even a hundred times the current output.

“...We’re going out of the way to send a mere village girl like me all the way to the Academy. I’ll put in the work so that it isn’t a loss for the company. That includes managing your usual careless self, sir.”

This girl was once my student in mathematics, but she had long surpassed her teacher, and was now joyfully flipping through the ledger in her hands.

*

A crowd of students wearing uniforms, closer in standard to mine than this rich boy’s, surrounded the gazebo, and I spotted a petite girl among them. Surrounded by her friends, her eyes were telling me to focus on what was in front of me.

They started by pouring Dreyfan’s yellow honey onto a biscuit. A small amount of tension seized the rich boy’s body. Anybody would feel tension when it comes to the royal family. Incidentally, the one blocking our Weinder Company’s expansion into the capital was none other than this boy’s family, the Dreyfans.

The capital lay in the center of the Kingdom, and was the only place with a significantly scaled market for high-class goods. I knew full well that the shares in this market were dominated by hereditary trading relations built ages ago. Well, heavily influenced as I am by Japanese sensibilities, I might not actually truly understand it.

Nevertheless, I’ve naturally thought of countermeasures to this. My plan wasn’t to penetrate into the market of those big merchant houses, built on tradition and status and composed entirely of the noble class. It was to build a new niche for honey to avoid any sense of competition.

My hint for this came from the difference between raw goods and processed goods. For example, fruits are classified as a raw good; that is, they’re meant to be consumed as they are. But if we plan to process the goods and make juice or candy out of them, the same fruit enters a different price category. In this case, it’s close to the difference between wine and cooking wine. By the standards of the other world, honey here was priced like fine wine. And no matter how abundantly available resources were over there, fine wine wasn’t meant to be boiled down or used in a cocktail.

I tried to create a new market for honey meant to be used as a substitute to sugar for flavoring liquor, confections, and other such things. Of course, my target market wasn’t the noble class, but the richer commoners. The scale of that market was several times larger than the super high-class market of the nobles, and my expectations were to even further expand that market as well.

Compared to Dreyfan’s “gold honey,” Weinder’s “copper honey” couldn’t even be called silver. This was my so-called reverse branding strategy. This was also a means of making it more convincing that an unknown, small-time company could sell honey at a tenth of the normal price.

Nevertheless, the goods our company began peddling out of nowhere were still high-class goods. I went through many hardships spreading our customer base, going practically door to door. And the moment that work began to bear fruit, the larger companies suddenly began obstructing us. Seventy percent of our customer base, and verging towards eighty, all turned down business with us at once.

Such was the influence of the Dreyfan Company, the representative of the guild which controlled the distribution of foodstuffs throughout the Kingdom. Apparently, they got their information on us from Berthold. Though I guess that was to be expected of the company supporting so many others under their umbrella.

At that time, it seriously had me trembling. It happened immediately after I purchased the small shop I was renting in the capital to spread my roots.

Fortunately enough, the remaining customer base was enough to keep us out of the red in the Weinder Company’s venture out to the capital. Our profit ratio was just that large. However, it put us in a situation where further growth was out of reach.

Even after that, they went as far as paying a surcharge to interfere with already prepared orders, and even when they were finally delivered, we’ve had cases of jars suddenly being broken. We really went through a lot. I took great care not to break into their share of the market, and this was the treatment it brought me. Thinking about it from another perspective, if I didn’t take some sort of countermeasure, the reputation of my company would never recover.

Well, it was enlightening. Thanks to them, I got more than enough of an understanding of the way business here was conducted. It gave me a real sense of the merits and demerits of the trade system here in this world, as well as its strengths and weaknesses. In the sense of collecting information over the course of a single year in the capital about the way the guilds functioned, you could even say that it was efficient.

In other words, I got a sense of reality, and found the means to be able to change it. I became able to clearly picture how I could apply the knowledge and concepts in my head. In that sense, I could honestly thank them.

Well, going along the lines of the dilemma of innovation, my eventual plan was to overturn the entire market, including their super high-class market, so the Dreyfans were going to become an enemy either way.

In any case, as an extension to that little quarrel in the market, the Dreyfans’ heir picked a fight with me here in the Academy, though it really was just a fight between children. I did manage to claim some new customers, however, so we’d been able to keep their obstructions under control, and this was what they resorted to.

This rich boy was probably hoping to keep me in check. The Dreyfans largely dealt in enormous quantities of grain, as well as a variety of high-class goods. Honey was actually just a small portion of their business. Their primary goal in this quarrel was likely to keep face, concerning the worth of their brand aimed at nobles.

However, there were limits. Going around the halls of the Academy, filled with potential future customers, claiming that my product was diluted halfway with water was going too far. Evaluating it based on traditions and social status was one thing. Doing so using its taste and depth of flavor was another. But making the false accusation that we were watering it down left me with no choice but to object.

After all, the responsibility a company has to their customers has nothing to do with whether they’re a big or small company. Moreover, they’re my precious customers that are dealing with me despite all the pressure this rich boy’s family is pouring on them. I couldn’t possibly let them down.

And since I refused to back down, this rich boy grew more irritated, and threatened to use his connections in the business world; such was his habit. And just as he did...

A classmate of ours who didn’t attend school all that often just happened to pass by. It would’ve been fine to ignore us, but apparently it pained her sixteen-year-old heart to hear what was going on. I suspected this all to be an act, though.

And so, that was how the two of us ended up in this tremendously uncertain situation that neither of us wished for.

The girl’s slender and pale fingers lifted her teacup from the table. She brought the porcelain cup to her small, pink lips with movements that made you wonder if there was some sort of auto-balancing mechanism built within it, and took a sip.

After putting down her cup with a most gentle sound, her slender and pale fingers reached out to a biscuit covered in amber honey, our merchandise. She pushed back her silky, platinum hair behind her ear, and brought the biscuit gracefully from her fingers to her small lips as her thin jaws slowly opened.

Tension filled the air. Just how would someone who belonged to the very peak of high society, accustomed to the most luxurious goods, judge our merchandise? It really did pique my interest, even though I knew it wouldn’t show on her face, and even though I knew she wouldn’t say that my goods were better out loud.

I held my breath and observed her, and she smiled ever so slightly. Her face, which had a porcelain beauty to it, suddenly had an innocence to it befitting her age. It had a charm that made me forget the situation at hand.

The schoolgirl with a red ponytail standing behind the princess glared at me. Incidentally, this one had a slender sword hanging from the waist of her uniform. I ducked my head in a hurry. Well, that was dangerous. This is a society where just admiring a beautiful flower out of reach is akin to plunging to one’s doom.

“That was rather enjoyable,” the princess said, as she once more took a sip from her teacup.

The tension in the air immediately reached its peak. This was the time for “judgment.” From a business standpoint, all she had to say was, “The second one has no brilliance in its color, and the taste is lacking. It’s not even comparable to the goods of the Dreyfan Company. One cannot even consider this honey.”

All I was hoping for was a soft landing. And after wetting her glossy lips with tea, the princess spoke in a tender, yet somehow translucent voice.

“I am unable to discern any difference in quality between the two. Both of them are delicious.” So the princess said as she smiled at the two of us.

There was nothing better or worse about either product. That was the same evaluation I had of the two. Having it assessed as such brought me great joy.

In the capital, the high-class market was firmly dominated by hierarchy and social status. As such, it was “determined” that goods sold by a large company with history and social standing were far superior to that of a small company with neither of those prerequisites. And here, contrary to all expectations, a member of the royal family, who stands atop the very summit of such order, honestly evaluated both goods. As a matter of fact, the noble girls around her all looked bewildered.

Even though it was a necessity, I had our prized merchandise ranked as second-class, so such genuine praise had a sweet ring to it. ...Wait, no, this isn’t the time for that.

I had no room to make such an honest response. Look, that rich boy who was so steadfast next to me up until now is trembling, and his face is completely frozen. Having it end in a draw wasn’t the worst-case scenario, but it was more than enough of a problem.

“Your Highness. We must begin heading towards the cathedral. The time for prophecy approaches,” the knight with a red ponytail whispered in her ear, and the princess tensed up for just a moment.

“I truly thank you from the bottom of my heart for granting us your time during such an important period where you must face your duties as the Spring Festival approaches, Your Highness.”

The rich boy somehow managed to stand on decorum. Deep down, he was surely cursing her just as I was, but his ability to change gears like this was quite admirable. It was a skill that I didn’t possess.

It was almost amusing that it just sounded like he was saying “If you’re so busy then don’t do something so damn unnecessary!” Not that I had the leisure for any of that. The simulation that my brain decided to start running was in full-on panic mode.

I placed our merchandise as second-class goods aimed at commoners instead of nobles to create a niche market and a clear delineation between gold and copper honey. And here a princess of all people had labeled them as equal. If it was anybody else, we could get away with claiming that her palate was simply lacking. But because of who it was, even the noble girls who were shaken earlier were all politely keeping their silence.

My reverse branding plan was at risk of failure. This could only lead to the business world’s representative, rife with funds and influence, pressuring us even further. Their negligence in going so far as to spend money to uphold their brand would vanish. It would be a problem that they’d have to put the full weight of their influence behind to solve. Furthermore, this compounded the issue of her being a difficult person to deal with.

The beautiful girl with platinum hair stood from her seat while directing a gentle smile towards us. She behaved herself like an impartial judge. However, in truth, this princess was surely under the impression that she had greatly put me in her debt. My complete lack of know-how at dealing with such a problem hurt my head.

And this was the state of affairs just a few days away from spring break. I remained down on my knee to hide my sour expression. Dreyfan spat some sort of insult at me, then left. It was probably something along the lines of “don’t get cocky.” I wasn’t, by the way. While you’re at it, give me some more realistic advice.

I could see Mia hurrying over to my side. Unusually for her, she looked worried. I shook my head and expelled my formless anxieties.

It’s alright. Regardless of whether the source is my environment, my opponent, or myself, a problem is a problem. And a problem just needs to be solved.

What I need to do is the same as always. First, I need to arrange these two enormous problems in my head until they’re sorted out. Next, gather information and decide on the crux of the problem. And finally, take action to resolve that point. See? It’s simple.