Chapter 16
Opening her eyes slowly, Rosa smiled faintly at the broad, but clothed, chest in front of her.
Rolling away, she got up out of bed quietly, the only motion from her bedmate being a slight shift. Satisfied that he hadn't woken up, Rosa headed into the bathroom, disrobed and hopped into the shower, her mind already active as she washed herself. Leading on from her previous thoughts, she didn't force Vesna to do anything too quickly. Sure, they were sharing the same bed, but they both still had clothes on, and she didn't try to touch or hug him, nor do anything that was too forward. Of course, making him share her bed on the first night was pretty damn forward, but, well, she wasn't perfect, and it meant she got to wake up looking at him, so she would accept that abuse of power.
During the evening, she had given some serious thought to what her boundaries were regarding her Charisma and the power she now wielded over Vesna and the two boys back at the warehouse. Using it to command them to do regular tasks that they would do if she had employed them was fine. Commanding Vesna to share her bed...that was pretty much her limit. She wouldn't tell him to do more than that, anything that came from it would be simply a natural progression...one completely fucked over by...well it wasn't Stockholm Syndrome, but it was still an unfair relationship, almost akin to an employer and employee having a relationship. She held a position of power over Vesna, and that was exactly why she had no intention of being the one to initiate things.
No, instead, she would leave it up to him. She would simply make it clear she was open to that sort of thing, and if he wanted to remain simply as whatever the fuck they currently were, that was fine. If he wanted to go further, that was cool, and if he decided he would prefer even more distance, whilst upset a bit, she would still accept it. She already had enough issues with controlling people as it was, abusing that control further would make her feel like a rapist, and she had zero intentions of that sort. Just the thought of commanding him to serve her in a sexual manner, whilst somewhat erotic as merely a fantasy, was completely shut down by the disgust she felt at actually performing such a thing.
Rubbing some shampoo into her hair and working it in, Rosa contemplated the day ahead. Vesna would follow her around, sure, but she had to give the boys a task to accomplish, she didn't want them to be left idle. Both looked almost like well-trained Genin honestly, minus the forehead plate obviously, so sending them off as a pair to go and collect things would be pretty reasonable, since she highly doubted anyone would mess with them, barring a shinobi, but a shinobi would have no reason to even do such a thing anyway, so her concerns were primarily setting boundaries for what they should and should not buy.
Perhaps she could 'train' them to have an F-3 rank of Foraging, then level that up and have them be scavengers, picking through shops and stalls for items that would be fitting sacrifices...it'd also be a proof of concept for giving her acolytes new skills. Crafting was another one she needed to test out, since if she could train her acolytes to do crafting, it'd open up a whole new world of automation to her. They wouldn't have interfaces, sure, but as long as they could craft items that was fine. She would still need to refine ore, since she highly doubted physical processing could beat her current, system-based method, but then they'd have pure metal to work with, making items to sell.
It'd be less efficient than her own system, but it meant she wouldn't need to dedicate any time to making money, they would work in the background, generating cash...for now though it wasn't even remotely worth the cost of setting it up, both in points and in actual materials. For right now, she was happy to spend a few minutes, literally only a few hundred seconds, turning ore into metal and then metal and leather into kunai. In the future, she could set that job for acolytes and focus on crafting more high-end items. If a kunai was worth 7,500, 1,000 kunai were worth 7,500,000 Ryo. But if she could make one high-end sword and sell it for a million Ryo...well, it'd be less reliable, since a high-end item wouldn't be replaced nearly as much as a kunai, but it'd open a brand new market for high-end equipment.
The more she thought about it though, the more she realized that it was far, far easier to keep things small and simple. 3 million Ryo every single day was a hell of a lot of income, it was plenty to start buying businesses and property, then use the rent from them to make even more money, but again, the acronym of K.I.S.S, keep it simple silly, came into effect. She was making plenty of money already, and there was zero need to shake the tree. She was only meeting with the mysterious businessperson out of curiosity, primarily to see what they would actually offer her.
It would also make her stance clear to everybody else looking to muscle in on her production, that was the bigger deal.
After making some breakfast for herself and Vesna, who still seemed to be in a bit of a fugue state, Rosa got on with her plans for the day.
The first order of business was checking up on her guards, who both reported nothing had occurred during the night. She honestly only really did it just to reassure herself, because she doubted they'd even know what happened if a shinobi decided to come pay her a visit, but it still made her feel better. When the couriers arrived, she handed off the previous day's kunai and made another set of 400, ready for tomorrow. She kept it in her inventory, able to keep a hundred in each slot, so that way nobody could steal any of them for whatever purpose.
With that done, she was then able to leave the house and venture across the city to the warehouse with Vesna in tow. She put off her plans for teaching the boys Foraging since she wasn't quite sure yet how to go about doing it, and instead she simply told them what they were looking for, gave Asahi and Aoki both a full million Ryo, then ignored their utter shock as she told them to go out and try to find as many items as they could, assuring them that they could use the money to buy clothes, food and the like if they wanted to. If they got robbed, well, it'd be annoying, but with her current income stream, it wasn't exactly the end of the world. If she had more than a measly 220 points she would have raised their stats to F+3 or even E-3, but she didn't and so, they would just have to make do.
Departing the warehouse, instead of going back home, Rosa decided to have a bit of a wander around the city. She was mostly looking for estate agents that had listings for apartments, since she wanted to move the twins into an actual apartment. The warehouse was fine, and in Fire Country, especially during the waning spring, it was plenty warm enough, but she didn't want to keep them living in there, it just felt cruel. But not only that, she wanted multiple, so she could have more acolytes living together. If she could outright buy an apartment block that'd be for the best, but that was a pretty damn expensive venture, even for her income stream.
The cheapest viable option she'd seen so far was a twelve-apartment building, and that cost 320,000,000 Ryo. She knew from the prices of regular commodities, such as bread, meat, cheese, and other items she knew of in both worlds, that the conversion rate of Ryo to Pounds was something like 100 Ryo to £6, so 320 million Ryo was something like £20,000,000, which blew her mind a little, but that was because she just wasn't used to such absurd amounts of money. She got 3 million Ryo each day, and her expenditures were negligible aside from the purchasing of her home, and so she had, rounded to the nearest each number, 120 million Ryo. To be able to outright buy the block would take her another 2 and a half months when general expenses were subtracted.
Humming to herself, Rosa began to make her way towards Mori's shop. If she increased the quantity of kunai sold to 800 a day, that would cut the time required in half, but she needed to discuss it with Mori, since she didn't want to just suddenly be like "Hey, here's twice as many kunai as before, have fun trying to sell them.", she wanted to bring it up and discuss it. Plus, she wanted to know what Mori's upper limit for selling the kunai off was. 400 a day already seemed utterly absurd to Mori, but she supposed that since shinobi treated them as pretty disposable tools, attaching literal fucking bombs to them if Katsuki had been telling the truth when she explained the types of tags to Rosa, that selling kunai off would be easy if each shinobi bought multiple kunai regularly.
It made her contemplate the economy of her current world and how the fuck it managed to stay afloat when the shinobi earned such a ludicrous amount of money. But then again, they were in the vast majority. If gunpowder was introduced, she doubted the shinobi would be able to stay on top, because, for every shinobi, there were at least 10,000 regular people...maybe, she hadn't exactly done a census on it, but the fact remained that civilians vastly outnumbered shinobi, and she doubted a shinobi could no-sell a wall of lead propelled at high velocity by a firing line of pissed-off normal people.
Still, she didn't want to do that for the sole reason that she wouldn't be able to control it. Kunai, weapons, armor and other random stuff were fine, it earned her boatloads of dosh without threatening her, but weapons that could actually scare her? No, that was just shooting herself in the foot, and she had no intentions of doing that. Admittedly, she had already shot herself in the foot regarding some of her decisions, for instance not working through an intermediary for trading her stuff away, but she could easily do that in the future, so it wasn't a big deal.
Arriving at Mori's shop, she wandered into the back with only a quick glance at the person running the shop itself, finding Mori working on the forge there with frankly casual ease. "Oh, Rosa, wasn't expectin' to see you. Something come up?" She asked casually, only glancing at her before returning her attention to the forge. Rosa shrugged, only really to herself considering Mori couldn't see her, then responded.
"Not a problem, but mostly a question. I wanted to know what your upper limit was regarding the kunai. How many are you able and willing to take every day, since 400 already seems like a hell of a lot, and I wanted to know if you can take more, and if you can, how many more you can take. The simple fact for me is that it's not about my ability to produce, it's about how quickly you can buy them from me." Rosa said with mild amusement, watching Mori working her forge.
She didn't stop even once, talking whilst putting plenty of focus into what she was doing. "400 kunai a day isn't actually a big deal. Watch." She said airily, pouring molten metal from where it was contained into what she identified was a cast. "That's 50 right there, the shinobi buy them in pretty huge quantities, since most of the time, they can't actually recover them after a serious fight, and they get damaged easily by most of their techniques. Thanks to the war, many shinobi are needing to restock their weaponry that they lost in the war, and number one on that list is filling their storage scrolls with kunai. It'll peter off eventually, but I can easily take 4,000 from you each day. An example for you, say each shinobi only bought ten from me, I only need 400 customers, and that's two low-ball estimations, since each shinobi will usually buy plenty more than that, and 400 shinobi a day is a very slow day."
Rosa remained silent, ever so slightly staggered by those numbers. 4,000 kunai a day, at 7,500 per kunai, meant she'd be earning 30 fucking million a day. That was something like £1.8 million a day. Of course, she still had to subtract 10% for tax, so 27 million Ryo a day, but that meant an apartment block could be outright purchased after only 8 more days, which was just absurd to her, and again made her question how the fuck the economy even functioned when she could do that, but...well, who could produce 4,000 kunai a day other than her? Anyone else would need an organization, people to pay in different ways, there were so many extra costs that it wasn't even funny to think about, and she could bypass all of that since she did it all herself, barring couriers.
She was already seriously contemplating simply doing away with the kunai and money courier and doing it herself, since 27 million Ryo a day would be sure to tempt anyone, even a shinobi, to steal it and flee. If they had an inventory, she'd entrust it to the twins, but they didn't, and she wasn't sure how she could go about giving them one in the first place. That meant her only option for not doing it herself would be to get her hands on a storage scroll and see if she could reverse-engineer it somehow, but she doubted she could, since she didn't comprehend even the fundamentals of how it worked aside from 'chakra bullshit'.
Though, she had no room to complain since she could make a piece of paper spit out a fireball on-demand.
After confirming with Mori that she would now be selling off 4,000 kunai a day for 30 million Ryo, Rosa stopped off at the Daimyo's Palace in order to pay her required taxes.
To say that the clerk responsible was surprised that she suddenly showed up in order to pay a little over 12 million Ryo in taxes was the understatement of the year, but that didn't mean she encountered any problems. Taxes were taxes, and since her earnings were catalogued by her deal with Mori, which meant the Daimyo would know where said money had come from and thus knew it wasn't illegally-earned, why would they have a problem with her? Her earnings could be tracked fully, from her purchase of raw materials, then her sale oof processed goods.
The only part that couldn't be ascertained would be how she turned those resources into goods, but why would they ever look so closely at it? The only reason that would cause them to come inspect her business would be to ascertain whether she had an undeclared workforce or something, but with shinobi being around, she didn't doubt that some had weird abilities that would make producing specialist goods easier and with less required personnel.
Fully paid up on her taxes and on the correct side of the law, Rosa made a second stop at the warehouse, finding that the twins weren't yet back. She wasn't concerned, opening her acolyte menu showed nothing amiss, and she assumed if they'd died they'd have disappeared. They could have been kidnapped or something, a prospect that was actually sort of possible if the person she was meeting at some unknown point in the future wanted leverage against her, but, well, if she was honest, whilst it made her uncomfortable to control them, she didn't...care all too much if they were hurt or killed. Sure, she'd be sad, and they were basically children so they'd have her sympathy, but she didn't have an actual connection with them, so using them as leverage would be highly ineffective.
With a shake of her head, Rosa dismissed her pessimistic thoughts as she headed towards her final destination before going home. In her mind, she made a mental note to give the courier responsible for taking her kunai to Mori and bringing her money back a lump sum as a bonus for not stealing her money. Since 30 million Ryo was a hell of a lot, Rosa and Mori were instead going to do it in a more simple fashion. The courier would still take her kunai to Mori's shop, but Mori wouldn't pay him. Instead, Rosa arrived at and entered a bank, a wretched hive of scum and villainy that she detested the very existence of.
Not really, obviously, it was fine with her and would simplify things so much. Every day, Mori would 'purchase' the kunai from the courier and the transfer would go straight to Rosa's bank account, which she could withdraw whenever she felt like it, thus keeping the money secure and without needing to handle copious amounts of Ryo bills. Said bank account hadn't yet been set up, but once she did, Rosa would give the courier an envelop with said details, the stuff Mori would need in order to perform the transfer, simplicity itself.
Plus, it wasn't as if Rosa expected Mori to renege on their deal and stop paying her. They were both making a good profit off of the kunai, so why would she ruin that? It didn't make sense, and if Mori did decide to fuck her over like that, it wasn't a big deal. Rosa would just quit dealing with her and go sell her goods elsewhere. And of course, Rosa herself wasn't going to mess with a perfectly profitable trade agreement, so Mori had no need to concern herself in that direction. Setting up an account wasn't too difficult, the only difficult part was not getting frustrated turning down all the special offers and deals that the teller brought up. No, she didn't want or need a mortgage, nor a loan, and she didn't need a card either, she was already carrying her money on her, and the bank was just there to make receiving the money easier and more secure.
Doubly so on the ease actually, because the bank would also handle taxation if she wanted them to, a 'complementary' service that she didn't doubt was caused by her Charisma, once again reminding her that she was basically mind-controlling everyone around her to a small extent even without her Charisma 'actively' working. Very briefly she wondered what would happen if she maxed her current Charisma out in the middle of the bank, but decided that she only wanted to know out of morbid curiosity, it was in actuality a fucking awful idea that she wouldn't be indulging in.
Though it did make her ponder just how powerful her Charisma could become if she let it...