My jaw dropped to the floor. I probably looked pretty stupid right now, but could you blame me? I never would have expected to hear Heidi talking about the future of the workshop or anything like that. I wanted a beruf certification as soon as possible, but I hadn’t at all considered that this was why Heidi was so absorbed in her ink research.
“...But you’re the one who’s researching the colored ink, Heidi. You deserve the certification.”
For each success, only one person could receive certification. Heidi deserved it; she was the one who had been so dedicated to her research that she was forgetting to eat and sleep. But when I said that, she opened her gray eyes wide and tilted her head.
“I couldn’t have finished the ink this quickly without you, and you’ll need the certification to run the workshop. Is this even something to discuss?”
“You’re not wrong, but...”
“I don’t wanna think about all this hard business stuff. I just want to mix a bunch of stuff and learn a lot about ink. Take the beruf certification for my sake, Josef. It’s what your cute wife wants,” Heidi said with a grin. For some reason, confirming that she was cute felt like accepting defeat, so I silently tossed her into bed.
Some time later in the future, Bierce, as the head of the Ink Guild, awarded me my beruf certification.
Leon—Sylvester Undercover
“Leon, we’ve gotta go to the forest today,” Lutz said before racing back to his room so he could change. I went back to my own room to do the same. The two of us always went to the temple once the store was open and we had finished dealing with the initial surge of customers.
“To think that the Gilberta Company’s leherl work would include going to the forest with orphans...” I grumbled, pulling on the rags I usually wore to stop myself from sticking out when passing through the south gate.
I came from a family of linen merchants. After my baptism, I became an apprentice at the Gilberta Company, then signed on as a leherl at the age of ten. The entire process was planned from the start by my parents, who wanted to strengthen their bonds with the Gilberta Company and its clothing business. In other words, I was working at the Gilberta Company to help boost my family store.
Incidentally, due to that Myne girl bringing in weird work all the time, the Gilberta Company had ended up venturing outside its usual area of business to build a high-class eatery. Master Benno had told me to go to the temple to learn how to serve food from the attendants who served nobles there, which was the only reason I was going. That said, I was grateful that I was being trained by attendants who had experience serving nobles, since I did think it would be pretty useful for moving forward in life.
...But for some reason, I spent more time working in the workshop than training to be a waiter, and even now I was being made to take orphans to the forest. It didn’t make any sense.
Unlike Lutz, who was born poor, I had barely gone to the forest before this. I wouldn’t have minded going there, either, if doing so would help my family. But chopping up wood, making paper, and printing books had nothing to do with our family business—in fact, it really wasn’t merchant work at all. Making things was the job of craftsmen, while merchants were in the business of selling those things, so I really had no idea why I was being told to make products myself.
I found it easier to accept going to the temple and helping Myne when there was something in it for me. She was an apprentice blue shrine maiden in the temple, and the master of Fran, who was teaching me to serve food. Master Benno had told me to treat Myne like the daughter of a noble, but she was actually from the poor part of the city like Lutz. I knew that for sure as I had seen her going in and out of the Gilberta Company in her normal raggedy clothes.
I hadn’t been told why or how a once-impoverished girl had become an apprentice blue shrine maiden. What I did know, though, was that Master Benno had been pulling strings to maintain her new outward appearance.
Myne had outfits suitable for wearing in the temple, but they were all used—none of them had been made to order. Her ceremonial robes were a bit different, but since those were made using cloth that Master Benno had given to the temple, she still hadn’t paid for them, and she probably wouldn’t buy any more in the future. Myne was a fake rich girl who would never be of any use to my family at all.
Of course, I did think her inventions like the plant paper and hairpins made using thread were impressive, and they were definitely profitable for the Gilberta Company; had I never gone to the temple, I would have viewed her from afar as a very impressive child prodigy. But she wasn’t of any use to me, and it was annoying to watch her get so clingy with Lutz all the time, so I didn’t really want to spend more time around her than I had to.
Lutz was this weird guy who wanted to be a merchant even though he was the son of a carpenter. He had none of the common sense that any merchant should have. The way I saw it, he had only been able to become a leherl because of his friendship with Myne—that was the only way I could explain a failure of a merchant like him getting a leherl contract before turning ten.
To be fair, he was a hard worker, just like Mark said he
