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When I got home after completing my job, my parents were rather surprised by the small chest of gold coins I placed on Dad's study desk.
"How much gold did you say was in here again?" Dad asked to clarify if he heard me right the first time.
"You heard me right the first time. Inside that chest is five hundred gold. And that's just the bonus," I said as I folded my arms proudly.
"I knew dragons were rich, but this is ludicrous." Mum commented.
"By our standards, yes. I will have a thousand gold and more as the actual reward soon," I replied, and Mum needed to take a seat after that.
Giving me a worried look, Dad asked in a foreboding tone, "What did you have to do for this gold?"
Knowing this would come, I sighed and said, "I am not at liberty to say who, but Professor Sageira had me do a job for one of her noble friends to rescue their kidnapped son, and upon the completion of my job, my client was very happy with my performance."
I twisted who my employer was and the circumstances of the "rescue", but it was more or less the truth.
My Mum's natural woman instincts to hook onto a juicy story tried to wring the info out of me, but I refused mercenary/client privileges. Of course, I did not use the word mercenary, but she got the point after twisting leading questions to get me to spill the beans.
The only way I got her to drop the subject was by asking how the other money-raising projects were going.
Upon my asking that question, Dad took out a stack of papers from his drawer and put them in front of me. "These are for you."
I picked up the paper and started reading, then I picked up another, and another. They were custom orders for my blacksmithing pieces. As I was reading through the orders, Dad said, "You are also going to need to restock the armory. Quite a few of my friends bought the standard models for their knights. The custom pieces for their family are in that stack."
As I looked through the orders, it seemed like Dad had already negotiated a price for each piece, and after looking through the stack, I estimated all these orders would bring in somewhere in the ballpark of eight hundred gold.
Guess I would have my hands full for the time being… I wonder how I am going to fit mercenary work into my schedule. Don't want the Steward's Guild getting huffy at me for not taking on jobs.
Besides selling my weapons, Mum had been hosting tea parties with the noble ladies in the surrounding territories and getting in contact with merchants from those territories to do business in and with our territory.
As for Dad, he had gathered merchants from our territory who had interests in expanding to tag along with him when he went to parties. From there, he let the merchants do their thing to get commerce flowing to our neck of the woods.
Speaking of wood, with the new territory "rewarded" to Dad, there was a lot of dense forest to harvest timber. So, as a good steward of the land, he sent people to set up new villages to make the foliage a little less dense by cutting down old growth and encouraging new growth.
Along with the people he sent to pioneer new logging villages, he also dispatched individuals on a resource exploitation mission in his new land. Apart from a few minor resources, the significant discovery was two potential iron mines. Early prospecting results project middling to high yields of iron. It is a risky investment, as they did not know how much iron was in that spot, but Dad took the risk and ordered the establishment of mining outposts.
When I inquired about the others who would be pioneering farming villages, Mum happily announced that all the plots of land had been eagerly snatched up by the sons of local farmers, and the remaining plots were also eagerly taken by farmers' families we offered in other territories.
And seeing that all these pioneer villages were quite some distance away, they needed management and protection. That is why Dad assigned Sir Hammel, the knight who almost had his arm totally amputated during the last battle, to the new territory to establish a capital for the area, and posted the thousand recruits we recruited from the locals to train.
From there, Sir Hammel, along with Dad's other knights, rotated through to train the recruits. And when those recruits are fully trained, they will rotate from manning Fort Eldric to patrol the new territory against monsters and bandits.
"In fact, I was going to check on their progress tomorrow, want to come along?" Dad asked.
I have never seen or heard of the process of people pioneering, so this piqued my interest, and I agreed.
***
The next morning, Dad, I, and some of his knights joined a supply caravan delivering provisions to the various pioneering villages. In addition to all the supplies and manpower being transported, a mercenary band was hired to escort the caravan because Dad's man-at-arms were stretched thin until the thousand soldiers were properly trained.
After the caravan and mercenary band paid their respects to Dad, and all the cargo and people were double-checked, we were off.