Reincarnated into a Game as the Hero’s Friend - Chapter 174

“I’m tired.”

“Thank you for your hard work.”

Lily offered me a cup of tea as I lay prone on the desk in my private office. I was happy, but I couldn’t even lift the teacup anymore.

Today, as expected, I had to work on a few days’ worth of paperwork. I never thought that I would see the evils associated with the hierarchical government in this world.

Let’s say, for example, that a package was supposed to be delivered from the domain of Count A to the Royal Capital via the domain of Count B, but it was delayed by a few days. The first question was where the delay occurred: was the departure at House A delayed, was the delay between House A and House B, or was the delay on the way from House B to the Royal Capital?

Next came the need to find out why the delay occurred. Was it a delay in document review, a road defect, or a safety issue due to the presence of bandits and monsters? Next, there could be compensation issues due to the delay, or compensation issues in case of poor quality. This was even related to measures to prevent reoccurrence.

In other words, I had to go to House A and B, the department in charge of road administration, the department in charge of legal affairs, and even the military, depending on the situation, to listen to their reports and confirm the situation. The castle was too big, you son of a-!

I knew that it would be too much trouble to repeatedly visit all over the place to hear what was going on, so I made a list of how the towns in our area were connected and what problems were occurring on each road, along with a railroad map, and submitted it as a recurrence prevention measure.

After reading the list, the person in charge noticed that only the cargoes related to a guild in a certain town were strange. Apparently, there was a high possibility that the guild was intentionally delaying the distribution and was asking for a bribe if we wanted the goods to be delivered earlier. It was certainly possible for them to be that pushy when it came to materials, if not products.

Further investigation revealed that the delays had apparently started around the time the guild leader was replaced. Since it was almost a stop-gap measure, they didn’t have time to look at the schedule. I understood the desire to reduce the amount of work involved in going back and forth within the castle.

As a result, the entire legal staff was involved in a sort of forced investigation of the guild branch in the Royal Capital, and I had to accompany them to the scene. It was a real bushwhack and I ended up not only in the Royal Capital, but also in other towns. Yes, I overdid it. I regret it.

“Excuse me, Welner-sama. I’m sorry to bother you, but…”

“Is there something wrong?”

My exhausted brain was spitting out error messages, so I sipped my tea mindlessly for a while and turned my head to see Lily apologetically calling out to me. I was a little apologetic because it seemed she had been waiting a long time for my brain cells to reboot.

“Yes, I have something to show you, Welner-sama.”

“Me? Sure, but can you bring it over?”

I was wondering if I needed to go personally to see it, but apparently not. Lily went out and soon came back carrying something on a tray. The object in question seemed to be lightweight material as well.

“Here it is. I think there are still some problems with the thickness and stuff.”

She seemed a little proud of herself as she showed it to me. I looked at the tray Lily had placed on the desk. It was a bundle of white paper…paper. Wait, paper?

I couldn’t help but lift one up. It was still quite thick. The texture was not necessarily like paper I knew. The surface was rough, like the rough wallpaper of my previous life, but it was still definitely paper.

I did not have any experience with the process in making it myself, but the paper presented to me was similar to the Japanese paper used for hands-on learning at school. It was not as tactile as, say, the high-grade rough paper used for invitations, but for a prototype, it seemed to me to be of a high enough standard.

“How were you able to make it?”

“Welner-sama told me how to make this before, so I was wondering if I could create something similar with similar materials. I tried my best.”

I think “I tried my best” was not such an easy thing to say when making something, but it did show results that were now in front of me. If I was a no-good person, I would have rejected this result based on my own subjective viewpoint or comparing it to the actual product I knew. I should prevent myself from becoming something similar to the boss of a black company in my previous life.

I had been training for the duel for the past few days, so Lily should have been studying at the Count’s mansion the whole time, though I was sure she also had a good amount of time to do some experiments. I turned it over, stroked it, and looked through it before turning my attention to Lily.

“How did you manage to do all that papermaking and stuff?”

“My mother and I tried all kinds of things. Welner-sama showed me the operation itself at that time. I made the tools by stretching cloth over a wooden frame.”

I remember that they were doing something like this when I was watching people making paper in my previous life. Conversely, the thickness of the paper was probably because I had not explained properly and what Lily did was something more of an imitation. Maybe I should have explained more carefully.

“What materials did you use?”

“You told me that fibrous plants are used to make paper, so it’s a mixture of barley straw, cotton cloth scraps, and a little bit of raffle fiber, and it’s steamed. My father found time to work on it.”

I doubt they grounded it with a stone mortar or something. Lily’s parents were cooks, so I knew they usually used a fire and would also have tools for steaming. Maybe I was just not as familiar with it as they were. I was somewhat convinced.

“How did this paper become so white?”

“Oh, that’s…”

There was a bleaching agent made by mixing the rind of several plants with ash, songbird droppings, and some kind of mineral that had been crushed and heated, and they washed the materials with it. I asked about the process of making it, but gave up trying to understand it because the ingredients were all proper nouns that I had never heard of before. I didn’t know much about plants, you know.

“It looks pretty hard to make.”

“Yup. Even at the inn, we had to use a bleaching agent for bedsheets and such because it removes stains very effectively.”

I almost made a strange response. Thinking about it, in RPGs, even the bedsheets at Inns where you stayed right after escaping from a dungeon were always pure white. I had no idea that there was a super strong cleaning bleach that was exclusive to a world like this.

Then again, this world had the flora and fauna unique to this world, and there were technologies that have been developed uniquely in this world, even if they were empirical. I assumed that the knowledge of my previous life was superior to everything else. That was a bit of a reflection, I guess.

“And regarding the rest of the materials, how did you manage to find and transport them?”

“Norbert-san, who helped us with the consultation, made the arrangements for us.”

“Norbert did?”

“Yes. He gave me a lot of advice on the type of fibrous wood and so on. He also told me that it would be better to have Welner-sama take a look at the prototype before presenting it to the Count, just to be sure.”

Norbert, this was what he meant when he said that I should praise Lily first. On the other hand, he wanted me to show it to my father so that it could become a new specialty or product of the territory. Hmmm. For now, let’s praise her for it.

“You did a great job. This is a good result.”

“Thank you.”

Her blooming smile was a feast for my eyes as well, but whether it could be made into a product was another matter. The biggest problem would be that without expert papermakers, mass production would be impossible, and I doubt that a stable supply would be possible in the current Zeavert territory.

It would also be difficult to develop the market. The literacy rate was not high in the first place, so the number of people who could use paper was limited. In my previous world, both paper and parchment were expensive, but because of the low literacy rate, it was a supply and demand thing.

In this world, the literacy rate was higher than in the Middle Ages, but parchment made of monster hide, which would be cheaper than paper, was widely used. It would take more than a literacy rate increase to create a new market to popularize paper as a tool for writing, though not without writers who would be using the paper.

It was often the case that even a good product would not sell if the time was too early and the market had not yet matured.

“This is going to be hard to mass produce, and you will be busy as well.”

“Yes, I think so too. It seems to be hard to grind straw and cotton shavings and such.”

As expected. The fine grinding was the part that, in my previous life, had been done with a water wheel or something similar. Doing it by hand would indeed be too inefficient.

No, wait. The fact that it was rare and there were only a few of them meant that it had a rare value.

After thinking for a while, I said, “Lily, I’m sorry, but I need you to prepare some painting materials. If there are any citrus fruit peels left in the kitchen, please bring some of those as well.”

“Eh? Ah, yes.”

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Also check out my other novels: A Demon Lord’s Tale: Dungeons, Monster Girls, and Heartwarming Bliss, Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear, and A Girl Who Was Told “You Have No Talent” Turned Out To Be A Talented Monster