Waiting Is Part of the Job

It had been several days since I'd sent Azu and the others to the Green Labyrinth.

I spent the time teaching Orleans various things while I waited.

About four days until the deadline.

Factoring in travel time, they needed to be back soon or things would get tight.

There are times when you have to entrust your fate to others and simply wait.

This was one of those times.

The anxiety of whether we'd meet the deadline lurked in the back of my mind, but there was nothing to do except push forward.

"Azu-sama and the others are late, aren't they, sir?"

Orleans came over after finishing the stocking I'd assigned her.

"It's not the time I expected them yet."

"I see."

Orleans nodded obediently.

She ought to learn to question people more, but given her upbringing, being this trusting was understandable.

Ramiza-san's end was on schedule.

She was a skilled alchemist, so that was only natural.

All that remained was diluting the Silver Peach extract to the optimal concentration and compounding it.

The packaging supplies were ready, and the soap was already loaded.

Truly, all I could do was wait.

I tried to distract myself with work, but business was slow on precisely the days I needed it not to be.

I ended up teaching Orleans arithmetic to kill time.

"Say you harvest five fruits a month and deliver three to the estate owner. That leaves two."

"Yes."

"Do that for two months, and what do you have?"

"Um… four?"

"Right. With four, even if there's a month where you can't harvest, you'll manage. And if you keep saving, it builds up."

"There are months like that sometimes. But what happens when it builds up?"

"That becomes your assets."

Even serfs weren't stripped of everything they produced.

Redistributing everything would be hopelessly inefficient.

Even in tiny amounts, stockpiling could be a lifeline.

And what you needed for that was numbers and arithmetic.

That said, Orleans didn't seem to fully grasp the concept yet.

For now, understanding that it helped during lean harvests would be enough.

She didn't even have the concept of owning assets to begin with.

That was likely an intentional result of how the estate was run.

While I was at this, evening arrived.

For a child, she'd done a decent amount of work, and studying on top of that had Orleans asleep before the sun fully set.

After putting her to bed, I returned to my room to wait for Azu and the others.

The timeline was growing dire.

If they were any later, I'd have to deliver a lower-quality product.

Hurried sounds came from near the house.

At this hour, all the nearby shops had long since closed up. It should have been quiet.

I grabbed a lit candlestick and rushed downstairs.

Throwing the door open, I came face to face with Elza, who was just about to unlock it.

"Oh my."

She gave a wry laugh.

They were behind schedule, but at least they'd made it back safely.

"Welcome back. How did it go?"

"Perfectly, of course. But…"

Beyond her, I could see Alexia supporting Azu by the shoulder.

"Azu? What happened?"

"We got drenched during the fight, and then the chills started. I think I caught a cold."

Azu said this in a slightly hoarse voice.

A cold was troublesome. For whatever reason, a cleric's purification couldn't cure the common cold.

All you could do was stay warm, eat well, and rest.

It sounded like Azu catching a cold was what had slowed them down.

But we could still make it.

I had Alexia handle getting Azu changed and took the Silver Peach extract from Elza.

"Rest for now. I'll run this over to Ramiza-san."

"At this hour?"

"Yeah. I warned her this might happen."

"Understood. Be careful."

I left her to lock up, grabbed the candlestick, and ran to Ramiza-san's shop.

I bypassed the storefront and ran around to her residence in the back, pounding on the door.

After several loud knocks, Ramiza-san emerged looking half-dead.

"Hey, depriving me of sleep is the enemy of good skin."

"Don't be like that. I brought the goods."

"Oh, they really are capable, those girls of yours. You must be proud."

"Yeah."

When I handed over the flask of Silver Peach extract, she snapped wide awake.

Still in her nightgown, she dashed to the compounding room and immediately began uncorking the flask and mixing it with various reagents.

"Pure Silver Peach juice loses its luster in no time, so."

She shook the flask as she spoke.

After repeating the process several times, she must have reached the target concentration, because she started mixing it into the perfume base.

The overwhelmingly sweet scent of the perfume began to transform.

This was it.

The exact same scent as the perfume I'd brought to Ateil.

"I'll leave the bottling to you."

"Got it."

One by one, I used a funnel to manually fill each glass bottle.

If only I could automate this, I thought idly as I poured.

Accounting for potential breakage during transport, I needed two hundred and twenty.

Finish by morning, then package them… No sleep tonight.

Around the hundredth bottle, I paused to stretch my back.

Ramiza-san had finished producing what she needed and had fallen asleep in her chair.

She'd been cooped up for days, so I couldn't blame her.

As I steeled myself to fill the rest, Alexia walked in.

She'd apparently bathed and changed, then come straight here.

"I'm here to help."

She'd left Azu to Elza, it seemed.

She had to be exhausted too.

Together, we filled the remaining perfume bottles and sealed them, over and over.

"So this is how they're made."

Alexia said this as she poured perfume into the last bottle and screwed the cap shut.

It certainly wasn't something you'd normally get to see from inside a workshop.

Thanks to Ramiza-san's engineering, the bottles were designed so you could simply press the cap to spray a fine mist of perfume.

That ingenuity might have been what caught Alexia's eye.

"All that's left is boxing and wrapping."

"Yes. Let's finish this."

Alexia's hands were more dexterous than mine. After some initial fumbling, she quickly got the hang of it and outpaced me.

Apparently, in noble families short on funds, some secretly took on piecework on the side.

I listened to these harsh realities while we wrapped, and by dawn, we could see the finish line.

"… I'm truly sleepy now."

With that, Alexia leaned against the wall and fell asleep.

She'd been pushing herself harder than she let on, it seemed.

I draped a blanket over her so she wouldn't get cold.

Quietly slipping out of the compounding room without waking either of them, I went back to my own shop and roused the mules.

I moved the cart to the compounding room and began loading the perfume onto the bed.

The perfume containers were glass so the contents would be visible, which meant I had to be careful stacking them.

Packing goods without damage was another skill expected of a merchant.

Once everything was loaded, I secured it all with cloth so nothing would shift.

If only I had some kind of elastic material…

Three days until the delivery deadline.