Chapter 26 Spend money to make money
We made six platinum from selling the other legendary jam and a bit under another plat for the sales of the rest of the jam. I was told later that if I’d alerted the king, he’d have most likely purchased it at twenty platinum outright, but I thought eating the stat-boosting food was more valuable anyway.
A single platinum was worth five gold, so I had made more than thirty-three gold in a single day. I was paid in platinum instead of mithril because while mithril was only twice as valuable as platinum, it was still rarer, and most people used platinum as the currency and mithril for weaponry and such.
To fully max out a tool, I’d need five ingots. Each ingot was worth about one hundred of that type of currency, so I’d need five hundred mithril chips to upgrade a single tool, twenty-five hundred to upgrade them all. I didn’t plan to do that; I would probably never upgrade a single tool to max in my entire life. It made far more sense to upgrade my wives' weaponry and equipment instead to keep them safe.
I had a lot of money to play around with, and they had gathered about three bars worth of copper so far. That meant I would only need seven bars, and I could buy them a new sword and daggers… At least if the cost was the same to upgrade the upgradable weapons as it was the tools. To upgrade a tool from copper to silver would cost ten platinum; it wasn’t worth doing now, but it was something I had to think about in the future.
I didn’t need to upgrade my scythe or fishing pole right now, but I should upgrade Tems’ shovel. It costs a platinum to upgrade without the copper to make bars. Hoe, pickaxe, shovel, daggers, sword. That was most of the money I earned from selling that jam. Everything just costs so much. I knew most farmers didn’t even upgrade a single piece of equipment in their first year, but it still felt like something I should do sooner rather than later.
After buying them better equipment, upgrading the bed and soundproofing the house more, and finally building the smaller greenhouses I wanted to build to start growing alchemy herbs, I’d have spent the entire amount I just earned. Herbs were thought to be a money sink. The cost to start growing them didn’t equal the cost to build the greenhouses to house the fickle, hard-to-grow plants. It would take a farmer years to recoup the cost. That’s why I had designed a smaller greenhouse, the size of a shed, to grow them in.
After selling off the surplus crops, I had enough to purchase the three ‘beginner’ herbs for making potions. It would allow me to start making health, mana, and stamina potions, or at least get the herbs that are required for making them. Most people didn’t keep any on them, especially low-rank ones, as they cost too much for beginner adventurers to keep on themselves.
It was a roadblock for alchemists as well. They would be stuck as low-ranking alchemists, making less costly, valuable, and less difficult potions. That sounds fine, but when you can only level while making potions, and it takes an extraordinary amount of the lower-quality potions to level the class, it means there were very few beginner-rank alchemists. They were either stuck at the start making the burn ointment, pregnancy testing, cold medicine, or they’d advanced to where they could buy and make the higher quality potions that middle-rank adventurers had the money to buy.
I wanted to get into that niche, and it would also increase the speed at which I leveled my farming class and job. I had the money to waste on increasing the speed at which my class and job leveled. In the long run, I hoped it would equal out. I got to work making all the changes I had planned, and the first thing I had to do was run my plan past my wives and see if they had any changes they wanted to make. “While you’re in town, can you ask the blacksmith how much a large oven with a flat top surface would cost?”
Tems was a gold sink, and Silk made enough money to keep herself fed with less than a silver to her name, but Cherry brought her own money with her when she moved in. She had been doing odd jobs around the town for almost a decade, and her father paid for her living expenses. It meant she had a significant collection of money built up that she was going to keep for herself for now.
I was fine with that, it did make the large oven she was going to buy come out of her money, though. I’d just have to get the amount it would cost for her, then she’d visit and probably get it for cheaper than what I was quoted for. Her skills were far more varied; as part elf, she was doing the exact thing I planned to do and picking up valuable skills for her class.
That was why she was so skilled in comparison with the rest of the common villagers. A decade of purchasing almost every single skill had her stats far higher than where they should have been, and she had enough skills to function as a secondary merchant for the village. That was before she just got the additional skill that let her preserver class also work for cooking from having sex with me.
It meant that she could now cook at an insanely high level, as if she had a chef or cooking class. She could retain the rank of the ingredients she cooked, and food could now give buffs, as long as she was the one who cooked them. Tems chimed in with my question about other things we needed. “Can we eat that jams again?” I sighed as I explained to her again. “No, that jam was very special. We might never be able to eat something that tasty again.”
She asked the same question a dozen times already, but just couldn’t understand why we couldn’t eat the best food every day. Cherry smiled as she offered. “I’ll make some strawberry candy for her to try later.” Silk put on her clothes; she was all aboard with my plans as she was still using the basic equipment she got from becoming a guard for the town.
I not only had to worry about my own class leveling quickly, but also my wives. Tems and Silk were offensive classes, so as long as they killed things they’d level, but now they could also level (although at a much slower rate) when they did the things on the farm that they gained from the skill they got from having sex with me. It meant as long as Silk was taking care of animals, she’d slowly level. If Tems worked as a farmhand, she’d slowly level. Cherry would level from making preserves, but also from cooking now. The upgraded weapons and equipment they had that made them better fighters wouldn’t mean much, but in the long run, it would make them safer while fighting in the forest, which would let them gain levels more safely.
It felt like the speed at which I leveled was the size of a pea, and every improvement I made would let the pea gather materials and speed up even further. It was like a snowball going downhill; every small improvement, every upgraded piece of equipment, every new skill would let me level that much faster, and it was all beginning to snowball.
I had to go handle all these new purchases, perhaps get an upgrading pan if that was possible for Cherry to use for cooking as a surprise gift, and buy all the other upgrades before it got dark; otherwise, we’d have to sleep on the destroyed bed again.