"Pft!" Anna, who was sipping on a cup of water, did a spectacular spit-take and began coughing as she choked on what she was drinking while Drake's confident smile cramped up visibly.
50 Gold Coins was an enormous fortune, even for the two of them.
To put it into context, Drake and Anna earned about 10 Gold a month, with most of that coming from Drake's smithing work. After deducting living expenses and various other costs, the couple were generally able to save about 3 Gold per month, and this was already enough to make them one of the wealthiest families in Redwood Town.
Clearly, however, they weren't nearly wealthy enough to support their prodigal son's new business plans!
50 Gold Coins was more than a years' worth of savings for the couple. While they could still take this much out, it would severely deplete the cash they had on hand, and if something unexpected were to happen, it would put them in an extremely difficult position.
Lucas naturally saw the reactions of his parents and immediately realized how unreasonable he was being, causing him to blush brightly and lower his head, "Ahem. Sorry, Mom, Dad, I got a bit too excited there."
"A bit?" Drake muttered, his face still twitching slightly.
Anna, on the other hand, was more direct in her rebuke, landing a fist on her black sheep of a son's head.
Curled up on the floor, clutching his head, Lucas had fully returned to his senses and was now regretting his prior impulsiveness.
Deeply regretting it.
Several minutes later, once the throbbing pain had subsided, Lucas got up and apologized again, finally placating his exasperated parents.
"We can't take that much out," Drake said firmly before softening his tone a bit, "But we can probably give you about 20 Gold right away. If you really need more, Lucas, you either need to find others you can borrow from, or find a way to raise it yourself."
Scrunching up his brow, Lucas once again fell into contemplation. Quite honestly, he had already 'borrowed' quite a bit from a number of people to get his various projects started. Even if he overlooked the several Gold his Aunt Sasha had invested with him, Lucas knew that he had gotten help from Helen, Grace, Charles, Farah, and several others already, all of whom had assisted him essentially for free.
Of course, if Lucas really wanted to be miserly and count each and every Copper, the Unarmed Foundations Art he had provided would probably be worth millions, if not billions of Gold Coins.
However, Lucas had never considered using this Art as leverage or collateral. The ones he taught the Unarmed Foundations Art to were his family, people who he didn't doubt would risk their lives to protect him, and there was no price which could be put on that.
Discussing favours amongst family was always awkward, so Lucas wanted to avoid doing so as much as possible. If he really needed to borrow money from any of his loved ones, then it had to be done in a completely formal, business-like manner with a signed contract and clear terms attached to it.
In the end, after thinking it over, Lucas made a decision, 40 Gold will probably be the absolute minimum I need for large-scale lych tree sugar refinement. I can probably convince Aunt Sasha to invest a bit more, and together with my own savings, it should be enough.
Revising his plans in his head once more, Lucas eventually concluded, I won't be able to expand my soap production meaningfully with just that much, but there's probably less than a month left for me to collect lych tree sap, so if I focus on that, after I process it into sugar, I can sell a portion for a high profit to get the rest of the capital I need.
Nodding to himself, Lucas smiled and thanked his parents before the family of three sat down for dinner.
…..
The next day, armed with about 20 Gold from his parents, 20 Gold from Sasha, plus his own savings of 6 Gold, Lucas began running around Redwood Town, buying up as many wooden buckets, barrels, and any other watertight containers as he could find. He also spent a lot of coins to commission more buckets and the all-important wooden spouts from every carpenter and woodworker around.
By the time Lucas was done, he had already spent nearly 30 Gold, about 70% of all his available funds. It was painful seeing all that money drain away just like that, but Lucas knew that in order to make money, sometimes you have to spend it first, so he grit his teeth and pushed forward.
Lucas then visited a number of woodcutters, buying up as much krast wood as he could, as well as commissioning them to cut down and dry more of these specific trees. He would need a large amount of firewood to cook the lych tree sap down into sugar, and since that was the case, Lucas figured he might as well use wood he could later turn into soap, killing two birds with one stone.
There was no way Lucas, with just a small hand-cart, could haul so many containers and so much wood home, so he had to get the shops to deliver the goods and materials instead, which cost him a bit extra. Thankfully, since he had ordered large quantities of almost everything he bought, most of the shop owners gave him some discounts here and there.
Doing a quick count, Lucas calculated that together with the buckets and barrels he had 'borrowed' from home, Farah's butcher shop, and the Town Lord's Manor, he had managed to acquire 244 containers which he could use to collect sap with.
Over the next few days, he would also receive an additional 50 or so buckets from the craftsmen in town, putting his total at just about 300.
300 buckets meant being able to collect sap from 300 lych trees. If each tree yielded 15 litres of sap over the next month or so, that would give Lucas around 5,000 litres in total.
From his experiments, he had found that it took some 50 litres of sap to produce 1 kilogram of lych tree sugar. 5,000 litres of sap could thus be converted into 100 kilograms of sugar.
100 kg of sugar might not sound like much, but it actually represented an enormous amount of wealth. In order to make his last batch of ice cream, Lucas had used up about 1.5 kg of honey, which had cost him roughly 6 Gold. That meant that honey could be priced at 4 Gold a kilogram!
If Lucas priced his sugar at 4 Gold a kilogram, that meant if he sold out his entire stock, he could earn 400 Gold, while his expenses would not add up to more than about 40 Gold, meaning he would earn 10 times as much profit as he invested!
The prospect of such a huge windfall nearly made the young boy's head spin.
Shaking his head to collect himself, Lucas made his way towards his last stop in town for the day, the orphanage.
After saying hello to a few of his friends he saw in the yard, Lucas walked through the halls of the old building before arriving at the director's office, where he knocked politely and then waited.
When the door opened, a short, brown-haired woman in her late 50's appeared and smiled, "Hello Lucas. What brings you here today?"
Ms. Leah was an orphan herself, and had been raised in this very orphanage many decades ago. When the previous director, the one who founded and built the orphanage, passed away some 10 years ago, Leah had taken over that role. She was a kind, soft-spoken old lady who always gave off a sense of warmth, but any naughty kid who thought they could take advantage of her was in for a big surprise.
After leaving the orphanage when she turned 16, Ms. Leah had gone out and become the apprentice of one of the town's best hunters, studying with him for 5 years before being recruited as a guard for a merchant who was impressed by her skill with a bow.
Traveling around for the next 20 years, fighting both beasts and bandits, this mild-mannered old lady had actually accumulated a vast amount of combat experience, and her harsh training had allowed her to reach the Eighth Step Vein Opening Realm, making her one of the strongest people in Redwood Town. Even Lucas' mother, Anna, the captain of the Town Guard, might not be a match for this old orphanage director!
With a wealth of worldly experience, a gentle heart, and more than a pinch of strict discipline, Ms. Leah kept all the orphans in town in line, raising them to be both upright and independent.
Lucas was also no stranger to Ms. Leah, as he often came here to meet up with friends. With his sensible attitude and polite demeanor, Lucas had always been looked fondly upon by the orphanage's director, and after his recent donation of 10 bars of soap for the children here to use, her impression of the boy had only improved further.
As such, when Lucas told Ms. Leah he was looking to hire 5 older kids who had recently left the orphanage to work for him, she agreed to help him without any hesitation.
Naturally, since these kids had technically become adults and left the orphanage, they weren't around, but that didn't mean they didn't come by frequently or that Director Leah didn't have a means to contact them.
Ordinarily, Lucas would have been fine waiting a couple days for the workers he was looking for to come and meet him, but he was currently on a tight deadline, a point he stressed to Leah.
Understanding what the young son of the town's best blacksmith was implying, Leah directly called for a few of the younger children and then sent them out to call over the potential workers she had in mind.
Half-an-hour later, 3 boys and 2 girls, ranging from 16 to 19 years old, were assembled in front of the director's office, curious looks showing on their faces. All of them had either been out in the farm fields or at construction sites around town just now. It was hard work with low pay, but it at least allowed them to support themselves.
Nevertheless, once these 5 heard that Director Leah had found a good job opportunity for them, but they needed to see her immediately if they wanted it, they passed off their duties to others and came running.
The sudden departure of these hired workers had caused some grumblings amongst the kids' former employers, but none of them made any overt objections given the old director's prestige in town.
Finding more labour wasn't easy, but it also wasn't too hard for these established farmers and tradespeople. At the very least, it definitely wasn't something worth getting into an argument over.
If these farm owners and foremen were blacklisted by Ms. Leah as an unreasonable employer, however, none of the past or present orphans in Redwood Town would ever work for them again, which would be a huge loss.
Lucas wasn't too familiar with these 5, as they were all quite a bit older than him, but he at least knew their names and had some impression of them.
On the contrary, these older kids were quite familiar with Lucas as he was a famous figure around Redwood Town. This was partly because of Lucas' close ties with the little princess, Eris, and partly because he had recently been making a big splash with things like soap and ice cream.
There were even rumours that a bunch of the newly appeared things like hand-pumps for the wells and the smelly fertilizer yard south of town were created based on this young boy's suggestions.
It was for these reasons that none of the older kids showed looks of annoyance or unwillingness when they heard that the one who would be hiring them was Lucas. In fact, even if it wasn't for his illustrious reputation, as long as Lucas was willing to pay them more than what they were earning before, they wouldn't show him any contempt.
After making some brief introductions, Director Leah shooed the group of 6 out of the orphanage as she had her own work to attend to. As for whether Lucas could convince these kids to work for him, that was a problem for him to solve. Leah would check in with the kids who left her orphanage and would stand up for them if they were being mistreated, but she refused to coddle them. It was up to them to forge their own path through life, just as she had.