Chapter 27: New Course
The braised sauce trial was successful, and Ye Mu quickly sought help to print flyers for the new course, distributing them at the market.
The new course was scheduled for 10:00 PM three days later since Ye Mu was now selling breakfast and had no time in the mornings.
The course remained free, with five spots available for each session. However, this time she added a new rule: participants could not have attended previous courses.
This was not meant to make things difficult for anyone, it was simply that, given her limited energy to conduct multiple classes, she wanted to offer more people a chance to earn money rather than let one person monopolize all the lessons.
In the market, Frank had been waiting for this opportunity. When he saw Jeff from Nightfall Restaurant enter the market with a large stack of flyers, he immediately realized what it meant, and his heart raced!
He had already decided that once he got the flyers, he would only need to glance at them, as long as they mentioned Nightfall Restaurant’s courses, he would sprint over to sign up at full speed.
As for what he would learn—that didn’t matter! If there were fees, that was fine too.
However—
There were plenty of others even more determined than Frank. While he was happily making his plans, several figures had already dashed out of the market like the wind.
One of those figures just happened to run past Frank. Startled, he focused and suddenly realized something, immediately joining the fray.
Several vendors rushed toward Nightfall Restaurant without even glancing at the flyers!
Just ten meters away from the restaurant, a grass mage who had fallen slightly behind shouted, “Vine Drop!”
A vine shot out from her staff, firmly grasping the wall of Nightfall Restaurant. She grabbed the tail of the vine and swung upward, flying over the crowd.
“Wow, this works?!” Amidst the gasps of everyone, this clever grass mage successfully swung into the restaurant’s entrance and shouted at Ye Mu, “I’m signing up for the class! Am I the first?”
“Yes…” Ye Mu nodded dazedly, her voice hoarse.
And she had a bad feeling!
She turned around, and sure enough, it was already bustling outside!
Water mages were riding the waves, ice mages were gliding and accelerating, fire mages were controlling jets of flames with their staffs, and bards were running while chanting spells to buff themselves.
Although these pure acceleration skills generally wouldn’t cause damage, wouldn’t accidentally injure pedestrians, and definitely wouldn’t accidentally demolish her building…
It was still terrifying!
Ye Mu watched as several customers who had already reached the door were frightened away by the dazzling effects.
Looking at the various lights outside, she didn’t know what expression to make, ultimately thinking to herself that the next time she printed flyers, she needed to add a line: “No spells allowed during the sign-up process, or you will be disqualified.”
Amidst the rushing crowd, Frank felt miserable. Although he had seen the spell levels, he had only been focused on increasing his health points to stay alive. Now, although his health was high and he wasn’t likely to die easily, the effects of various spells wouldn’t be very good.
So even though he gave it his all, even drinking two bottles of mana potions to keep using acceleration skills while running, he still couldn’t outrun the frenzied crowd.
By the time he dashed through the restaurant’s entrance, the five spots had already filled up. Ye Mu had a look of disbelief and brought out some new dishes from the kitchen for everyone to taste as consolation, saying, “You all worked hard… try again next time.”
Frank, feeling frustrated, plopped down onto the ground, unable to say a word. Next to him, a female mage who also missed out bent down, resting her hands on her knees, panting, “Um… Boss, can you take more students at once? Why just five?!”
This remark immediately drew responses: “Yeah, five is way too few!”
“Hey, it’s not that I don’t want to take more,” Ye Mu said kindly, stepping aside to clear the passage between the dining area and the lounge. “But look at the kitchen. While it’s not small, the space at the stove and the island is still limited, too many people can’t fit.”
“If you can’t see the operation process clearly, the learning effect will be poor, so it’s better not to overcrowd.”
“Fine…” Although everyone felt regretful, they could only understand, and after a while, they dispersed in low spirits.
The five who secured spots cheered and bounced out, exclaiming, “Oh yeah! I’m going to learn to cook with the culinary god! The master’s brilliance will shine on my life!!!”
At the center of the town, behind the administrative hall, the last inn personally built by Isaac was finally completed.
With this addition, Qiana Town now had five inns, with the other four located in the east, west, south, and north. Each inn was four stories tall, with about thirty to forty rooms.
In total, this meant there were nearly two hundred rooms, enough to accommodate three to four hundred people, which should suffice if another wave of migration like the last occurred.
After the completion, Isaac habitually inspected the area before heading home. Chase and Jenna were busy with other tasks but happened to pass by the town hall afterward and noticed the newly completed inn, feeling that something was missing. After thinking for a while, they realized: none of the inns had names!
Clearly, it wouldn’t do for all five inns to be nameless. The two decided to go find Isaac and remind him to discuss this with Ye Mu.
They had been comrades through thick and thin for a long time and were very close. So when they reached Isaac’s doorstep, they didn’t knock and just walked right in.
Entering the living room, they found Isaac seated at the dining table connected to the kitchen, meticulously… crafting something.
Jenna looked intrigued. “Wow, you’re actually making something like this? I thought you didn’t care for it!”
In terms of attributes, “Construction” encompasses both “Building” and “Manufacturing.” Therefore, a master-level construction mage is essentially a master craftsman.
Isaac never did crafts, he found these small items uninteresting and only liked building houses. At most, he would design clever control panels, which was his limit.
But now—Jenna walked closer to take a look and noticed there was nothing in front of him except for a few scattered raw materials. When she reached out to touch it, she discovered there was a layer of completely invisible fabric.
“…Are you making a light mage’s cloak?!” Jenna exclaimed.
The light mage cloak was designed by a light mage over a hundred years ago and is thus commonly referred to as the “light mage cloak.” Making this cloak requires master-level construction as a basic condition, and the magical level requirements are extraordinarily high, and only a light mage can do it.
Additionally, it requires various expensive and rare materials and takes a long time to produce.
Isaac looked pleased and, while not lifting his head when answering Jenna, smiled, “Yes, just trying to make one.”
Jenna asked, “Are you making it for yourself?”
Isaac replied, “For Miss Ye.”
Jenna exclaimed, “?!”
Chase responded, “?!”
The two subordinates exchanged silent glances, unable to suppress their curiosity. But Isaac, focused on his crafting, remained oblivious to their gossip, happily lost in his own thoughts.
He kept replaying Ye Mu’s words from that day: “The inn will be priced at 30 copper coins per night.”
Others might find it hard to understand this sentiment, and even Ye Mu herself probably never expected him to grin foolishly for several days because of that statement.
But he felt that this meant he had found a kindred spirit.
This didn’t mean he hadn’t met good people before, in fact, Chase, Jenna, and the six members of the Sibyl team were all great individuals. It was just that when it came to changing the world, they often had many concerns, leading them to prioritize their own well-being or waver when their interests were at stake.
But Ye Mu was different.
If at first, he was somewhat tricked into coming to build the territory and her relatively low tax rate was merely due to her own grievances from being deceived in the past, then the inn’s pricing was pure, heartfelt goodwill.
In this matter, even if she considered her own interests just a little, she wouldn’t have set the price so low. So when she determined this price, she must have only been thinking about those who had already arrived at the territory but had nowhere to stay.
She wanted to ensure that since they had come, they should have a place to shelter from the wind and rain. As the lord, she felt it was her duty to provide such a place. While she could charge a small fee to avoid losses, there was no need to profit from it.
Such thinking seemed foolish to many. Over the past twenty years, Isaac had received countless such evaluations, a significant number of which came from friends and family, even from his father.
But now, he had met a “fool” just like him, someone who was willing to sacrifice personal benefits to make the world a little brighter.
This was wonderful!
After being lonely for so many years, he finally found someone he could connect with.
So he wanted to give her a gift, and after contemplating for two or three days, he pondered what to give.
He thought only the most precious gift would be worthy of her, but here “precious” shouldn’t simply equate to “expensive,” or it would seem too vulgar.
In the end, he thought of the rare light mage cloak.
Due to its stringent requirements for construction and magical levels, along with its extremely precious materials, there hadn’t been a new light mage cloak produced in nearly a hundred years. The few existing ones were mostly collected by nobles and rarely shown to others.
However, he happened to meet the requirements for both construction and magical levels!
As for the rare materials needed for its creation, he happened to have them in the inheritance left by his mother.
So what was he waiting for? This was the perfect gift for her.
It was valuable enough, heartfelt enough. More importantly, she would definitely find it useful.
Isaac immersed himself in the joyful process of creation, picked up a top-quality blood-red gemstone, carefully placed it into the corresponding slot, and murmured a spell. The gemstone vanished with a sound, leaving only a streak of red light that flickered like lightning, traveling back and forth across the invisible fabric of the cloak.
At nine-thirty in the evening, Ye Mu finished the restaurant’s operations and returned home to work hard.
Who would have thought! In the real world, she rarely worked overtime, yet after crossing into the game world, she was forced to get caught up in it!
But there was no choice, after all, she was the lord, wasn’t she?
When there were few people in the territory, it was essentially just a small village, everything was simple, and there was no need to rush about many things.
However, now that the population had doubled, many things she originally planned to address later had to be prioritized.
First, she needed to hire some “civil servants” to work in the tax office and the bank. Although both the tax office and the bank had self-service panels for handling various affairs, there were only two panels available. With the increasing number of people, relying solely on those two panels would surely lead to a backlog.
Hiring staff would allow for more service windows, there was no limit to the number of windows as long as there was space, which would greatly improve the speed of business.
…In this regard, Ye Mu felt it was somewhat illogical. In her view, the rise of artificial intelligence should reduce the need for human labor, so it didn’t make sense that the panels had a limit while human-operated windows could be unlimited.
But the reality was just that.
Ye Mu previously had a small “cognitive bias” about this matter. When she was in Magic Dragon Town and saw those staff members, she originally thought they were NPCs from this world. It wasn’t until a few days ago, when she asked Jenna about it, that she learned they were no different from other mages in this world, they were just working there.
Moreover, this world had a complete assessment system for these professions, with a ready-made question bank in the system that could generate exam papers at any time, greatly reducing the pressure on lords to recruit.
Ye Mu’s reaction to this was: well, it seems that the ultimate goal in life is to take a civil service exam.
Since the task wasn’t difficult, Ye Mu decided to just go for it. She issued a recruitment announcement in the territory hall, informing everyone that the exam would take place in five days, and generated the exam questions to store in the territory hall.
After making these arrangements, the hall’s panel displayed a registration option. Residents of the territory could sign up in advance, and as the exam date approached, they could enter the hall, where an independent exam space would be generated for them—quiet and fully monitored by the system, preventing any cheating.
Ye Mu had never seen anything like this before. After setting it up, she opened it to take a look and couldn’t help but exclaim in amazement.
Another matter was establishing a public security department.
In this world, the “public security department” was divided into two types. The first type, which Ye Mu had already encountered in Magic Dragon Town, was the police station. The second type sounded much more grand— the knight order.
Mechanically speaking, the police station here did not have a complete assessment system like the tax office and bank. In contrast, the selection process for the knight order was clearer, although this “clarity” mainly stemmed from stringent requirements regarding magical levels and age, which limited a large number of people.
However, even though the knight order’s system was more refined, Ye Mu still planned to choose the police station. The reason was simple: the knight order was primarily composed of great lords and nobles.
As for her territory… it was at most a larger village, and at best, a small county.
When have you ever heard of a village chief or a county magistrate having a knight order?
The secondary reason was that, unlike her, who was a faux noble that had been misrepresented, the knights were the true noble class. Even if a small number of members were not nobles before joining the knight order, they were considered nobles afterward.
Therefore, facing them… she found it hard not to feel insecure.
At the same time, their social status also meant that she, as the lord, would have to offer a very high salary.
Given that the town was still in its initial stages, it was better not to aim too high for now.
Ye Mu then asked Chase and Jenna from Isaac’s trio if they had time to help assess the police officers. The two readily agreed, so Ye Mu sent out the police station recruitment information from the town hall, using the criteria provided by the system.
【Police Officer Recruitment Announcement】
—Requirements: Age ≤ 30 years, Magic Level ≥ 40, gender not limited,
—Salary: 4500 copper coins/month, meals included, accommodation not included,
—Please contact 【Jenna】 【Chase】 for applicants.
The names 【Jenna】 and 【Chase】 had clickable links, which opened a dialogue box for contacting them directly.
After the message was sent out, Ye Mu contacted Isaac and entrusted him with the construction of the police station. This task was no challenge for Isaac, he started work at nine the next morning, and by twelve noon, the police station was completed.
—
Magic Dragon Town.
The slum always seemed to be shrouded in gray, everything here was old and dilapidated, with all beauty and prosperity lurking far away, and a decaying atmosphere enveloping everyone.
In a few days, it would be Christmas, and it was already very cold. Most people here couldn’t afford coal, so there were deaths every day. As everyone became accustomed to it, they grew numb to the sight.
Carly had also been numb to this for a long time. She had lived in poverty, and after falling seriously ill at a young age, she suffered from the negative effects of 【weakness】, which trapped her in a vicious cycle.
This made her struggle for survival even harder, especially after her parents died, she had devoted all her energy to “survival” and had no strength left to care about the lives or deaths of others.
One could even say that she had become so numb that she no longer cared about her own life or death, her so-called survival was merely instinct. If someone asked her why she wanted to live, she wouldn’t be able to provide a decent answer.
But today, she unexpectedly received some news that seemed to activate something inside her.
The news came from her cousin Laura. Laura had also lived in this slum, but she was slightly healthier than Carly. Perhaps because of this attribute, Laura had a bit more adventurous spirit than Carly.
So when the benefits of the new territory spread like wildfire in town a while ago, Laura felt that she was already very poor and didn’t have much to lose, so she decisively packed her things and left Magic Dragon Town, joining the migration to the new territory that night.
Today, the messages Laura sent her were filled with excitement.
【Laura】: Oh my God, I can hardly believe it now, those rumors were actually true!
【Laura】: The taxes here are really low! They implement a progressive tax rate… I can’t explain it well, but in short, poor people like me don’t have to pay a single penny, and that daily tax doesn’t exist here at all.
【Laura】: It might sound a bit funny when I say this— I’m now looking forward to paying taxes! That means I must be earning a lot!
【Laura】: Oh, right! I attended a free class a few days ago! It was taught by the culinary god herself! At the time, it was only the second session, and not many were interested. I thought, since it was free, I’d go and listen.
【Laura】: The result… Oh my God! The culinary god might really be a god! Not only did she teach for free, but she also gave away a bottle of sauce!
【Laura】: With this bottle of sauce and the cooking skills she taught me, I set up a stall selling snacks, and in just a few days, I earned 2000 copper coins! Although a substantial portion was costs, even after deducting those, I still have some savings!
The word “savings” left Carly in a daze for quite a while.
In the slums, the people often faced starvation, and the words “savings” had little meaning for them.
After saying this, Laura continued: “I now feel like life is completely different! I’m wondering if it’s possible for me to buy a house of my own? Not some ramshackle hut in the slums, but a real house.”
Oh my God, a house!
Carly was astonished. Although Laura had described her experience in detail, Carly still found it hard to imagine the kind of life Laura was living now, to the point where she could dare to think about owning a house.
After a moment of silence, an impulse surged within Carly.
She decided that she would also go to Qiana Town to take a look!
Like the Laura of the past, she had nothing left to lose. Rather than enduring day after day of uncertainty, she might as well take a chance!
Suddenly feeling empowered, Carly immediately began packing her belongings. For someone living in the slums like her, moving was simpler than for those who lived normal lives, she had very few things to take, just a little over 200 copper coins, and no house to sell—everyone in the slums had built their own homes, which were technically illegal.
Thus, Carly was able to leave Magic Dragon Town in just half an hour and reached Qiana Town by noon that very day.
As soon as she stepped into Qiana Town, she felt an unusual atmosphere.
This was just a newly built town, and compared to Magic Dragon Town, its residents were still few and its facilities rather inadequate, it could even be described as somewhat “desolate.” Yet Carly could clearly see that most of the people here were happy, their eyes reflecting a kind of… a kind of peace that was hard to find in Magic Dragon Town.
Yes, peace. Each person’s expression was stable, although they hadn’t lived here for long, a layer of hostility had already faded, and their eyes held less suspicion when facing others.
This detail left Carly a bit dazed as she wandered toward the residential area. Just as she was about to reach it, she remembered to stop someone and ask, “Excuse me, are there any daily rentals available in the town? Where are they located, and how much is the rent?”
“Oh, you must be new here!” A middle-aged man who had been stopped smiled as he looked her over and told her, “There have been too many newcomers lately. Although the territory has been adding new houses, they usually sell out as soon as they’re built. However, you can stay at the official inn in the town.”
Carly’s heart sank at that.
The official inn in the territory couldn’t possibly be cheap.
The middle-aged man guessed what she was thinking and quickly added, “Don’t worry, the official inn is quite affordable, it only charges 30 copper coins a day. If you were to rent a house, the cheapest bungalow would be at least 50.”
“30 copper coins?!” Carly exclaimed, almost in disbelief.
“Oh, don’t get too excited,” the man said, patting her shoulder with a knowing look, “This town has plenty of exciting things in store for you. By the way, I recommend you stay at the inn to the east, the one just behind the residential area, it’s closest to the market, making it convenient for you to find something good to eat.”
Carly swallowed hard, feeling embarrassed. “Thank you… but I’m afraid I can’t afford to eat.”
“You’ll be fine. Just go take a look,” the man said with a chuckle, leaving the matter open-ended without any malice.