I found a retively secluded alleyway to take off my shawl and re-wind the bandage around my hand.

  When I turned around, I spotted a young dirty street urchin who was peeping at me from behind a garbage dumpster. The boy was probably no more than six or seven years old, but his mouth was totally agape witnessing from my figurative magical girl transformation. The child had probably never seen anything like it, since svery was as irrevocable as a death sentence in this oppressive country.

  If you were born a sve, you stayed a sve for your entire life.

  There was no way to reverse the status.

  Our eyes met for a prolonged moment.

  The Kingdom of Galuterica had a widespread socioeconomic problem with undocumented children. It was very common for pregnant women to go into bor in their own homes instead of a hospital, so it was a very simple affair to never decre that you had given birth.

  The taxation structure of Galuterica was heavily regressive, meaning that it burdened the people at the bottom of society much more than it affected the people at the very top. Annual taxes were capitated, simir to the historical “soul tax” pioneered by Peter the Great of the Russian Empire in 1718. Every single child transted to a small but non-negligible amount of additional taxes, so there was a pervasive financial incentive to underreport births to the government.

  However, any family that did this would not have a birth certificate or citizenship for their child.

  No wealthy or middle-css family would ever subject their own offspring to such terrible long-term prospects (they could afford the taxes regardless), so it was primarily an issue that disproportionately affected the poor. These children grew up without any legal protection, but they hoped that they’d earn enough money to buy their own citizenship at City Hall one day.

  I could tell that this was very likely this poor child’s circumstances from a single gnce.

  It was a particurly dangerous lifestyle, since non-citizens were considered ideal targets for human trafficking.

  + + +

  Out of sympathy, I gave my old shawl to the boy. It wasn’t very high quality, but the fabric was perfectly functional. He might even be able it to sell for a few copper coins on the bck market, which was enough for a few weeks of bread.

  Even though I had been re-cssified as a sve overnight, I had paradoxically become richer than I had ever been in my entire life. I had done the math, and there was more than enough money for Kang Jiesu and me to live quite comfortably even if we never worked another day in this isekai universe.

  However, we weren’t so rich that I could buy literally anything without thinking, nor would it be very wise to frivolously donate rge sums of cash to charity. The amount in Kang Jiesu’s bank account was just enough to retire on, and if we added another person to the calculus, one of us would need to go back to work again.

  With that context, I needed to spend judiciously.

  The boy quickly ran away after I gave him a generous handout.

  + + +

  After letting down my hair and applying a very light cosmetic powder, I spent the remainder of the morning visiting a series of different shops in the market.

  It was considerably less stressful than visiting the bank, in rge part because I chose higher-end establishments that prevented sves from loitering with an exterior barrier. The cashiers in these stores rarely checked customers if they had a stamp of approval, since it could be safely assumed that anyone who could pass the barrier had legitimate business. Furthermore, from a customer service perspective, asking a customer to show their hand could come off as rather offensive — it implied that the cashier thought that the customer wasn’t a free person — and not everyone responded very well to getting their ID checked when they were buying alcohol.

  As long as I looked like a regur city girl — a merchant’s daughter — I felt confident that I wouldn’t be carded.

  I had never seen a sve wearing anything as pleasant and refined as my current outfit.

  I looked like I had plenty of money to spend, and indeed — the shop clerks immediately flocked to me like hungry pigeons when the realized that I wasn’t just window shopping. Anyone could see that I was buying furniture, clothes, magical devices, travel supplies, and rge quantities of miscelneous goods.

  At any given moment, I had at least three or four different salespersons fighting amongst each other to climb in front of me, trying to entice me into buying a particur set of jewelry, delicate gss shoes, semi-transparent lingerie, hypnotic spices with faintly aphrodisiac qualities, or a rare mechanical trinket imported from a distant foreign country.

  However, I had already prepared a strict budget in my head.

  I pretended to be interested in the things that they showed me, but I eventually turned it all down.

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t afford it. Rather, the bigger issue was my social status. I asked the shopkeepers to deliver anything that I purchased to the Royal Pace (ATTN: Kang Jiesu), and the pace staff would obviously get a good look at the contents of the deliveries before they moved it into temporary storage.

  People would quickly grow suspicious if 90% of everything that I bought was obviously intended for a woman. Officially, this was Kang Jiesu’s money, and it was supposed to be money that he spent on himself. Even if he was a generous master, there were practical limits to his kindness, and it simply wasn’t reasonable to spoil and shower a sve with luxurious gifts as if she were a princess.

  It vioted Galuterican common sense.

  Thus, I knew I needed to bance the ratio of my purchases.

  If I bought one thing for myself, I really needed to buy three other things for Kang Jiesu.

  I needed to maintain the illusion that my cssmate was the one who was holding the control stick.

  Truthfully, I knew Kang Jiesu would hate it if I bought him a 16-wheel truck full of brand new men’s clothes, but there really wasn’t any other way to hide the new clothes that I purchased for myself. My own acquisitions needed to be the minor component of the overall sale, which meant that I needed to pad everything else with a lot of junk.

  Just for the shits and giggles, I even bought an entire rack of counterfeited spell-swords and magic shields that were supposedly imported from Cambria because well… boys like fancy swords and explosions and stuff.

  The only silver lining to all of this was that I was 99% certain that Kang Jiesu would return most of the things that I bought for him. I already accounted for this in my budgeting, and I could predict fairly reliably that the mountain of men’s clothes that I purchased would not turn out to be a true expense.

  I just needed to make sure that it was shipped back in time for the 14-day return policy.

  + + +

  My final stop for the morning was a local beer tavern that was popur among adventurers.

  It wasn’t the ideal location for a meeting with the Merchant’s Guild, but I didn’t have too much of a choice. The Merchant’s Guild was headquartered on the opposite side of the city, which was far outside of the one kilometer radius that I considered to be safe for travel.

  When I asked the clerk at the post office to pass a message along to my special contact in the Merchant’s Guild, I used retively informal nguage in my invitation.

  ‘I’d like to treat you to a couple of drinks. I have some special news to share.’

  A number of maids including myself had a particurly good retionship with this particur merchant in the guild.

  The Kingdom of Galuterica had retively misogynistic ws, which ultimately boiled down to the fact that women could not own a business, gamble, or trade stocks. However, this didn’t change the fact that royal maids made a very good sary, and many of my female colleagues had quite a lot of disposable income.

  Francesca — the finance-obsessed investment guru in my friend group — had been the one to personally introduce me to the merchant who had been been trading stocks on her behalf.

  We considered him to be fairly reliable and trustworthy.

  It was technically a gray-zone in the w, as we were essentially passing fairly rge sums of money underneath the table. However, many of my female colleagues could vouch for his professionalism and discreetness, and he only asked for a small fee on top of the capital gains that we made.

  He practically adored and worshiped Francesca.

  I was sure that my friends made him a lot of money, if not simply by copying our investment portfolios.

  My friends — Lisa, Francesca, and Stel — were some of the most intelligent people that I knew, and they kept very close tabs on the politics of the kingdom as well as the economic ndscape. They routinely made huge profits, flipping stocks for 200% or 300% returns, while rarely recording major losses. You could consider it to be a type of insider trading, since we often heard various rumors around the Royal Pace that other merchants and businessmen would have no way to ever knowing.

  Unfortunately, my own backdoor investment accounts weren’t nearly as rge as my friends’ (most of my disposable income went to my family), but my special contact in the Merchant’s Guild still gave me a lot of respect.

  + + +

  I looked all around the tables for a certain bearded face and bushy eyebrows.

  A well-dressed man in his early 50s waved at me from a table in the corner of the tavern.

  I sat down across him.

  “Hana! It’s so good to see my very favorite maid!” His voice boomed heartily. “How are you doing?”

  “Please don’t lie straight from your arse,” I responded light-heartedly. “I know Francesca is your favorite.”

  My nguage was quite crude, but the merchant showed no sign of being bothered by it considering that we were sitting in a local tavern. In fact, he looked very happy. Compared to the st time that I saw him, he had upgraded his pocket watch, and I could see that it had been hand-crafted with adamantium by the most famous artisan in the city. When we first opened our investment accounts with him several years ago, he had been a small no-name merchant, which was quite a testament to how much his wealth had ballooned over the years.

  The merchant ughed.

  “Who knows,” he said in jest. “If you’d quit your job and become my wife, you’d instantly be my new favorite.”

  The flirting was semi-serious, but I knew that he primarily saw my friends and me as profitable golden geese. He loved money more than anything, after all.

  “I’m fttered, but I’ll let you save your marriage proposal for Francesca instead. I do have to warn you that she doesn’t come cheap. I think she would want rights to your company as well as your entire family fortune.”

  “You girls just have to make it hard for me… huh?” He mused contemptively.

  However, I didn’t have the time to waste on a middle-aged merchant bachelor who was more than twice my age. I had serious business on my agenda, so I jumped directly to my main objective.

  I slid several sheets of promissory paper across the table.

  “I’d like you to help me with incorporating a new company,” I told him. “The 1000 gold registration fee is here, too.”

  The merchant raised his bushy eyebrows.

  He picked up the document and slowly read it in detail.

  Astutely, he noticed that it was my handwriting and that I had signed it on behalf of ‘Kang Jiesu’.

  “I suppose that means a congratutions is in order?” He remarked with a wry smile.

  If a maid was signing documents on behalf of a random noble, it certainly meant that I wasn’t employed by the Royal Pace anymore. As a matter of fact, the most logical reason why a maid would ever sign such a consequential legal document as a man’s proxy was if she had married and become his concubine or wife.

  It implied that Kang Jiesu and I shared a legal bond with each other.

  “Something like that,” I answered evasively.

  “This Kang Jiesu fellow is a very lucky man,” he said. “I won’t lie that I’m very jealous.”

  However, he accepted the incorporation paperwork nonetheless.

  Incorporating businesses was part of the regur responsibilities of the Merchant’s Guild. If the paperwork was legitimate, it would be hard for him to refuse, especially with the steep registration fees. Furthermore, I always could have simply gone to the main branch physically in person, and I would have gotten the paperwork accepted anyways.

  I had designated the owner of the business as ‘Kang Jiesu’.

  It would be registered as a trading company.

  + + +

  I passed the middle-aged merchant one final promissory note.

  “Lastly, I’d appreciate if you could purchase 10,000 gold worth of wheat and grains on behalf of our company.”

  —It was an absurdly rge amount of money.

  The expression on the man’s face instantly turned as grim as death’s door.

  He hesitated for a long while.

  “…So you think the market is going to crash,” he eventually murmered.

  There wasn’t any other reason why anyone would ever gamble so drastically against the price of grain.

  “What’s the underlying reason? Mass famine? War?” The merchant asked, trying to probe for my reaction.

  Currently, market sentiments were at a high. The Kingdom of Galuterica had put out a lot of publicity that twelve powerful heroes had been summoned from another world, so many investors felt confident that war with the Demon King was going to end in victory soon. The ambiance in the Royal Capital exuded a festive and celebratory mood.

  “No comment,” I replied cryptically.

  It was never my responsibility to eborate or expin my decisions.

  If he wanted to gamble his fortune on copying a random maid’s investments, that was entirely up to him.

  ?