Chapter 88: Live To Sienna 88
He asked if he could pay the price of sixty thousand bags and the young merchant put a sack on the table that looked heavy at a glance, instead of answering him. He opened the sack and saw it filled with dazzling gold coins.
Define gulped down.
“Do you want to sign then?”
The young merchant looked calm, unlike himself, who constantly moved his gallbladder to swallow his saliva. So, Define became even more impatient.
If he had to drag his feet for nothing, the young merchant would seem to go away with that bag of gold. Even if not for the Panacio family, the southern part of the country was filled with wheat.
“Of course! We have to do it, signing the contract!”
He called the butler to fetch the papers. It was a routine document concerning the purchase of wheat. When the young merchant looked at the document and looked at him, Define looked at him. His pride was hurt by the fact that his posthumous work was being overlooked by the eyes of a young merchant, but the bag of gold placed before him had made him lose his self-respect.
“Is there anything you don’t like?”
“The condition that we deliver wheat on the fixed date to the desired warehouse is fine, besides the terms of including transportation costs. But the item, here, in which there is a case of a breach.”
Define said, who looked at the documents he pointed at.
“You mean the clause that gives you double the price in case of a violation?”
“Yes, I’d like to modify this. Let’s quadruple the breach amount and make it a safe haven.”
The image of Define frowned upon his words. The young merchant looked at his face and said,
“It’s not like the Panacio family will not be able to produce six thousand sacks of wheat this year, and doesn’t matter anyway since you guys will be transporting wheat through the Southern Chamber of Commerce?”
“But…”
In addition to the fact that they have to pay back four times the cost in case of a contract violation, and above all, they were concerned that land should be secured. The young merchant then jumped to his feet from his seat.
“If you don’t want to, we can just call off the contract like it never happened then. I am here because I heard that Your Excellency, Mr. Panacio, owns the largest amount of land and because they are heard to be quite plentiful… I guess I’ll look for some other place instead.”
When the merchant stood up without regret, Define seized him in a hurry.
“Oh ho, maybe it’s because you’re young, but you’re quite the hot-tempered one. It’s such a big deal, so I just thought about it for a while.”
“Then would you like to sign as that?”
“Of course. What’s the importance of breaking the provision in case of a breach of contract. It’s something we have to do well if we want to keep the contract from being breached.”
Define called in the butler and quickly modified the contract. The young merchant even went so far as to carefully check the security of the land and write it down in detail in the clause.
Now, both had only to sign the contract. The merchant asked, sitting down as if he had something suddenly come to mind.
“What are you going to do with all this wheat?”
He asked back with a troubled look at Define’s question.
“Do I have to tell you where the wheat is going to be used for?”
“Ha ha ha, you’re a bit harsh because you’re young. I’m just curious. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s not hard to answer. It’s the southern part of the country that has its river, so it’s good for farming, but other countries have had a bad drought. So, our symposium is going to be selling wheat around in other countries.”
“I see. You’re looking good with passion in this. I’m sure it’ll work out.”
Define laughed inwardly, praising the merchant with his mouth.
‘You think it’s going easy to sell wheat. If you sell wheat to another country, the tax that you have to pay to the Laifsden Empire is going to be very heavy. If the transportation costs and taxes paid to other countries are added, it would be a loss even if they were sold for twice the price. It was just a stupid merchant who inherited a lot of money.’
Define saw him off and asked him,
“By the way, I didn’t ask your name after our big contract. What’s your name?”
The young merchant said with a troubled look at his question.
“Mac Ke… Sires is my name.”
“Macke Sires? That’s an unusual name. If you need wheat from now on, you can come here anytime! I’ll make you a contract on good terms as I gave to you today!”
The brown-haired young man, who was explaining the last meeting that ended in success after a boastful speech by Define, put his hand on his chest and breathed a sigh of relief.
“When he asked my name, I almost answered that it was Mac Kane.”
He gushed the beer out into his mouth, shivering in disgust at the thought of it now. Pavenik said, pointing to a dark-skinned man sitting next to him with his fingers.
“That’s fine. Kissinger couldn’t even get me to work here at all. He talks like a knight no matter what he says. When I asked him to play the merchant, he gave me the strength to his abdomen and put his tone of voice down and said, ‘I’m here to buy some wheat.’ What merchant in the world would say so like that and be able to do business?”
Mac said angrily and not Kissinger.
“What?! Then you made me do such a thing because I don’t look like a knight? It means no matter what Kissinger does, he’ll always have the appearance of a knight!”
Pavenik said with a prickly face.
“I’m not saying that. That’s how flexible you are. Unlike a guy who’s stuck here.”
Pavenik said, hitting Kissinger on the shoulder. Kissinger glared at Pavenik with a fierce look and said in a sickening voice,
“It seems to me that you want to get involved in a spar with a guy who doesn’t have a lot of flexibility.”
Pavenik quickly changed the subject.
“No, that’s not it… By the way, His Highness should be coming today, right? We’re left alone here and locked up in this stinking inn while he left for the Imperial Palace, so I don’t know why we haven’t gotten any word back from him yet.”
Kissinger drank only beer without saying anything, and Kane said with a smile,
“It’s a divine marriage. I guess he doesn’t want to party with the Crown Princess perhaps.”
Pavenik replied with a shrug.
“I really don’t know when those two got so attached to each other”
Although he was quick to catch onto things quickly and understand situations very fast as well, he thought that the relationship between the Crown Prince and the Crown Princess was as difficult to understand.
“I’ll have to go sometime today.”
When Carl said he had to go, Sienna almost popped these words up, ‘Are you already going to go?’. Although she knew that he could not stay in the palace for a long time, she could not help herself from feeling disappointed. She tried hard to pretend to put on a calm front.
“I know. You have a lot to do, so you’ll have to go quickly.”
Carl spoke with a face full of discontent,
“Do you like it when I leave the palace?”
“No, the idea of leaving isn’t good…”
“So, you don’t like me leaving, then?”
It occurred to Sienna that he was acting like a child. He was asking with a scary face, but she was sure that he was definitely frustrated rather.
“What’s the point of my opinion? It’s just that Carl has to go to the border…”
“I’m curious about your opinion. If I don’t have to go, do you want me to stay here?”
“That’s…”
Sienna was not able to give out a random answer. She feels tired when she was with him. Being with him makes her too emotional and she ends up caring too much about anything. But it’s not like she doesn’t want him not to be around either.
She gets tired faster than usual with him, but whenever she finds out something new that she didn’t know from the past before, she feels intrigued and happy. As she watched him acting like a child, throwing a tantrum, she couldn’t help but flinch at the corners of her mouth in, holding back her laughter as she had never seen this side of him in the past.