CH 35.1

Shopping with Big brother (3)

“What are you trying to do?”

“I’m going to defeat you and get the sweets. I’m stronger than you, after all.”

Alicia’s eyes narrowed quickly. The hair all over her body was standing straight, and her tail has more than doubled in size.

The strategy is simple. If I can subdue Alicia and cling to that bulging treasure of hers, my victory would be unquestionable.

“It appears that Young lady cares more about sweets than me.”

“… Nuh…”

My heart throbbed in my chest at the slightly lonely look on her face. But if I lose sweets, I cannot live. I cannot eat them often, which causes me agony. The sweetness of a small amount of happiness is comparable to gold.

“Why… why are you bullying me…”

“It’s a punishment for the duel. The most effective way to punish you is to confiscate your research data and materials, but since you are probably hiding them inside that thing anyway, I’m going to confiscate the sweets you are looking forward to instead. Should you blame someone, blame your own inadequacies.”

Alicia, who hadn’t forgiven me for the dueling incident… is going out of her way to confiscate my sweets. But she’s naive, too naive. As naive as the royal family’s purveyor who thought they couldn’t run out of sweets (I’m the culprit). I already have some sweets, so it doesn’t matter, even if I can’t buy them.

I don’t have any more money anyway. The money I just gave to that uncle was all I had on hand, so if Alicia says no, there is no money for me to spend… even if there was, it will be taken away from me the moment I gave it. But Alicia doesn’t understand. The treasury is my treasure warehouse, which means that there are hundreds of cookies made by the supreme Alicia stored there, and every single day I resist the urge to eat more, so that I could have snacks stored for emergencies. And currently, I was stuffing my cheeks with the cookies I took out with Quick Draw.

“Calm down, Alicia. Alice had already stored away the cookies you made in that thing. Look carefully, she’s already eating.”

“Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.”

Alicia tried to take the bag of cookies from me, but she couldn’t take the sweets from me because it instantly entered the treasury with Quick Close. Utterly foolish. With such a convenient Artifact, it’s only natural that I would accumulate sweets in there. Well, I’m probably the only person in the whole world who hides sweets in an Artifact like that.

“Crunch, crunch… gulp. As I thought, they are supreme. If only Alicia would let me use the money freely, I could buy more things.”

“You still don’t have it at your disposal?”

“Young lady once spent all her money. That’s why the Patriarch asked me to take care of it for her.”

That’s rude. I only bought the minerals I needed for my research. I can make magic tools, so I sell the tools I make to the government and get paid for it, but Alicia didn’t tell me how much I have gotten paid. Well, I told her that it was too much trouble to make the magic tools all myself, so I had her start selling the blueprints, which made me a lot of money. She told me that my parents thought that it would originally be an investment asset for the duchy that I would own in the future, but I just signed a quick contract with Mr. Grantz, one of the five Marquises and a Dwarf. I certainly signed a good deal.

“…… How much did she spend?”

“… thousand…”

“What?”

“Three thousand gold coins.”

“Wha—”

I thought there were a lot of minerals that were sent to me, but I had that much money? Well, no magic tool craftsman would ever sell the blueprints for his magic tools, after all. It’s usually a secret, so it must have sold for a high price. I was surprised, but my brother was even more surprised.

“Why does she have so much money to begin with!?”

“Young lady, of all people, said that she couldn’t be bothered to make any more magic tools, so she sold off the blueprints. And all of the magic tool she created were cheaper and more powerful than anything else on the market, and she sold them cheaply at that!”

If you remove the useless parts from the magic formula and simplify the parts of the magic tool, they can make it quite easily. Probably the magicians of the past messed with the magic formula to make it impossible to copy. I just put it back together.

“… So she spent all that money… what could you possibly have lost that much money on?”

“All of it has been turned into materials for new magic tools, mostly minerals. While I was preparing a replacement for the tea, she made a deal for all the money and the equivalent in minerals. Because Young lady’s status, I couldn’t have her undo the deal once she made it, so it wa all gone at once.”

That was about a year ago. This was when I was in mood of creating things before I entered the academy.

“So, is she broke now?”

My brother asked Alicia with a look of disbelief on his face. How rude!! I have earned it back.

“No… she was commissioned a blueprint for Crystal of Far Sight, and earned more than before.”

The performance of Crystal of Far Sight was not optimal, so I applied the magic of checking the surroundings by using a pseudo-eye created by a magic called Search Eye, and made a magic tool that allowed the user to see the place they want to see in more detail, and sold it off to my Father. Studying abroad costs money, after all.

“The requested product and the delivered product were different…”

“I guess His Majesty couldn’t complain since the performance was better than the commissioned work.”

I don’t have a hobby of doing shoddy work. I always do my best to make the best product I can. Even that one was made after being rejected five times by the Spirit teachers. Of course, it was not that bad.

By the way, I based it on a spy satellite. You see~ I can make almost anything with magic, that’s why I find it so enjoyable.

“By the way, what about the weapon’s shop?”

… Ah.

That being the case, we made our way to a weapon’s shop.