He looked back at the system screen floating in the air.
"Okay, make me a few... make me around..."
He paused.
"Okay, never mind. I’ll tell you the specific numbers for the torches later."
He immediately walked out of his room and decided to talk to Cassius to get some solid info on how the territory had developed while he was gone. And he needed to grab Burke to know exactly how much the army had grown.
A short time later, Adrian sat at the head of his long dining table.
Sitting around him were the core pillars of his territory. Claire, Serena, Cassius, Burke, Thorne, and sitting quietly near the end was Jack; the young assassin who was currently the face of the shadow squad, and then Lorcan.
Adrian looked at all of them.
"Give me the updates on the territory’s changes."
The first one to speak up was Burke. The bald ex-adventurer cleared his throat.
"The amount of knights we currently have are about slightly over five thousand in total. This includes the knights that will be joining us here soon based on the numbers that were given to me. Once the remaining forces do get back to Oresfall, we will have slightly more than five thousand full fledged knights."
Adrian raised an eyebrow and nodded. That was a massive jump in military power.
Burke continued.
"We did not get any extra assignments into the standard army. There were no extra applications from the commoners recently. So the total number of soldiers are exactly the same."
Adrian nodded again.
"Okay."
He turned to look at Cassius.
"What about the other stuff?"
Cassius adjusted his glasses and looked down at his ledgers.
"Well, there is a lot of things to discuss."
Adrian frowned.
"What do you mean?"
Cassius looked back up with a perfectly flat, professional expression.
"Well, firstly, I have made a few changes to the prices of certain thing. I had no choice but to make certain decisions without consulting you because you were out of the territory fighting."
He flipped a page.
"I guess the main issue was that originally we were bleeding money. The amount of money we spent on the citizens, on the construction of the apartments, on public jobs, on providing them with food and the raw materials for everything, was far outweighing the amount of money we were making through selling the iron ore outside."
He tapped his finger on the paper.
"And recently, even with the farming capabilities of the dungeon, there was a few months period of time where the production of iron ingots had heavily dropped because people were using their daily mana for the agriculture purposes instead of the wheel. Due to this, our iron trades fell too and our direct income went down."
Cassius pushed his glasses up his nose.
"Due to this, I had to make certain changes to the territory’s financial situation and the way the money flowed."
Adrian placed his hands on top of the table and leaned forward.
"Tell me what changes you made."
Cassius nodded.
"First thing, I increased the rent."
He held up a hand before Adrian could speak.
"I made sure that the people would still be able to afford it while also having enough money left over to eat good food. But that is all that they would be able to do. They would have a roof over their head and they would have enough food to live comfortably."
Adrian frowned hard when he heard this.
"Wait. No one complained?"
Cassius shook his head.
"No, not really. I basically just put up a public notice that the treasury is bleeding money because we are not making enough to actually give people all the free stuff forever. And everyone just accepted it. Some even donated their money to us directly."
He shrugged slightly.
"I feel like as long as we provide them with a stable way to make money, I don’t think they will have a problem with the way we run things. Since compared to other lords, you are actually doing much, much better. And... forgive me for saying this, but you don’t actually owe them free stuff. They have to earn it themselves."
Adrian leaned back against his wooden chair and let out a soft sigh.
"Well, as long as it works I guess." he sad as he ignored the last part.
He rubbed his chin.
"And what is the current state of our treasury? Are we making enough money to keep the whole thing running or do we need more?"
As he asked that, he thought to himself, ’I might have to sell a bunch of mana crystals again at the capital I think.’
Cassius just smiled slightly.
"Well, I managed to get the whole thing working perfectly. And currently we are making significantly more money than we are spending. Even with all of the free stuff that we give to the people, we are still making a massive profit just with the increased rent."
He closed his ledger.
"I thought that just saving all of this excess money and using it for another project that you might want to set up in the future would actually be a great way to get things going."
Adrian nodded in relief.
"Okay. Good. And what happened to the whole farming stuff?"
Cassius nodded.
"Right, about the farming. We are importing a lot of seeds from other territories which is actually not enough to meet demand. We need a way to get a massive amount of seeds to help the people who wish to plant more."
He looked at Adrian.
"Due to this, a lot of people have come to me and they have told me that we should set up a shop or a trade route where merchants from other territories can sell seeds in bulk over here."
Adrian nodded.
"I will think of a way to solve this whole seed issue."
Cassius nodded back.
"There is also another problem."
[A/N: I’m gonna have to take my mom to the hospital tmro morning and idk when I’ll be coming back. There’s a chance that I might have to stay there so I’ll be uploading tomorrow’s Chapters early. Which is... around 2-3 hours and i’ll upload 2 more]