A week after visiting the Vanderbilt estate for his mother’s birthday, Michael wanted to see the current state of the Reborn company in Kingsbridge.
As Castelle wrote company reports in her office, the candle suddenly flickered and her shadow morphed into something completely different.
“Castelle, I’m coming to visit.” Michael’s voice sounded out through her office, notifying her of his presence.
She immediately fixed her posture and turned around to welcome the Young Master.
She bowed down to the corner of the room, where Michael magically appeared out of nowhere.
“It has been a while, Young Master,” Castelle said.
“Sorry, I got busy with stuff in the Parched Lands. I’ll try to visit Kingsbridge more often now that I’ve got more help.”
Before he left, Michael left everyone he knew a clone of himself in their shadows. This was a superior version of Fudge’s skills, which allowed Michael to transfer his true body to any of his clones no matter the distance between them.
This made traveling back and forth to Kingsbridge and the Parched Lands extremely easy.
“How is our company doing?” Michael asked as he took a peek at the window showing the office floor of the company.
There had been a huge influx of workers in the building from the last time he visited this place.
It looked like Castelle had to hire a lot more people to manage the growing business of Reborn.
“The company’s doing extremely well, Young Master. The entirety of Kingsbridge has now been lined with our plumbing system, allowing them easy access to water. The profits we have garnered from the installation alone have netted us more than ten million gold coins.
We have also implemented a subscription-based water filtration system that you envisioned. Every month, we gain hundreds of thousands of gold coins from the citizens wanting to drink water straight from the tap.”
Michael nodded to himself.
Slowly, Kingsbridge was reaching closer and closer to the quality of living in his previous life. Although they had to pay a water bill every month, it was worth it because they were kept safe from deadly diseases and plagues.
“How about the sewer system?” Michael asked.
“Everything in that front is doing as we expected, Young Master. The construction was finished without a hitch,” Castelle showed Michael the report papers regarding the whole project.
He inspected everything with ChatJK2 and saw that everything had gone as well as they planned. With the help of Seberus and the Magic Tower, the quality of work was assured from the very start.
“Because of our efforts, the rate of diseases in the City had gone down substantially,” Castelle said with vigor.
Fudge briefly popped out of Michael’s shadow. “My clones inspect no kind of plague spreading in the City, Master!”
Thanks to the Goddess’s timely warning, they were able to completely stop the decimation of humans in the City.
“Not only that, but the surrounding territories around Kingsbridge have also contacted us with requests to implement the same sewer and plumbing system in their area!” Castelle said, pointing to the mountain of letters in her desk from the overlords and governors of those territories.
“I must admit, Young Master. This subscription-based system is nothing short of genius! If we start to implement the plumbing system in more and more homes, the monthly fees we earn will continue to grow each year!
The huge influx of money will allow us to fully expand into the Kings region and hopefully break into the Queens region.”
The country they were in was divided into different regions.
Kingsbridge City and Michael’s home estate were both located in the Kings region. Below the Kings region was only the Parched Lands, on its left and right were surrounded by oceans, but above it was the region called Queens region.
If they wanted to continue growing the Reborn company into a worldwide business, then they needed to first conquer the entire country. And to do that, they needed to expand into the Queens region to have access to the rest of the country.
“How is it?” Michael asked. “Have we had any success in reaching the Queens region?”
He asked this because the Queens region was hard to get into, solely because of the mountain ranges that separated the two regions. Peddlers needed to trek through dangerous valleys and landslide-prone areas just to reach the Queens region.
“We’ve had success in spreading our products there,” replied Castelle. “The only problem is the speed of our expansion. Because of the hard terrain, we can only transport soap and matchsticks in that area for now. After all, we produce all the products here at Kingsbridge and have them transported all the way there.
Faucets and pipes are hard to transport properly, so we can’t implement the plumbing system there yet.
It would be a lot easier once we construct the main branch in the Queens region, which would be helped by all the money we gained from our projects.”
Michael thought hard about the problem plaguing Castelle. He instructed ChatJK2 to give him a mental image of the country’s map to give him a better view of the situation.
From the looks of it, the only thing preventing their expansion was the hard landscape of the mountain regions.
Then, his eyes went over to the empty space beside the mountains, devoid of any treacherous terrain.
“Look at this,” he said to Castelle, projecting the country map into the air. “Why can’t we just go through this section beside the mountains?”
Castelle inspected the map and shook her head. “It’s not possible, Young Master. That is inhabited by an infamous Dwarven kingdom. They are not friendly to humans and have always rejected any attempts from humans trying to enter their territory.”
Michael, hearing this, knew that they couldn’t force the Dwarven kingdom to open their gates for the Reborn company.
They would just have to find another way for now.
“Oh, Castelle. I forgot. The reason why I visited you this time is because I have another product I want you to sell. It’s called concrete…”