Mars Village (1)
“Still, it’s troublesome that the number of adventurers is increasing. We can’t exactly post guards at the lake full-time, after all.”
“Even with regular patrols, there’ll always be adventurers showing up under the excuse of a quest.”
“We’ll need a way to distinguish our guild’s products from any others.”
“You mean, a way to make it obvious if something’s a fake?”
“Yes. This time, we’ll be filing a patent application, but we won’t be granting any production licenses. It’s a village specialty, after all.”
“A branding mark, then?”
“That’s probably our best option for now.”
“In fact,” Marcus said confidently, “the urushi lacquer we use has a special ingredient added to it. So even if someone just applies urushi, it won’t have the same shade as our village’s finish.”
““Is that so?””
“That’s right. Between the brand mark and the color, I believe we can tell the real ones apart.”
“Marcus, do you have something that’s coated with plain urushi?”
“Yes, you’ll understand better if you see it.”
In the reception room of the village chief’s home, what we saw wasn’t the deep, glossy black we knew—but a burnt brown instead.
“This different, huh?”
“Are there any other materials similar to urushi?”
“I don’t think there are any in this country.”
“In that case, it’s safe to say spies will start showing up here.”
“That’s exactly our concern,” Marcus admitted.
When I asked for clarification, he explained that potential spies might sneak in disguised as brides, grooms, or simply as people applying for residency.
If only they’d put that energy into developing their own lands and guilds instead of trying to steal other people’s patents…
For any products we don’t issue production licenses for, we’ll have to worry about infiltration from now on.
We’d like to help with apprehension, but since we don’t have a reliable method, we’ll have to leave each village to handle it as best they can.
After receiving some of Elm’s crafts, small boxes, and Goosh wool, we left the village the following day.
“So this is Mars Village.”
It was a day’s travel north from Lux Village.
Hard to believe there’s a village even farther out.
Brother Chris was walking ahead, chatting with the village chief on the way to his home.
Beside the village ran a three-meter-wide river.
This was one of the villages we’d asked to start growing rice—but the main reason we were here today was because this was the village that had created the Kapp○ Shrimp Crackers.
Shrimp crackers require wheat.
We’d asked them to expand their farmland to grow rice and wheat separately, but since we’d need a huge amount of wheat for the shrimp crackers, we were here to discuss how to handle that.
We wanted both the rice and the crackers—so they’d have to work hard.
In the reception room of the village chief’s home, Brother Chris said:
“Chief, once again—congratulations on taking second place in the food category of the exhibition’s souvenir division. The shrimp crackers had simple seasoning, but they were so addictive and delicious.”
“Thank you very much.”
“Have you run into any difficulties producing them as a souvenir item?”
“Yes, when we try to make them in large quantities, we don’t have enough ingredients.”
“Wheat?”
“Wheat too, but the real problem is the river shrimp we mix in.”
When the village was first founded, they used those shrimp mainly for soup stock, since the meat was too small. After extracting the flavor, they’d just discard the bodies.
It was the village chief’s grandmother who thought to dry them, grind them into powder, and mix that with wheat flour to make the crackers—originally as a way to supplement calcium.
During the preliminary and main exhibitions, they caught a huge amount of river shrimp to make shrimp crackers, but now the shrimp population had dropped drastically.
Because of that, the village had been discussing whether they might need to withdraw from selling the crackers as souvenirs in the new city.
What!?
No shrimp crackers?
But that’s what I was most looking forward to this time…
What do you think about this chapter?
