Chapter 164: Invitation (1/3)
âI know full well how much you dislike rigid positions, so I wonât force the issue, but wonât you consider becoming our engineer?â
Immediately after inviting me, Reinhart-san said that he understood that much about me.
âItâs for the same reason that I donât think youâll ever try to work for another noble elsewhere. But you know too many strange things. If word of this blood serum of yours were to come out, nobles will
surely
appear in
droves
and try to employ you without regard for your own feelings. You understand this too, right?â [Reinhart]
I nodded silently and replied.
Even if the cure for the Cursed Wound is taken, if it were to spread in society, there will naturally be patients and families looking for it.
There are bound to be merchants and nobles who wish to sell to those people at a high price.
Unfortunately, it wouldnât be a surprise if people wishing to secure the rights no matter what appeared.
âWe would of course want to help you in such a situation, but there are things that are difficult to do with the way things are now.â [Reinhart]
Although the dukeâs family treats me well, my social standing remains that of a âcommonerâ.
Iâm not the subject of the dukeâs family, but merely a âchild they are slightly partial toâ.
Of course, even just that makes things a lot more convenient for me.
After all, no one would want to incur the ill will of the dukeâs family, which possesses great authority.
A boy adventurer, who owns a small store, and to whom the management of the abandoned mine has been entrusted to.
Even if such a boy were to possess strange ideas and knowledge, so long as these ideas were
only
at a certain level, then no one would dare lay a hand on him.
âBut the knowledge to concoct the âcure for the Cursed Woundâ is a different story. Our family may possess great authority, but itâs not as if thereâs no way for others to go against us.â [Reinhart]
When I thought of that, the idea of cleverly woven schemes immediately came to mind, but the madam seemed to infer that and she wryly smiled.
âI canât deny what youâre likely thinking, but think of something simpler. Right⊠Letâs put it this way. Right now, youâre in a position where you can do anything you want with your store, yes?ăBut if youâre too selfish, then various people will try to stop you.ăDepending on what it is youâre being stubborn about, people will turn a blind eye to your selfishness once or twice, but if you keep acting stubborn, eventually youâll lose the trust of the people around you. Itâs the same thing for us. We hold great power, but we canât just use it as we please.
If you were to become our familyâs engineer, then when people try to recruit you, we can refuse them if you donât wish to work for them. But with the way you are now, if we tried to interfere, then they would snap back at us and say something along the lines of âYouâre not even trying to hire him yourself! Donât get in our way!â Thatâs a bit more forceful than what theyâre likely to say, but you get the point.
That being said, itâs doubtful that they would wash their hands clean of the matter so easily and will probably continue to keep up appearances and try to make excuses, such as in order to give you a suitable position given your meritorious deeds and what not. Thatâs just how valuable your knowledge is.â [Elize]
If I were to keep the existence of the blood serum a secret, I probably wonât get into trouble, but that would also mean having to live with the danger of leaking word of its existence to someone my whole life.
And if knowledge of the bloody slimeâs blood serum were to spread, then itâs possible more cures might be discovered. It wonât necessarily be limited to just the Cursed Wound. I canât predict just how big this will turn into, but itâs possible that a lot of lives that would otherwise be lost could be saved. Hiding such powerful knowledge is simply too wasteful. No, âwastefulâ isnât even enough to describe how great of a loss that would be.
ââŠCan you tell me more about exactly what the occupation âengineerâ entails?ăI want to know exactly how my life would change if I were to accept that position.â [Ryouma]
âThatâs right. As Iâve mentioned previously, an engineer is a technical expert hired by a noble. When needed, the noble will call upon him and have him demonstrate his expertise. In other times, he is called upon for consultation. So long as the engineer is able to accomplish those duties, then he can live as he wishes. After all, highly skilled craftsmen do tend to have strange fixations that normal people find difficult to understand.
For example, in our case, we have a live-in engineer on medicine, but our engineer on âsmithingâ owns a workshop and a store in the Middle-Class District and is working normally. Being hired by a noble doesnât mean monopolizing your expertise or keeping you on a leash and not utilizing your skills.â [Reinhart]
It would appear that as long as they can keep in touch with me, I donât even have to stay at the town where the dukeâs residence is situated.
As such, I can continue living at the abandoned mine as Iâve done until now and continue working at Gimuru.
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