Chapter : 909
So, she had gone recruiting. She did not look within the gossipy, intrigue-filled halls of the Ferrum estate. She looked to the city, to the ranks of the retired, the overlooked, and the deeply, profoundly competent.
Her first recruit was a man named Rolf, the former Captain of the Rizvan City Guard. Rolf was a mountain of a man, his face a craggy landscape of old scars and a perpetually unimpressed expression. He had been forced into an early, and deeply resented, retirement due to a political squabble with a corrupt city councilman. He was a man of iron integrity, of unwavering discipline, and he was bored out of his skull.
Mei Jing had approached him not with an offer of a simple security job, but with a challenge. She had shown him the chaotic, bustling, and slightly-too-informal logistics of their manufactory—the haphazard supply chains, the informal inventory management, the security that consisted of one, very large, and often absent, man named Ken Park.
“This,” she had told him, her voice a calm, clear statement of fact, “is a river of gold, Captain. And it is currently being held back by a dam made of good intentions and wishful thinking. I need a man who knows how to build with stone and iron. I need a man to turn this… charming workshop… into a fortress.”
Rolf, who had been expecting to spend the rest of his days yelling at pigeons in the city square, had felt a fire he had thought long dead ignite in his old, warrior’s heart. He had accepted the position of Head of Logistics and Security on the spot.
And he had been a revelation. In the space of two weeks, he had completely, and ruthlessly, reorganized the manufactory’s entire operational flow. He had instituted a formal, written system of inventory control, tracking every single ingredient from the moment it arrived at the gate to the moment it left as a finished product. He had established a professional, uniformed security force, hiring a dozen retired, and deeply loyal, former guardsmen who owed him their careers. He had streamlined the supply routes, renegotiated the contracts with the guilds, and had eliminated a dozen different points of waste and potential corruption.
The alchemists, Borin and Alaric, had initially chafed under his stern, almost military, discipline. But after his new inventory system had caught a supplier who was trying to sell them a shipment of diluted, inferior almond oil, they had become his most fervent converts.
Rolf had not just brought order; he had brought a new, and very welcome, sense of professional security. The manufactory was no longer a chaotic, creative laboratory. It was now a smooth, efficient, and very, very profitable machine.
Mei Jing’s second recruit was a man named Master Günther, the former bursar of the Royal Academy of Commerce. Günther was Rolf’s complete opposite. He was a small, thin, and perpetually worried-looking man, with a fringe of gray hair and spectacles that were always perched on the very tip of his nose. He had been the quiet, unassuming genius who had managed the finances of the kingdom’s largest and most complex commercial institution for thirty years, a master of the silent, arcane, and deeply powerful art of accounting. He had retired, not because he was old, but because he had grown tired of the endless, petty political squabbles of the Academy’s board of directors.
Mei Jing had come to him with a different kind of challenge. She had shown him their current financial records: a single, simple, and increasingly overflowing ledger, managed with the well-intentioned, but ultimately amateurish, diligence of Tisha.
“Master Günther,” she had said, her voice a soft, respectful murmur. “We are a company that has the potential to become the single greatest economic force in this duchy. Our profits are… considerable. And our bookkeeping is a disaster waiting to happen. We are a dragon, and we are currently trying to count our gold with the fingers of a child. I need a master. I need a man to build us a treasury.”
Günther, who had been expecting to spend his retirement reading bad poetry and cultivating prize-winning roses, had looked at the raw, chaotic, and unbelievably beautiful numbers of their profit margins, and his old, accountant’s soul had sung with a joy he had not felt in years. He had accepted the position of Chief Financial Officer without a moment’s hesitation.
He had not just counted their gold; he had given it a purpose, a strategy, a voice.
With Rolf managing the body and Günther managing the blood, the AURA enterprise was no longer just a workshop. It had become a true, professional, and terrifyingly efficient corporation. Mei Jing, the acting regent, was no longer just a brilliant marketer; she was the Chief Executive Officer of a burgeoning empire. And the foundations of that empire, the loyal, professional workforce that she was building, were being laid, stone by careful, meticulous stone, while its founder and king was off in a foreign land, accidentally getting himself engaged to a princess.
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The final, and perhaps most crucial, piece of Mei Jing’s new, professional structure was Tisha. The cheerful, charismatic, and impossibly empathetic former tavern wench had been the heart of their public-facing operations, the woman who had turned the chaotic, angry mob at their gate into a loyal, and very profitable, customer base.
Mei Jing knew that Tisha’s unique, and frankly magical, talent for “social engineering” was an asset that was as valuable as any alchemical formula or any financial projection. And she knew that Tisha’s role had to be formalized, had to be expanded.
She had promoted Tisha from a simple Head of Customer Relations to the newly created, and very grand-sounding, position of Director of Public Engagement. Her role was no longer just to manage the queue at the gate; it was to manage the very heart of their brand. She was in charge of the AURA story, the legend of the Saint of the Coil, and the quiet, ever-growing cult of personality that was forming around their absent, and now semi-mythical, founder.
Tisha had taken to her new role with a joyous, and terrifyingly effective, enthusiasm. She had a natural, intuitive understanding of the power of a good story, and she was a master of a new, and very potent, kind of magic: marketing.
She had taken Lloyd’s initial, brilliant idea of the “Citizen’s Lottery” and had transformed it from a simple, crowd-management tool into a daily, city-wide festival. Every afternoon, a huge crowd would gather at the manufactory gate, not just the desperate and the hopeful, but the curious, the bored, the entire, vibrant cross-section of the city’s common folk.
Tisha would preside over the lottery drawing herself. She would stand on a small, raised platform, her cheerful, infectious energy turning the simple, administrative task into a piece of high-stakes, public theater. She knew the names of the regulars. She would share jokes. She would ask after their families. She was not a corporate representative; she was their friend, their champion, the gatekeeper to a dream.
And when the names of the ten, lucky winners were drawn, she would present them with their prize—a single, beautifully packaged bar of the ‘Noble’s Choice’ soap—with the solemn, celebratory flourish of a priestess anointing a new king. The winners would weep with joy. The crowd would cheer for them, their own hopes renewed for the next day. The lottery had become the most popular, and most beloved, daily event in the entire city.
It was a masterpiece of brand-building. AURA was no longer just a luxury product for the rich; it was an aspirational dream for the poor, a tangible, and occasionally achievable, symbol of a better, cleaner, and more beautiful life.
And behind this beautiful, public-facing theater, Mei Jing, the cold, pragmatic regent, was building the iron-and-stone foundations of their empire. She, Rolf, and Günther had become a formidable, and perfectly balanced, executive team. Mei Jing was the visionary, the strategist, the one who saw the grand, continental-scale future of their enterprise. Rolf was the iron fist, the man of logistics and security, the one who made sure the trains ran on time and that no one was stealing the cargo. And Günther was the silent, watchful eye, the man who saw the soul of their empire in the cold, hard, and beautiful language of numbers.