After hearing the desires of his beloved ministers, Yuan Zhu decisively shook his head and vetoed them. "Dream on! Even I don't have pretty maids or maidservants. What makes you think you deserve them?"
Nie Yin could not help muttering in rebuttal, "If you don't have any, just buy them."
Every day, great sums of silver went splashing out, and Yuan Zhu had yet to see a single coin come back. He was triggered on the spot and angrily rebuked his ministers. "Buy, buy, buy—buy a bed! Do you know how much it costs me to cultivate you? Do you know the cost of feeding these 'Alien Species goblins'? Do you know the pressure I bear from taking out loans to build a factory? Do you know that this lonely king still needs to purchase a shortfall of at least '400+' goblins?"
Nie Yin tried to put herself into Yuan Zhu's state of mind, then suddenly said, "Since the goblin shortfall is so large, why buy them from outsiders instead of raising them ourselves?"
Goblins had always been famed for their ability to reproduce. Middle-school biology textbooks recorded that they reached maturity around four years after birth and became capable of breeding. A litter usually numbered around four to seven, with a gestation period of six months. Their average lifespan was about twenty years, but because their living environment was harsh, few lived past eighteen.
At present, the longest recorded lifespan for a natural goblin, meaning unmodified, was seventy-three years. It came from a public-welfare experiment conducted by an old-established pet feed company.
Inside their flagship store, they had built a glass exhibition hall similar to a zoo, the Magic Mirror House, for passersby to visit. They proposed fixed daily feeding of three meals, freely and long-term feeding goblins with