"This is unbelievable. How much would ten tons be worth? Ten kilograms is twenty million, so ten tons is a thousand times that... uh, ah. Twenty billion yen? This is unbelievable."
Twenty billion yen was such an enormous sum that everyone could only measure it against their own sense of money.
Some said that the most a person could earn in wages over an entire lifetime was two hundred million yen. You entered society, worked yourself to the bone, devoted your whole life to a company, and only found release in old age. Even including retirement pay, it would amount to no more than two hundred million yen. In other words, that figure was the value of one person's life—no, it could even be called the price of a life. Then twenty billion represented the enormous value of a hundred human lives. Suppose each person started working at twenty and continued until sixty, for a total of forty years. This gold would equal four thousand years' worth of wages for one person. Didn't that mean you would have to work every day from the Jōmon period until now to earn that much?
"Is twenty billion yen... a lot?"
"It's an absurd amount. You could probably buy enough sliced cake for Maria to eat for the rest of her life and never finish it."
Jessica Ushiromiya explained it in terms Maria could understand.
"Witch's Gift"
"But if it were twenty billion yen in cash, that would be one thing. Still, having that much gold all gathered in one place feels rather unrealistic. As we said earlier, gold is extremely heavy, so converting your assets into gold and storing them is inconvenient. If it were securities with very high face values or exceptionally valuable jewels, that would be easier to understand. After