Winner Takes All

It was still the conference room in the headquarters building of the "Eye of Wealth."

The atmosphere was oppressive, the air heavy. Even the whale-oil candles on the walls seemed especially dim.

"Let's put it to a vote!"

Chairman William Orange's deep voice echoed through the spacious conference room.

However.

Every Frisia person present knew perfectly well how vital credit was to themselves, the major institutions, and even the entire fledgling "Lowland Republic."

Over the past century, the prosperity of the Frisia Kingdom's commerce and the development of its maritime trade had rested precisely on the gold-like reputation for reliability forged by Frisia merchants!

It had all originated from a true story dating back to before the Age of Exploration.

A Frisia captain named Barentsz and seventeen sailors had been transporting a client's goods when their merchant ship became trapped by frozen seas on an island belonging to a northern island nation.

They waited in isolation for a full eight months.

During this period.

They tore apart the ship's deck for fuel to maintain their body temperatures in the minus-forty-degree cold, and they hunted to obtain barely enough fur and food to survive.

Under such unimaginably harsh conditions, eight of them died one after another.

Yet these Frisia people did something outsiders could scarcely imagine: they did not touch a single item entrusted to them by their client, even though the cargo included clothing and medicine that could have saved their lives!

When winter passed and spring arrived, the surviving crew, after enduring countless hardships, finally delivered the goods intact to their destination and placed them in their client's hands.

They paid with their lives to uphold their beliefs, creating a principle of commerce passed down through the generations and leaving behind precious wealth for their descendants.

At the time,