They had the intelligence;
They had a plan;
They had a focus;
They even had the materials.
All that remained was to start gathering shelters such as those stone houses in one place.
Naturally, Lan Qingyou had no objection to that.
The Magician: "Then sell me some. A hundred should be about right."
After all, there was an ancestral witch in the group.
Getting hold of something like this should have been very easy.
But!
The Tower: "I refuse."
High Priestess: "Huh?"
High Priestess: "Wait, why?"
Vivian could not quite understand why Lan Qingyou would refuse.
Wasn't this clearly for everyone's sake?
The Tower: "You can buy them from those girls, but I can't sell them to you."
There was a note of helplessness in Lan Qingyou's voice.
The Tower: "These things aren't worth much, and they aren't difficult to make. But a lot of the girls rely on these little scrolls for their starting funds."
The Tower: "If I give them to you, who's going to buy theirs? If nobody buys them, how are they supposed to grow?"
The Tower: "So I won't sell them. If you want to buy some, go find other Black Witches."
Lan Qingyou's reasoning was sound.
Very, very sound.
So sound that nobody could argue with it.
It had been fine before.
There had only been a hundred or two hundred thousand of them, and Lan Qingyou could support them all herself.
But things were different now.
Never mind the few territories surrounding the Land of Abandonment.
Eureka alone now housed several million Black Witches.
There were plenty of new ones, old ones, recent arrivals, and those who had been around for a hundred years.
Under these circumstances, the lowest-grade materials were naturally the first to run short.
And naturally, their output consisted of