"Main God bear witness! My Wajin brother, there is no hurry about the silkworm eggs for now. You can first help me keep an eye out for them... What our tribe needs more urgently at present is more craftsmen, all kinds of craftsmen! And more livestock, especially four-footed beasts—horses that can be ridden, and oxen that can plow the fields!..."
The setting sun hung low; the day was about to end. Faced with Kakizaki Mitsuhiro's tempting proposal, Zuwaro pondered for a long time, then finally shook his head with difficulty, temporarily pressing down this "huge" transaction of "one hundred Gold Talismans."
As for his reason for refusing, it was not that the kingdom's fleet lacked that much gold. In truth, in the bottom hold of the flagship Great Snow Wolf, there were still four hundred jin of gold weighing it down. And in the divine South Mountain Port on the Kamchatka Peninsula, the remaining fifteen hundred jin were stored in cellars. As for the expenses along the way... when he traveled south, he had scattered Gold Talismans everywhere, and with the current trade added in, he had used only a hundred pieces, merely a trifling hundred jin of gold!
One had to know that High Priest Chimer, who was currently stationed on Great Whale Island and oversaw the logistics of northern colonization, held the right to dispose of close to ten tons of gold—gold scraped from half the Lake Kingdom, the entire Totonac Alliance, a small portion of the Maya city-states, plus the rare, high-purity raw ore collected from the gold mountains on the West Coast!
To the nations of the Old Continent, this was almost an inconceivable, madness-inducing dreamlike figure, one that could spark a crusading holy war, completely rescue Castile from its fiscal crisis, and sustain Spain's funnel-like