Count Samo had been absolutely right.
As long as the Xinfei Merchant Guild grew powerful enough that everyone had to think twice before crossing it, Xu Yi would never need to spend his days worrying about some great noble swallowing it whole.
But for the Xinfei Merchant Guild, which currently "didn't even rank among the guilds in a small city like Bunta City," that road was undoubtedly still a long one.
Of course, meals had to be eaten one bite at a time, and roads traveled one step at a time. There was no rushing it.
Fortunately, the Xinfei Merchant Guild's development had been both steady and rapid. Compared with when it had first been established the previous year, its strength had grown many times over.
The simplest, most direct comparison was in the figures.
When the Xinfei Merchant Guild had first been established the previous year, it had sold fewer than a thousand Magic Fans in its first month, with total sales of less than two thousand gold coins.
Since Xu Yi had still been hiring the city's various blacksmith shops to cast the Magic Fan casings back then, costs had been high. In the end, its net profit had only been around five hundred gold coins.
Although that had been an enormous sum to both Xu Yi and Heinz at the time, for the present Xinfei Merchant Guild, even the materials consumed by the Research Institute's magical experiments in a single month probably cost more than that.
According to the April financial report Sebas had prepared, the Xinfei Merchant Guild now had many sources of profit.
Among its Household Magic Machinery, sales of the Automatic Magic Rice Cooker and Magic Desk Lamp had remained steady.
Setting aside the explosive sales in their launch months, 6,748 Automatic Magic Rice