The first step in selling bread was to find customers.
Fortunately, they were in London's East End. It was a recognized slum, but quite a few people lived here-in fact, there were a great many.
Some capitalists had ridden the wave of the revolution and built many factories here. A large number of the slum's residents were factory workers, making them a natural customer base.
There were also lower-class casual laborers here who had no steady jobs.
They all needed to eat and sleep, so bread, a cheap daily necessity, could certainly sell quite well.
As far as Mo Fei knew, there was a place selling bread three blocks from the orphanage.
Calling it a bakery gave it a little too much credit. It was just a small workshop.
Several cooks worked under a heartless owner.
They crowded into a cramped kitchen, kneading dough and baking, doing repetitive work all day long.
Many of them were not even particularly good cooks. Their only advantage was their cheap labor; they were all poor people living nearby.
They earned the lowest wages and did the busiest work.
It was easy to imagine what the bread baked by such a group tasted like.
Mo Fei and the others had only ever bought it in emergencies. It was often burnt, and being so dry that it could not even be sliced was normal too...
What annoyed the nearby residents most was that the bread they bought here sometimes contained bran that had not been properly sifted out. One look made it clear that the flour used here was of the lowest grade.
Yet even so, business here was actually quite good.
After a hard day's work, very few people were willing to bake their own bread. What they usually did was pour a bowl of boiling water and soak the hard, dry bread in it to fill their stomachs.
This was precisely the market Mo Fei was targeting.
The bread he made would definitely taste much better. Even if it cost 0.5 pounds more, they would find it entirely acceptable after trying it. Besides, this slightly more expensive "luxury" might also be a way to treat themselves.
More importantly, as long as the workshop's owner understood that the amount of bread they sold was limited and would not actually affect his business,
peaceful coexistence would be possible.
But if that man proved shortsighted and had some unsavory ideas,
a cold glint flashed through Mo Fei's eyes at the thought, and he began planning the next skill he would improve.
That was right. Under his original plan, his next skill should have been either farming or livestock raising.
But some of Lina's earlier words had reminded him that his current surroundings were not within China. If anything happened to the orphanage, all his plans for the future would collapse.
So next month, he intended to improve a combat-related skill.
As the director of this orphanage and its only adult, he needed to learn to use force to protect himself.
As a government-certified orphanage, they had a chance to resolve anything done openly. At worst, they would have to spend some money. But if anyone dared plot something behind their backs, then they would have to forgive him...
A transmigrator would teach his enemies what it meant to return a favor.
Of course, there was actually another way to deal with it: improving a snake-related skill.
He had originally had no such idea, but Tom's presence had made Mo Fei realize that snakes might be quite a good tool too.
Keeping venomous snakes and using them to deal with enemies would be discreet and would not arouse suspicion. This approach seemed even better.
However, Mo Fei had not yet made up his mind.
That was getting off track. In Mo Fei's view, finding customers was not difficult.
He could have the orphanage's children sell bread outside, taking only five or six loaves at a time and returning once they had sold them. That way, the money in their hands would be unlikely to attract the attention of those thugs, while more people would learn about the orphanage's new business.
Of course, the neighbors were also worth approaching. If that worked, a steady stream of customers would be enough to cover the orphanage's expenses.
Winning over the neighbors would be much simpler.
Putting his thoughts into action, Mo Fei slowly stood up and returned to the kitchen, intending to make a batch of bread for some people who could help them establish sales.
While Mo Fei busied himself with his own affairs, the orphanage's children began their games. With Tom around, they had gained another after-dinner activity: teasing Tom to see whether he would cry.
They might succeed only once in ten attempts, but even so, they never tired of it.
The children at the orphanage had been mentioned before.
Not counting Tom Riddle, there were eight children at Mo Orphanage.
The oldest was Aiwen. He was already twelve and had been at the orphanage for four years. He still looked like he should have been in school, but he could already be considered one of its pillars.
Next was Lina, who was around eleven. Her story had been mentioned before, so there was no need to repeat it here.
Then there were the other children.
Next came two boys around ten years old, one somewhat plump and the other so thin he was little more than skin and bones.
The plumper boy was called Boer. He was somewhat timid by nature and had grown accustomed to enduring things and backing down. He had first come here because his father had accidentally killed his mother while beating and berating her, after which a series of sordid incidents had followed.
By the time the child was sent here, he was already like this.
The thin boy was named Kyle. The reasons for his frail build were complicated. In Mo Fei's previous life, his lack of appetite would have made a great many people trying to lose weight drool with envy. But that was not the biggest problem. The real problem was that he was always quiet and withdrawn, and his eyes were terribly empty. At the orphanage, Boer was usually the only one who stayed beside him and listened to those bizarre scenes he described.
The reason he had been sent here was simple. His family thought he was a freak and did not intend to raise him, but they could not bear to abandon him either, so they quietly left him at the orphanage's entrance one night.
After that, they never took the initiative to see him again.
As for how he felt about Aiwen and Mo Fei, they could not be called strangers to him, but neither were they particularly close.
Boer seemed to be the only person he was truly familiar with.
But this child was also someone Mo Fei paid some attention to, because he was always talking about fantastical things, such as a female demon emerging from the earth, a frog sitting beside a spring, and eyes appearing outside the door at midnight...
Though it sounded rather unnerving, to a transmigrator, could this be some kind of talent?
After all, this was a world of magic. This child called Kyle might very well be a wizard, though that would be easy enough to verify.
They only needed to wait until he turned eleven and see whether he received a letter from Hogwarts.
The nine-year-old was a little girl named Mia, a pretty little girl who looked like a doll. However, she was also the most timid child here; even a rat darting out by the roadside would give her a fright.
She always liked to cling to Lina's side, quietly following her around.
Normally, such a beautiful child would not have ended up in an orphanage like this.
After all, beauty had always been an asset. She could have enjoyed many happy years, then married after reaching adulthood and continued living a decent life-but only if her parents had been reasonably well-off.
Not a thug and a prostitute.
That was right. She was a prostitute's child, and whether it was a curse or a blessing, she had inherited all her parents' good looks and grown into what she was now.
Having a child was never a simple matter for a prostitute.
It interfered with earning money and affected her body too. Yet back then, for reasons unknown, her mother had given birth to her and kept her hidden while raising her until she was six.
However, as she grew more beautiful with each passing day, her mother began to regret it.
For people at the bottom like them, looks like that were never a good thing.
So one night, she drugged her daughter unconscious, wrapped her in a sack, then gritted her teeth and hired a carriage to take her to the orphanage's entrance.
As for her mother herself, she left without looking back.
After Mia came the eight-year-old.
His name was Zane.
Though already eight, he looked only five or six. He had been frail and sickly from birth. His occasional shortness of breath and perpetually pale complexion made him look very fragile. He was also the child everyone at the orphanage worried about most.
A large portion of the orphanage's money had gone toward his medical treatment.
Mature for his age, he also blamed himself deeply and always seemed gloomy.
But there was nothing they could do. Though his illness usually caused no major problems, whenever it flared up, those wrenching coughs were enough to make anyone's heart ache.
The last two children were Jimmy and Lucy.
They were both five and looked like tiny little things, but in the orphanage, they had already lost the right to play.
When Jimmy first arrived, he had always seemed somewhat bewildered and vacant. His reactions were not particularly quick either. He liked sitting blankly by himself, neither playing nor making noise, and seemed rather numb.
At first, Mo Fei had been a little worried about his ability to communicate.
But later, he seemed to be the most normal child of all. Whatever Mo Fei or Aiwen told him to do, he would do it, and he could keep up that sort of mechanical work for a very long time.
That was how the responsibility of looking after Tom had ended up in his hands.
As for Lucy, she seemed like the most normal child in the orphanage, with clear eyes carrying a fear of the unknown. In reality, however, she never spoke. She was like a mute. If Mo Fei had not once heard her whispering something to Jimmy, he too would have thought he had taken in a mute.
Oh, right. Jimmy and Lucy were probably brother and sister. They had been sent here together.
The swaddling clothes they wore at the time had also been made from the same piece of fabric.
Unfortunately, no one knew why they had come here.
Five boys and three girls made up the orphanage's entire membership, and they were also Mo Fei's initial foundation.
The second batch of bread was soon baked as well. This time, he took a basket from nearby and placed some bread inside. Once it had cooled a little, he covered it with a layer of breathable cloth and left the orphanage with Aiwen.