chapter 53
I looked at the state of the city—truly disappointing. I contacted the captain of an airship and told him to bring more resources, stating that those fucking idiots went on a demolition run. After that, I began flying back to Earth at high speeds, after rach earth i undo my Rainbow Flame Transformation and change clothes from my storage room. I can't use my storage ring due to the spatial fluctuations around my body when I use my unique Magic Rainbow Flame Transformation. It really sucks, though—it also prevents people from teleporting right behind me. The spatial fluctuations extend an entire meter around me, so trying to teleport near me won't work; the interference from these fluctuations will prevent you from teleporting too close.
I landed in front of my house. Entering, I found Alex my familiar and Sophie going at it. Though it's not really surprising, Sophie had already mentioned that she was going to make my familiar a concubine, stating that only she gets to be the wife. Naturally, I joined the fun. After a few hours, we took a bath and decided to go shopping.
We headed to the shopping street. This entire street was on a leyline, so despite them looking like small corner stores—well, small luxurious corner stores since the materials used in the shops were extremely valuable, such as fine jade, gold, silver, platinum, mithril, and various expensive woods—the shops were designed to cater to the high class. If you looked based on appearance, not a single shop looked ugly; they were all well-designed works of art as much as they were buildings. Of course, they looked tiny on the outside. They were using spatial magic for convenience because a leyline runs through the entire street. It's called Shopping Street because every building on this street is a shop.
We entered one of the shops. Although it looks small on the outside, it's as big as a shopping center on the inside, with a ridiculously large amount of things to buy. Now, naturally, the cost of things is pretty low in this shop. This is because it isn't selling any luxurious items; it's just a grocery store. With the ease of magic, farming and agriculture-related industries became far more reliable. This greatly reduced the prices, but also, none of these shops want to carelessly raise their prices. Living longer lives means they want long-term profits, unlike human beings who focus on short-term gains, failing to see or even try to see the long term.
If you're going to live 10,000 years or a thousand years, you don't want to make a whole heap of money at once because those billions of dollars aren't going to last you long enough. You'd rather make a very steady amount of money, as it all adds up over time. This understanding is why the shops have very stable prices and why humans in Australia have a very hard time setting up businesses here. Their mindset is to make as much money as possible, while the mindset of the longer-lived people who are not human is to make a stable income. After all, if you can steadily make a dollar a day for a thousand years, you end up with a lot of money. But if you only make $10,000 once, you only ever end up with $10,000.
We naturally decided to get some snacks, putting them in our storage rings and leaving. This country uses magic in place of industrial machinery. This has two advantages: cooking-related spells and crafting-related spells require the necessary tools. For example, if you want to use a cooking spell, you would obviously need a stove and a spatula for the cooking process itself. You would also need some sort of spoon to mix the ingredients. In other words, the cooking magic doesn't make food appear out of nowhere; it just allows you to enchant the tools used to cook so that they can basically cook by themselves. This means you need both the ingredients and all of the tools you would normally use to prepare a dish. The spells use the skills of the cook, so if someone who didn't know how to cook tried to use cooking magic, the result would be horrible.
This is also the case with crafting. These types of magic only save time, which is how we're able to produce products rivaling the mass production of machinery, but with much higher quality since the skills of the magic user are also taken into account. A highly skilled craftsman could produce a wooden table of much better quality than any machine could in the same amount of time. Someone skilled enough in magic can have multiple productions of the same product going on simultaneously, as long as they have enough tools and materials.