Chapter 642: End of Year Meeting – Part 3

Tina is friends with Olivia, whose mother is from the Dalton Family that owns and produces the original Bathing Cream, maybe they’d be interested in some kind of joint venture, Lucas jotted down the idea in his notebook before addressing Rebecca and Joel, "for now, stop increasing our purchases of animal fats and instead start mixing in imbi oil to continue increasing production up to the factory’s maximum capacity of 1 million units per month."

"I’ll try to strike a better deal for bulk imports from the Vast Ocean Trading Company, and I’ll dedicate more resources to trying to cultivate the actual fruit trees in the Rockwell Kingdom so we can eventually become self sufficient," Lucas followed up.

"That would be wonderful," Rebecca nodded, "After all, 1 million bars per month is still well short of our ultimate goal, yes?"

"En," Lucas nodded, "1 bar of soap for every man, woman, and child in the Rockwell Kingdom every month is still the baseline we’re aiming for. It might take us a bit longer than we had hoped to reach that goal, but I’m confident we will succeed."

Smiling widely, Rebecca and Joel both acknowledged the order, ""You can count on us, Boss.""

And with that, the two of them sat down again and Lucas turned his attention to the final member of the original 5 young-adult orphans he had hired to help him back in Redwood Town.

Seeing her Boss nod towards her, Laura, who was currently the third highest ranked member of the organization just behind Lucas and Victoria, stood up from her seat and began her report, "This year’s harvest resulted in a total of 703 tons of Maple Sugar, which was sold for roughly 15.6 million Gold."

"After all expenses such as wages, taxes, and production costs were paid, the remaining profit was 14.2 million Gold."

"Of that, in accordance with our agreement, 75% was directly paid to the Balfour Family, leaving us with a total of 3.55 million Gold in net profit."

The numbers were shocking; on a completely different level compared to every other venture Lucas was engaged in put together, and Laura was just getting started.

"Ever since the winter sugar harvest ended, with the additional funding from both our organization, the Balfour Family, and the Randolph Count Family, we have been pouring an immense amount of effort into building up Maple Town and founding new villages in its surrounding..."

When she was essentially put in charge of Project Maple, Lucas’ most lucrative and geo-strategically important public-facing business, Laura had felt a huge amount of pressure, but despite some initial missteps and fumbles, the young woman had gradually gotten her footing.

Today, it was apparent she had risen far above her original profile as a simple worker and was now a highly competent and confident leader.

This past year, Laura had not only managed the completion of the brand new mid-sized Maple Town, but had also overseen the construction of 8 small villages dedicated to tapping lych tress.

The new road network linking Maple Town to its villages, as well as to Falcon’s Bend, was another of Laura’s accomplishments, as was the migration of nearly 5,000 pioneers from both the Balfour March and Randolph County to these newly established settlements.

Of course, she had not done this alone.

Laura got a lot of help from her mentor, Victoria, Eris’ mother, Sasha, her own trusty assistant, Blaine, and many others in Lucas’ orbit, including Lucas himself.

Still, that did nothing to diminish Laura’s achievements.

Other than his Head Manager, the person who Lucas appreciated and trusted the most amongst all his employees was definitely Laura.

The young woman went on to report the number of taps they had installed for the upcoming harvest season was expected to reach 18-fold what they were compared to last year, which was far more than their original goal of a 10 times increase.

Processing capacity for lych tree sap had also increased by more than 50 times, with literal factory-style facilities now up and running in Maple Town. This would not only improve quality control, it would make the turn-around time for sugar production much shorter than last year, garnering applause and praise from everyone else in the hall.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t all good news. Laura also made sure to note that after the unexpected cold-snap that happened half-a-month ago, a small sap run had occurred, during which their field workers had noticed that many of the taps which had been left from the previous season failed to produce any liquid.

What’s more, some trees which had been heavily tapped were showing small signs of rotting around the ’wounds’ where the taps had been installed.

Of the taps from the previous season which did still work, a different issue had arisen, a decrease in the quality of the sugar which could be refined from the extracted sap.

For instance, some Star Lych trees which had produced Mid-Rank Tier 3 sugar the previous year only produced Low-Rank sugar during this early winter ’sap run’; however, this only seemed to be an issue when more than 7 or 8 taps were installed on a single tree.

In short, they still had a lot to learn about how to best harvest and process maple sugar if they wanted this to become a sustainable industry.

All that said, last year, Lucas’ organization earned 3.55 million Gold from producing and selling maple sugar, and Laura was now telling them that, under her management, they could expect somewhere between 15 to 20 times that much money in the coming year.

Even taking the most conservative of estimates, that was 50 million Gold, more than enough to purchase basically anything they wanted to.

Even ordering a small Skyship from the Rising Sun Empire might be possible with that much cash, thought only if Lucas did so through his Master’s connections.

I need to find some way to reward Laura, Lucas thought to himself.

He had already promoted her twice this year, from a Low-Rank Manager to a High-Rank one with a salary of 10 Gold per month, but that hardly seemed like enough compared to the work she had done for him.

Staring at the young woman before him, who was basically unrecognizable compared to her old, scrawny, scruffy self from a year-and-a-half ago when he first hired her, Lucas noticed that despite a substantial improvement in her health and wealth, Laura’s cultivation remained at the Seventh Step Body Tempering Realm.

For a 21-year-old commoner orphan in the Rockwell Kingdom, that was actually pretty impressive, but for one of Lucas’ best and most loyal assistants, that simply wouldn’t do.

For that matter, both Rebecca and Joel were also lagging quite far behind in their cultivation, despite now being orders of magnitude better off than they had been a year ago.

Part of that was probably all the work Lucas had dumped onto them, leaving them little time to actually cultivate, but another part was a lack of proper guidance and Cultivation Techniques.

Lucas had been delaying giving them such things not because he was being stingy, but because he was hoping to achieve more results from Project Ascension before introducing his new cultivation method to them.

With Elizabeth Carlson’s recent breakthrough, and with soap and sugar production now having become somewhat stable, perhaps the time had come for Lucas to bring these three into his innermost circle.

They had already proven their loyalty and trustworthiness, so Lucas saw no problem with sharing some more of his secrets with them.

He would still need to get permission from his Master, but Lucas didn’t anticipate any issues with that as Laura, Rebecca, and Joel didn’t really have anywhere else to go, nor did they have connections with anyone who they might try to disclose the secrets of the Unarmed Foundations Art to.