Chapter 156 – Maximizing Profits

Chapter 156 – Maximizing Profits

“That’s quite a nice talent—being able to enjoy all the world’s delicacies while simultaneously strengthening yourself. You should eat more high-energy things in the future; it should work even better for you. Many magical plants taste quite good too,” Carmela said.

Vasida nodded eagerly. “I couldn’t bring myself to eat Magic Gold Coins, but I’ve eaten Moira’s cards, and also the potion dregs from Potions class! They really do work better than ordinary food!”

Lady Carmela truly deserved her reputation as a powerful Sorceress—she’d seen through it at a glance.

“Potion dregs?” Carmela nearly thought she’d misheard. “Why on earth would you eat potion dregs?”

“In fact, it’s not just potion dregs—there are also tree branches, stones, soil… But she doesn’t eat them directly; she puts them into her Devouring Stomach,” Amisha explained. “The Devouring Stomach can digest and convert everything into Mana that nourishes both her power and her physical body.”

Carmela: “!!!”

She’d been wrong. This child’s ability was far stronger than the Dragons’.

Not even the Dragon King could extract energy from garbage, but this child could!

This digestive capacity and energy extraction-conversion efficiency—she had never seen anything like it.

“Vasida, you need to step up your research into Sorceress Magic. The authority you command is incredibly powerful!” Carmela said earnestly.

If Vasida’s Sorceress Magic were to be made available to the world, the strength of witches—and indeed all Races in Valen—would probably rise by an entire tier.

Even Carmela herself felt tempted.

“If you have any questions about Sorceress Magic, you can ask me—no, actually, asking Moira would be better. Even I have to admire the extent to which she’s developed Sorceress Magic!”

Caught completely off guard by the sudden praise, Mo Lan’s reaction was: “(⊙_⊙)?”

How could she possibly deserve to have Lady Carmela—the creator of Contract Magic, the core medium of all Sorceress Magic—say that she understood Sorceress Magic better than Carmela herself did?

Without Lady Carmela, there would be no Sorceress Magic to share in the first place!

“Lady Carmela, you flatter me far too much. My understanding of Sorceress Magic comes from just that one book, 《The Path of the Sorceress》!” After saying this, Mo Lan thought for a moment and added one more thing: “At most, there’s also a bit of marketing strategy from my previous life.”

“Moira, there’s no need to be modest,” Carmela said. “Just tell me—if you possessed my authority over contracts, how would you turn it into Sorceress Magic for sale to maximize profits?”

Mo Lan answered almost instinctively: “Obviously, I’d split it into different contract forms—trading Contract Magic, safety Contract Magic, master-servant Contract Magic, equal Contract Magic, and so on—and sell them separately! The finer the classification, the better. The Magic itself would be sold for a permanent Mana fee, and each time a contract document is manifested for use, there’d be an additional one-time Mana charge. Ideally, I’d add protection tiers to the contracts—the greater the penalty for breach, the harder a contract is to violate, the higher its tier, and the more expensive it sells for.”

In truth, she had already thought about this question extensively while reading 《The Path of the Sorceress》.

If she were Lady Carmela, she absolutely would not have simply created a single Golden Pen Technique capable of writing all contracts.

Even if she had created tiered levels for the Golden Pen Technique corresponding to different tiers of Sorceress Magic contracts, it would still be a significant loss.

Selling only the Golden Pen Technique without charging for each contract written—how was that any different from selling a recipe without collecting franchise fees?

Although Carmela had already gained some inspiration from the advice Mo Lan had given Lilith, at the time she’d only felt a tiny bit of regret.

But now, actually hearing Mo Lan lay it all out, her tiny bit of regret had become an enormous amount of regret.

Because she’d discovered she’d lost out on even more than she’d thought.

Her Magic had been established long ago, and changing the rules after the fact would violate the spirit of contracts.

What was lost was lost. At least she had already passed the stage where she needed Sorceress Magic to earn Mana, rapidly grow her strength, and escape threats from other Races.

But the young Sorceresses hadn’t!

She emphasized once more to Vasida and Sylph: “Once you two have figured out what abilities you plan to imbue your Sorceress Magic with, you absolutely must consult Moira on how to sell them to maximize profits! Otherwise, once you’ve made them publicly available, it’ll be too late.”

Vasida and Sylph nodded so fast their heads became a blur.

If Lady Carmela’s Magic had been sold the way Mo Lan described, just imagine how much more Mana she would have earned!

No Sorceress would ever turn her back on more Mana.

They also felt a bit fortunate—fortunate that Mo Lan had been born in their era rather than Lady Carmela’s.

Otherwise, Contract Magic, Book Magic, and Fireworks Magic probably wouldn’t be as affordable as they were now.

Otherwise, they themselves might have unknowingly sold their own Sorceress Magic for far too cheap.

“Moira! When the time comes, please help us figure out how to sell our Magic!” The way Vasida and Sylph looked at Mo Lan was almost identical to the way they looked at Magic Gold Coins after receiving them as exam rewards—counting each one with gleaming eyes.

“Of course, no problem. But… don’t you think my way of selling is too much like a swindling merchant? With my approach, witches and other Races entering contracts would have to pay a much higher price!” Mo Lan asked hesitantly.

When she had been designing Card Magic, she’d also wondered whether she had internalized the ways of her previous life’s capitalists a bit too thoroughly.

Doing this to other Races was no problem at all—in fact, she was even planning to double the price again when selling cards to witches compared to outsiders, at ten times the cost price.

But for witches—even at only five times cost, plus the gacha mechanic—wasn’t that going too far?

In the end, it was thinking about Earth, thinking about herself, and then thinking about what her seniors had said about witches’ principle of equal exchange that made her stick with her original plan without further concessions to witches.

She needed to earn more Mana so she could grow stronger faster, escape the threat that came with being a Sorceress, gain the power to save the world, and rescue Earth—the world that had given her a new life.

But she hadn’t expected that her way of selling would not only be praised by Senior Lilith—who routinely called her a swindling merchant and compared her to a goblin—but would also be held in such high regard by Lady Carmela, Vasida, and Sylph.

“What does it matter?” Lilith said. “Although I constantly call you a swindling merchant and say you’re just like a goblin, if I had your brain, I’d absolutely be an even bigger swindler than you!”

“Exactly! Did you think Traci, Anita, and I don’t sell our Magic the way you do because we’re kindhearted, because we don’t want to? It’s because we simply never thought of it! Even after living for several hundred or over a thousand years, it still never occurred to us that Magic could be sold that way.

When we were young, we couldn’t think of selling it that way. Now, we never thought about how to earn more Mana from it.”

Carmela continued:

“If someone had told us back then that Magic could be sold this way, we absolutely would have chosen to do exactly as you do.

There is no shame in pursuing your own interests. It’s only when you harm others’ interests that you should feel uneasy.

Sorceress Magic is our authority. We have absolute freedom in how we handle it, and no one has the right to question that!

We have no obligation to share it with others. The reason we ultimately chose to share it isn’t because others needed it—it’s because doing so benefits ourselves.”