24 Expanding to new lands

Year-186 AD

Years in world- 4,186

After that day things seemed to take off like a rocket and I forgot to buckle up.

Julius and Alista became best of friends as Alista showed him the books with records of my money and businesses.

And the two of them brainstormed a way to spread out my money.

Oh and what is that you ask well let me tell you.

It was to start building a chariot arena.

And not just some circular area where they go in a circle on a quarter-mile track.

It was a five-mile-long track with seats going all the way around it.

With seats for Hundreds of thousands of people, with sweets for the emperor or nobles at the very top.

With massive pieces of velarium on long poles for shade.

We paid the workers an above-average amount for their work.

I mean it's not like we won't make it back when those workers come back and pay for entrance.

But the entrance fee might as well be free, with how low it was.

It took almost twenty years to make the arena.

At this point, Alista had retired to the villa I bought for him and his wife with servants for their every need.

So now Julius was in charge of my finances and loved it.

He was always doing different charities for the poor and building new homes for the poor.

And he was always using my money for one thing or another making sure that it got around.

All the while I wasn't sitting in the corner twiddling my thumbs.

I was looking to expand out because when Rome falls and the Volturi takes over, I will be able to move somewhere I have already set up.

Rome collapsed in the year 476 AD so that gives me a good three hundred years to get a plan in place.

And I think I know just the place.

England or what will become England.

All because in later years England will be a superpower with its fingers in every empire's pie.

And where else do you put all of your gold if not in a place that was only invaded by the Normans in 1066 or small amounts of Viking invasions?

Currently, England is under the rule of the Romans.

So leaving Julius in charge I hitched a ride on one of my ships to England with a metric shit ton of gold to help with my idea. Once there I started building my small underground empire.

I planned to become an important part of what will become England and how do you do that well let me tell you.

I started by opening a bank.

I ended up naming my banks Gringotts because just like the goblins in Harry Potter my vaults were underground and I had most of the gold in my vaults.

But unlike in Rome, I made this one twice the size of the one in Rome, because I was planning for the long term.

And with the Romans ruling England there were plenty of officials and military officers who knew of the vaults in Rome and we're more than happy to use my vaults.

What I did with this one was loans.

With the gold in the vaults, I would lend out their gold to someone and they would have to pay it back at a 3% interest rate.

2% to the person whose gold we used and 1% back to the bank.

We did monthly payments or you could pay it all in full.

But you always had to put something up as collateral if you couldn't pay back what you took like land or your home, sheep, horses, cattle, whatever you took out you had to have something worth as much as you took out.

And let me tell you, was it popular with the people whose gold was used and gained money just by keeping their gold in our vaults, although it wasn't much because they were paying us to keep their gold safe?

We also had 100% insurance on your money.

Like if we were to be overrun and some king ran off with your gold we would give you back what was taken, no strings attached.

Back then your gold was always at risk of being taken so that was also very important.

Something interesting is that I had to employ a literal army of people to work for me.

For starters, nobody knew how to count over ten so I ended up bringing people from Rome to teach my new employees math, so how to count, read, and write.

Those who excelled at it were put in places of management. With their own underlings to work for them.

I had a department just for keeping the papers in order and up to date, as well as one for the loans, to make sure the payments were being paid on time.

I also had a group of soldiers or ex-soldiers as my collectors who would go and threaten those who didn't want to pay what they owed.

As well as a hidden group that I placed in each department that would tell me if people were stealing, in other words, my own narks or snitches.

Then I had the really bad guys and I mean the worst of the worst all in their own little department.

And who are those you might ask, well let me tell you.

The auditors.

These were the guys that I paid the big bucks just to make sure they didn't go crooked on me.

Even though I had my own nark in the group it's less of a hassle to deal with if I just pay them more and keep them honest and happy.

The auditors were the really smart guys, and the hardest to find to fill an auditor position, they were like finding a needle in a haystack.

Their job was to make sure everything was run perfectly and if they found anything wrong god have mercy on that person's soul.

Of course, this was still a small operation, not even a quarter of what was in the vaults in Rome but that was just for now.

After I was done in England I decided like a great man once said, "Well I got this far, might as well keep going".

So I did. Putting my most trustworthy employee in charge I got on one of my ships and started moving.

After making a quick stop in Rome to see how Julius was doing, I went to Egypt and did the same thing in the city of Alexandria.

And let me tell you It's nice to have friends in high places in Rome, anywhere Rome ruled I could do whatever I wanted.

After another few years there, I went to India and then the Middle East, building my banks. I hadn't gone to China yet but that was just a matter of time, I just didn't want to overdo it. I was going to let the banks establish themselves and everything get on track then maybe I would expand.

I was making England the headquarters for all of this as well, all banks would make copies of their records and using my ships send them to England where they would be stored. So if there was a fire or something they can request the document, where we could copy it and then send it to them.

Causing me to make another department just for that.

By this point, it was the year 227 and I was satisfied with what I had done.

My banks were now known all over the known world.

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This one is a bit rushed because I really want to get to the next arc of the story so sorry about that ;)

And sorry if there are any problems with it I'm super tired and will fix it tomorrow