Guild Business

"Finally that's over!" I moaned loudly as I lazily slumped into my chair.

I knew that mountains of paperwork were my destiny when I first started the Adventurer's Guild, but I didn't think that it would be THIS complicated. Despite the fact that my body and mind physically could not experience fatigue, I still felt mentally exhausted after nine straight days of doing nothing but paperwork.

I lay my face down on my desk after letting out another sigh and closing my eyes. I lay there for a few seconds before I heard a knock on the door before it opened. "You know laying in that posture is bad for you right?" I heard some criticism coming from Lilith as she walked in through the doorway, probably holding even more stacks of paperwork.

I didn't even bother opening my eyes as I greeted her with a raised hand. "I'm tired ok? I haven't even got any breaks to sleep since this whole thing started a month ago!" I moaned out.

"You have been working hard." She said as she put down the papers, sat on the edge of my desk, and began to pat my head to comfort me.

"... You know I'm supposed to be the one comforting my daughter, not the other way around right?" I groaned as I looked up at her.

Lilith giggled a bit and stopped patting my head before jumping off the desk. Seeing how she was done with that and on to more official matters, I pushed myself up and away from the table and gave her a more business attitude.

"How are things progressing?" I asked.

"Good. Between your knowledge and Velmama- I mean Velzard's magical tools, we have officially finished properly training all of the staff. We have plenty of Adventuring Advisers, Monster Material Butchers, and Herbologists. The printing press you requested has begun full production of Adventurer's Guidebooks and we are passing them out to all new recruits whenever they register." She reported.

"Good," I replied as I nodded my head in confirmation.

Training Advisors was a relatively easy task. We simply hired a huge number of workers, particularly good-looking young men and women, and trained them up on hospitality as well as taught them how to sell the benefits of registration. We also hired a number of Herbalists to make potions using the method I discovered earlier in my life of making High Potions from Low Potion Ingredients.

Apparently, it was a revolutionary discovery and many of them wanted me to publish the method in a journal of some kind to let the world know. I simply waved it off at the time, but it turned out to be a big deal, but that's a story for another day.

Anyways, the herbologists had a threefold job. The first was to make potions for adventurers to use to heal themselves or their party members. The second was to identify plants and herbs that adventurers brought back before confirming that what they brought in was genuine and thus the adventurers were paid for their mission. The third and perhaps most important thing was surveying and mapping out the areas where the herbs grew and teaching adventurers how to properly forage without killing or over-harvesting the plants so that they could grow back.

Monster Material Butchers were actually the hardest to find. Many monsters have special biological features that are valuable to businesses. Direwolves, for example, had pelts that naturally protected them from the cold and were mostly water resistant, so coats made from their pelts were popular. Lizardman Tails were a delicacy in the West, so making sure to properly butcher and prepare the meat was essential. A Horned Rabbit's horns made for a good conductor of magical energy and their meat was delicious. The bones of most monsters can even be ground up into a powder for some supernaturally good bonemeal fertilizer which was then sold to the more well-off farmers who could afford it.

The most useful material, however, was the magic stones that most high-ranking monsters have. They could be used for a variety of materials, from a magic wand's focus to magitech like the Registration Orbs. Hell, we even mixed a powderized version of the crystals into the ink we imprinted into Guild Cards to give it its magical effects for privacy reasons.

Monster Material Butchers also existed to teach adventurers how to properly butcher their catch and dispose of the remains, mostly through small pits which were later burned and buried to prevent the undead from rising back up, especially in magicule-rich areas.

"Has my wife come out from the warehouse she's coupled herself up in yet?" I asked with a bit of hope.

"Unfortunately not." Lilith sighed, knowing the news would kill my mood.

I melted a bit into my chair in depression and let out a long sigh. I loved Velzard so much. I also knew her love of crafting things, so when I asked her to make the magic tools for the Guild, I knew she'd get into a mood of creation in which there was no room for little old me. One of the reasons why I stayed working for so long without a break was because I was waiting on her to finish her groove so we could relax together, but it'd been a month already and she didn't show any sign of slowing down.

Lilith chuckled awkwardly. "Seems like you're idea to make the next generation of Guild Cards into a type of currency has come back to bite you, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess. I just thought if Adventurers didn't have to carry around so much money and could safely store and then withdraw them at another branch, it'd help with the adoption of Guild Cards by adventurers, though I guess the wireless updating worldwide was way more complicated huh?" I asked.

"Yes, it is revolutionary, actually! We've even got merchants lining up and constantly petitioning to allow us to use the system whenever we get it up and running as a sort of international bank." Lilith smiled at me.

"Maybe in the future, we can operate like that, but for now we can't sync up the information over more than a few meters let alone across entire cities or countries," I muttered before straightening up again.

"How's the Book doing?" I asked.

"It's already on its fourth iteration! Soon it'll be ready for public release alongside the Adventurer's training course." Lilith responded.

The Adventurer's Training Course was a two-week long course that all Adventurers had to take part in and pass to register. It was kinda like a training camp if you thought about it. The course was something I came up with to produce worthy and elite adventurers who wouldn't get themselves killed in Goblin Slayer style.

It consisted of both practical and class lessons. The practical lessons taught adventurers how to unlock their Fighting Spirit Aura to improve their chances in combat as well as teaching them how to make a camp, find clean water, dress wounds, deal with poison, and prepare proper rations. It also taught them how to butcher monsters correctly, spot and collect ingredients, gather information from the locals about monster activity, scout out monster lairs, and maintain their equipment properly.

This course was designed as a result of a thought experiment that spun out from my old world. In that world, there was the thought 'How many Albert Einstein's are stuck working at McDonald's to make ends meet?' It was a good point and often used to advocate for free college in America back where I came from, but in THIS world, the question was different. 'How many future legendary adventurers will die to goblins because they didn't know how to fight in a cave and their sword strikes the ceiling, or how many mages will die because they didn't know how to cast spells to deal with being poisoned?'

(A/N: Can you tell I've been watching Goblin Slayer Recently?)

The Adventurer's Guidebook was exactly as it sounded. It was a book that helped adventurers by giving them a monster encyclopedia with strengths and weaknesses for some of the most common monsters, an ingredient encyclopedia that showed which plants are poisonous or not and which can be sold at the guild for potions, a map of the known world which would be updated on every new printing run, a list of guild rules, regulations, and procedures, as well as a list of set prices for standard missions that could be used when they were negotiating personal requests. Additionally, each book would have a, for lack of a better word, an advertisement page, which gave out information on the local discounts businesses that offered free services to active adventurers, like a free meal at an inn if you buy a room or a discount on buying a sword for those who finished their basic training.

I smiled thinking about everything I had to set up and how I'd standardized the training procedure to the point that many countries wanted to send their professional soldiers through training just so that they could learn the skills to a higher level than what they were trained in before.

'It kinda makes sense why all that paperwork was required now.' I thought before shaking my head and sighing with a small smile on my face.

I turned to look at Lilith who was my acting secretary for the moment. "So everything going according to plan then. What are some of the issues we are facing?" I asked. I wasn't so stupid to think that nothing would go wrong or that we wouldn't get any copycats. Not only that, our adventurer's guild may be a troupey mess of standard isekai BS, but to the people of the world, it was revolutionary, so many people, especially the already active and not registered adventurers, would be suspicious of it, even if we did have the backing of many countries.

"We are very understaffed," Lilith admitted. "We have enough people to run most guilds now, but because we are expanding so rapidly, we will soon outpace our ability to staff them. Not only that, but there is also the racial problem." Lilith admitted.

I sighed. I guess I should have expected that. I may have only been working on the project for a month, but that was because the Guild was only open for that long. We had one location in seven different countries, mostly in their capitals. While each one of them was fully operational, for it to be considered a 'successful' launch, we'd need to expand into many of the bigger cities around the world that weren't just political capitals. The biggest problem with our ability to expand, however, wasn't personnel, it was racial.

I had made a name for myself in my early years as a Hero and preached a lot about equality for all races, but that was easier said than done. Dwarves and Elves hated each other over some stupid grievance centuries ago which made it hard to have Dwarves working in Elven countries without them being hazed and harassed hard while some human countries still practiced Slavery and were eyeing up the attractive elves and beastmen who worked as Advisors in the guild.

Then there was also the issue of the entirely new race of Dark Elves which were the result of Ivarage's Miasma corrupting normal Elves and darkening their skin. They weren't any different from normal elves, but they still faced some discrimination from normal colored elves and especially the few surviving High Elves who held power in places like Sarion.

I actually made use of this discrimination to have them work in the guild since many lost their normal jobs and homes in the attack, but that still didn't stop the harsh words they'd received. The beastmen were the same. Many of them were compared to monsters and actively hunted down or enslaved in most of the world. I bought and freed most of them, hiring them into the Guild if they wanted it, but many of them retreated into the south of the continent and began to establish tribes there or in the Jura Woodlands.

The less that's said about vampires being accepted the better. Humans straight-up refused to acknowledge them as equals and viewed them as only intelligent monsters and nothing more. They'd be lucky to not be attacked by mobs in the street or harassed by the authorities in most human countries, which was only slightly better than being seen as straight-up monsters.

Thankfully, most adventurers, especially those who had been around for a long time, didn't discriminate nearly as much as normal citizens. It was a bit of a requirement of the job, as your employer could be a female dwarf or a male dog-beastman, so it made sense not to view them badly if you wanted to be hired again in that community. I was hoping to use this open-mindedness to create a culture of inclusion, at the very least in regard to species, in the guild so that anyone of any race can become an adventurer in the future, even if that wouldn't happen for many years to come.

I stood from my seat and stretched my entire body out, shaking out the tiredness. "Welp, I'm done for the day and I miss my wife. It's about time to go see Velmama don't you agree?" I asked as I put my hand on Lilith's shoulder for a moment before passing her.

Lilith was beet-red after I teased her about that. It was an inside joke between Velzard, Lilith, and I when I decided to adopt her when she was younger. I was Papa Al and Velzard was Velmama. Lilith loved calling us that when she was younger but nowadays she'd get embarrassed whenever we mentioned it.

"Geez~" She said under her breath with a puffed-up cheek before turning to follow after me, pouting cutely as we walked.

.~.~.~.

A/N: Sorry everyone for the long delay. Practically all of last week was early morning schedule followed by late night the next day then back to early morning which really f*cked up my sleep schedule and I was too tired to write. That's why this chapter probably felt a bit disappointing to the readers who waited for so long, it was supposed to come out the day after so you didn't have to wait.

Anyways, this will be the last chapter that is super involved in the Adventurer Guild Stuff. I'll still have Alaster mentioning events that happen because of it, and being the Guild Master will be his 'day job' but the day-to-day stuff will be skipped.