First Customer 

At noon, Tenur finally gave the order to the slaves to open the store doors while some continued to work on the front wall.

The slaves had not managed to cover the entire front of that property with plaster. They had done so for the most part, but there were a few spaces left to cover where the irregularities of the wall were still exposed.

But even though the job was not finished, this did not matter.

Tenur had already completed part of his plan by presenting this store in a different way, forcing everyone who passed in front of it to look curiously at this construction.

The slaves still working at the time of the opening was not a problem. Tenur planned to continue this service until the entire store exterior was covered with plaster.

But amid this, the parts that had already been filled with plaster were drying, completely smooth due to Tenur's work.

As he had always done in this store, he first showed the slaves what had to be done, and only then did they try it.

He had used a thin but straight wooden bar to go through the wall with soft plaster, adjusting the irregularities to produce something straight without imperfections.

Some of what he had done was practically dry by the time the store opened, and the first person to enter that place couldn't help but notice it.

"That... How did you guys do it?" A well-dressed man, followed by three people who appeared to be his servants, asked in surprise. "That wall looks so smooth... But obviously, that's that white stuff, not the wall itself."

Shui saw the owner of the best tavern in the city asking him this and stepped forward to explain. "That's called..."

As he was about to speak, Amir stepped before him and pointed in Tenur's direction. "This is the creation of this captive, Tenur, a slave of lord Mero, senior. Our store will be producing this to sell very soon, so just keep an eye out for it senior for when we start."

That man, relatively short for the area, 1.65 meters tall, tanned skin, bald, looked at Tenur and asked. "Slave, did you create this? Where do you come from? Does that exist over there?"

Tenur looked first at Amir and saw this servant nodding for him to answer. He then said. "Senior, I come from a small place called Rinia. And yes, I created the formula used in this Touma family store."

That was not a lie. There were several formulas for how to obtain plaster in Rinia. The way Tenur did this had been his creation at the time when he was still a low-level magician and needed coins to pay for his journey.

There were mortals and magicians in Rinia. Among low-level ones, trading with mortals was one possibility to obtain resources to accelerate their growth quickly. Because of this, Tenur knew some things helpful to mortals, as he had created and traded many of them.

"Rinia?" The servants there, including Shui, wondered in muttered tones.

That wealthy freeman, Unas, had never heard of such a place either. Still, he was interested in the possibility of conquering an area that had given birth to someone capable of creating something so relevant. "How did you get here, slave?"

"I wouldn't be able to say, senior. I suffered an incident and ended up here without knowing how, nor if there is any way for me to return." He said, which was indeed the truth.

"Sigh... He doesn't know." That man looked at one of his servants significantly after hearing Tenur.

Unas looked at Amir and asked. "How much does some of that cost? I am very interested in something so interesting."

Amir pointed to Tenur, who was already doing the math considering the price of materials.

This captive then said. "10 bronze coins per kilogram."

Gulp!

"How much?" Shui was the one who exclaimed in surprise, not believing that a small bag of that stuff would cost that amount.

He had seen that the store's front wall alone had used over 30 kilograms of plaster to cover all the holes, so if this was used to cover all the walls of a house, someone interested in the job would have to buy in the range of 120 to 180 kilos.

That would be between 3,600 and 5,400 bronze coins just to decorate a house!

Who would spend enough coins to feed more than ten slaves in a month just to do that?

Tenur understood the thinking of these people, who were perhaps going to find the price high, and said. "Don't think of it as a recurring cost. Once you use the plaster, you will go years without needing to apply more of it.

As long as the wall is preserved and protected with the other product we will sell, some customers may even go a lifetime without reusing the plaster in their homes.

So the cost of this product is actually quite low."

While those men and the servants who knew nothing of the production costs of that thing considered Tenur's words, the few who knew what he was doing realized that it was not so simple.

'I think there is something wrong with that... The materials used by Tenur shouldn't be expensive, as these people make the price he talked about seem.' One of the slaves who participated in the production of the plaster thought to himself.

Unfortunately for him, he did not know mathematics or the value of coins like most people in this world. As a slave who was dependent on his master, someone who was illiterate, this man only had a superficial notion about the currencies of this world.

Because of his ignorance, he could not do a simple addition calculation to realize that the profit this store would make on a sale following those parameters would be more than 150%.

But he was not stupid. This captive knew that no one would complain about the price of the materials used by Tenur, even if they bought them simultaneously. So he realized that there was something strange about all this.

Lucky for Lothur, these ignorant men, fearful of their own future, would not risk giving opinions or even understanding everything he was doing.

That was why he had chosen them to watch him on some jobs in this store.

"Hmm, I see..." Unas commented, thinking about buying some of that to test on his property.

If the quality was good, he felt it might be an interesting investment to make.

It would not generate wealth for him, as a slave might. But as a rich man, he had other priorities besides developing his fortune.

He had worldly desires and wanted to satisfy some goals and ambitions, among them having a better status locally.

And hell, if he could cover his property with that stuff, his house would stop being just another one in Cusca and would become a place to be watched.

Maybe he could even have a nice house similar to those of the leaders of Cusca!

"All right, when will you have this plaster? I want to buy or even order 10 kilos of it." He looked at Tenur, feeling that, strange as it was, this was the individual who knew things there.

"Two days. We will have plaster to be sold in two days, senior." Tenur replied as he cleaned his clothes of the white powder from the plaster.

That man was satisfied with that answer and thought about going back his way home to talk with his sister about what he had seen, someone with ambitions like his.

But when he remembered that he had come to this place for another reason, he turned around and went towards the interior of that store.

Unas almost gave a pole back in surprise when he entered there, not expecting to find such a different place inside that store.

"Gods! What has happened here? Everything is different!" He exclaimed as his servants frowned, looking at their surroundings.

Immediately upon doing so, they put some of the strangeness aside when they noticed the prices and names of the items on each piece of furniture.

Everything was very organized, and even a customer who had never entered this store or didn't know how to identify some elements could walk in there and go to the correct piece of furniture.

It was a straightforward setup that would make negotiations easier!

'That looks very practical...' Unas went over to the sample he was searching for in this place, something he would typically need the help of a slave to find but did so easily this time.

"What about that price? What about it? Is it right?" He asked, finding things there cheaper.

"As a gift for reopening the store and new management, we have below average prices for the next seven days only, senior," Tenur said while having a smile on his face.

One way to attract customers was precisely by lowering the prices of the products. Naturally, this decreased the profit margin of a sale but increased the chances of getting new customers, among them even those who would be loyal, recurrent customers.

Tenur knew of theories of all sorts to increase sales of something, and he was giving this discount not out of kindness but as a sales strategy!

"Is that so?" That man smiled while Shui made an ugly expression upon hearing such a thing.

...