Chapter 195: Chapter 169: Yisha’s Predicament
"A grand... plan?" A smile played in Ye Wen Ni’s eyes as she looked gently at Ling Xiao. She said in a crisp voice, "Don’t tell me you’re planning to hunt Magical Beasts for money, are you?"
Ling Xiao chuckled and shook his head. His talent was in avoiding Magical Beasts, not hunting them. The idea of earning Gold Coins by hunting them for their Crystal Cores was nothing but a joke.
"You remember those Beauty Pills I had Yisha sell for me, right?"
Ling Xiao’s eyes lit up as he spoke. "On the day of the Blast Flame Lion King festival, Yisha presented one to the Queen. The Queen took it right there on the spot. An hour later, she emerged after bathing and changing her clothes, stunning almost everyone present!"
"Now that you mention it, I’d almost forgotten we had this way of making money."
Ye Wen Ni’s smile was dazzling. Of course, she knew all about it. She had read Yisha’s letter, and the excitement was palpable in her writing. The success had surpassed everyone’s wildest imagination!
「The day of the Blast Flame Lion King festival. The Yalan Royal Palace, Lanyue Capital City.」
His Majesty the King’s reaction to the immense change in his wife went from disbelief to astonishment... and then to sheer ecstasy! He declared it the best festival gift he had ever received.
Nothing could make the old King happier than seeing his wife’s youthful beauty restored.
Thus, on the strength of this elixir, he immediately conferred the title of Hereditary Baron upon Yisha! He even promised that any children she might have in the future, regardless of gender, could inherit the noble title.
Noblewomen were not unheard of in the Empire, but they were exceedingly rare. In fact, no new female noble had been created in several decades! That Yisha managed to earn a title, personally conferred by His Majesty the King, all on the strength of a single, top-grade elixir... some people even began to compare her to that incredibly lucky Ling Xiao from not long ago.
In fact, one could say Yisha’s luck was even better than Ling Xiao’s.
Because Yisha’s family... was a traditional and powerful merchant clan. The status of merchants had always been awkward; obtaining a noble title was next to impossible. This was the harsh law of aristocratic circles: no matter how much money you had, to a noble, you were nothing more than new money. In terms of social standing, even a landless, powerless, and penniless Baron was held in far higher regard than a merchant of immense and boundless wealth.
Not just anyone was qualified to become a noble.
Aside from the status Yisha herself had gained, the Beauty Pill—which His Majesty the King himself had called a "divine medicine"—garnered intense interest from every noble with the privilege of being in the King’s presence that day. This was because Yisha had personally announced that pre-orders would begin in three days, with a strict limit of only fifty pills sold per month.
In an instant, the high nobility went into a frenzy. Yisha’s family was thrust into the spotlight, garnering the attention of every major power. They went from being a family well-known only in commercial circles—one that nobles would never deign to glance at—to a household that even a first-rank Grand Duke would personally visit, speaking with the utmost courtesy. Only those who experienced it could truly savor the difference.
Thanks to a single young woman, Yisha’s family had successfully ascended into the ranks of the nobility!
Subsequently, Yisha issued an announcement: each Beauty Pill would cost fifty thousand gold coins! Furthermore, regardless of the buyer, payment was required in full, upfront.
Fifty thousand gold coins for a single consumable elixir was an absolutely astronomical price. Yet for the practically frenzied noblewomen, this cost was a mere trifle. Some of the super-rich nobles even began clamoring for an auction, demanding the pills go to the highest bidder. A war of words erupted, driving the price of a single Beauty Pill up to two hundred thousand!
Yisha herself hadn’t fully anticipated this situation. She had her family issue another announcement, clarifying that the elixir only needed to be taken once every six months to maintain its youth-preserving effects.
But the noblewomen, having lost all reason, couldn’t care less about how often the elixir needed to be taken. Men cared most about power; as long as they held it, they wouldn’t mind graying temples or deeply lined faces. But women were different. If there was an elixir that could keep them forever young, forget fifty thousand gold coins a pill—even at five hundred thousand gold coins a pill, there would absolutely be people willing to pay!
This world had many poor people, but it also had plenty of rich ones!
The wealth accumulated by the great clans over thousands of years of development was simply unimaginable.
Faced with this situation, another of the Lanyue Empire’s great clans, the Huangpu Clan, directly approached Yisha’s family. Yisha’s full name was Isabella Gandalf, making her family the Gandalf Clan. In the world of commerce, the two families were both competitors and partners, and they had maintained a good relationship for many years. Now, facing this peer who had suddenly become a noble, the contemporary Clan Leader of the Huangpu Clan, Huangpu Cangran—who was also Huangpu Yue’s father—proposed a partnership, his heart filled with envy.
Mosie Gandalf, Yisha’s grandfather, stated that he couldn’t make the decision himself; the matter required his granddaughter’s approval. Yisha, in turn, felt that using the massive influence of the Huangpu Clan’s auction house would not only allow the Beauty Pills to be sold at a higher price but could also expand their influence into the wealthy merchant class.
In truth, great merchant families like the Huangpu Clan, Xie Xiaoyan’s Xie Family, and many others, while their social status was worlds apart from the nobility, their financial power... was absolutely enough to rival a nation!
