When Ben saw he could expect the current store's employees to all return to work for him the corners of his mouth turned up as he spoke to them.
"Excellent, then I have nothing to worry about with such an experienced and capable staff of employees working for me! I guess that should do it then for this impromptu meeting, now that the store is officially closed all of you can head home and enjoy your time off! If anyone has any questions please feel free to ask away!
When Ben finished speaking the girls were all beside themselves with excitement.
Their new boss seemed different from other kingdom nobles. He was easy to talk to and did not look down on them because they had a lower status.
Not only that but he gave them a paid vacation! They were all a unsure of what a vacation was and assumed it was a term used from where he had originated from.
What they did understand was he was paying them to stay home and relax until the store was once again reopened! Who did things like this in this city, paying their employees on down times? The answer is nobody!
If you were sent home on a downtime you had to make what money you had last until you came back to work or find another job! There wasn't a single merchant, craftsman, or business owner willing to pay employees when they were not working for them.
After the girls finished hopping around in excitement he answered a few questions they had and let them and Baynard head home for their two-week break.
Now that Ben was alone in his new store, he wanted to look around. He had just bought a property and had only had a glimpse of the first floor so far.
But before, he could set off and tour the place, he opened the flashing notification once again.
"What happened this time? I couldn't have learned a skill from walking back from the palace and talking to the employees right?" Ben whispered curiously.
[Notice] [You have created a build zone outpost! The king of Aregard has recognized your ownership of a section of land within his borders! You are now able to build as high or as low as you wish within the borders of this outpost!]
[Would you like to name this outpost?] [YES] [NO]
'I seem to have made an some type of a outpost from purchasing this property?'
"System, Can you explain this notice to me? It says I can build as high or low as I wish. If I am reading this right does this mean I can build a two hundred foot tower here or dig down into the ground and create a multi-level basement as long as I do not try to build outside of the property lines?" Ben asked to verify the notice he was reading.
*Ding!* [The host is correct, it is possible to build any stable structure within the outpost borders. The host should keep in mind that this property is still within the borders of another kingdom and may have certain building restrictions or codes that need to be followed.]
"That is true if I went and built a skyscraper or some large ugly structure here it may end up causing me problems with the kingdom. I don't want to build anything that will make me stand out that much anyway. If I show off by building a towering store the king might ask me to build something for him and how would I explain I cannot do it unless I actually own the land? They would think I'm trying to scam them for sure!" Ben contemplated for a moment.
Ben took a minute to rename the property to Goldcrest Spirit Store and closed the notice. He looked around and decided to walk over to the staircase that went upstairs.
The store's second floor was just like the first floor. It was just one huge open room with plain bare walls and a few supporting pillars.
Taking out his hammer, Ben smacked at the wall lightly a few times and small chunks of some type of plaster fell away to reveal rough chiseled stone blocks. The blocks were of all various sizes and had their joints mortared with a sandy looking yellow colored plaster.
'For the era, this is a well-constructed building. It seems Remi spent a good amount of gold coins to build it, but compared to the system's modern techniques, it is inferior.'
When Ben went to the third floor he found yet another huge open room. Not interested in looking at Remi's furnishing Ben went back to the first floor. He now noticed the first floor wasn't as deep as the upper floors and the offices were too small to use up so much space.
Along the first floor's back wall were four closed doors. He knew that the one door went Remi's old office and the one to the left of it was Baynard's office. So what was behind the other two doors?
Ben crossed the room to open the third door to the right of Remi's office and found what looked like two wooden chests that had a flat lid that lifted up. When you lifted the lid there was a smooth flat surface with a circular hole. Inside the chest under this hole was a large glazed clay bowl.
Ben figured out that these were chamber pot toilets like the one he had in his inn room. The person could sit down and relieve themselves and a servant would come by later to remove the pot from inside the chest. They would dump the waste somewhere clean the pot and put it back inside the wooden chest.
The inside of this indoor primitive bathroom smelled like the portable outhouses they had to use on the construction sites. It wasn't a pleasant odor and it forced you to quickly do your business and get back out into the fresh air.
He left the bathroom with a wrinkled nose from the smell and went to open the last far right door.
Behind the last door was a hallway as long as the offices that opened up into a storage room used to hold additional furniture.
The back storage room was a decent place to store extra merchandise out of the way. This way if you sold, let's say a table you could pull out another just like it from the storage room so that you would not have to wait weeks for the next one to be delivered and possibly lose a sale.
Now that Ben had finished checking out the store, he was eager to make some money to pay back the 500g he borrowed from the palace.
Ben crossed the city square in front of his store and went inside the City Hall where he talked with the receptionist and rented three vendor stalls all next to one another in a row on the same aisle.
He paid the girl and gave her a small tip again as he went out into the square in search of his rented stalls.
While he was looking for them it was strange now to see his new store from where ever he was in the central square area.
The front of his new store looked out across the gigantic city square where thousands of people walked here and there between shops and stalls looking for their daily needs.
When Ben found his stalls he pulled them all together making a forty-five-foot-long display counter. Once, again he laid out red cloth on the wooden countertops to make his display more presentable.
Using the blankets from the beds he originally bought for the slaves he hung them from the top of the stalls to hide what he was doing behind the vendor stalls from the passing shoppers.
When he was hidden from sight, Ben removed the sign he made before even though, he knew now that most of the people could not read. Even so, he believed they would still remember what it looked like and associate it with him.
On one of the stalls, Ben began to display Cuts of beef, pork, fish, and chicken along with chicken eggs that he put in a small wooden crate. The meat was laid out in stacks on small cut wood plank boards.
He used his carpentry and furniture making skill to make a simple bread rack that stood six feet tall and he filled each wooden baskets hanging from the rack with white, wheat, French, and Italian bread loaves. Ben placed the bread rack next to the end stall so people could look at the different loaves of bread as they walked by.
On the next stall, he displayed fresh fruit and vegetables from both Earth and Victus. Now that the word was spreading that he was a cultivator from a foreign land it would not be strange to continue introducing new exotic foods no one had seen before.
Also next to the fruits and vegetables he stacked up cans that had a picture design and a product name of what it contained stamped into the front of each metal can.
He displayed cans of vegetables, fruits, raw fish, raw beef, raw chicken, raw pork, beef stew, chicken stew, pork stew, apples, strawberries, blueberries, and pineapples, Next to the neatly stacked canned goods he placed a small wood slat basket and filled it with can openers.
On the last stall, Ben started displaying his new Bakery goods. He put out lemon curd pastry, pineapple curd pastry banana curd pastry, apple cinnamon pastry candied fruit cookies, vanilla cookies, apple pie, strawberry pie, blueberry pie, lemon pie, banana pie, and mulberry pie.
Right beside the baked goods, Ben arranged the pot, pans, skillets, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, cups, knives, ladles, spatulas, whisks, and strainers all made by the blacksmith.
Now that he had his vendor stalls filled with goods, Ben still had a couple other products he would like to sell. Opening the System Store he made a few purchases. He still had his 200+ gold coins and now that he owned a store and had plenty of food he did not need to rent a room or pay for meals.
From the System Store, he bought a jewelry display cabinet, six dress display stands, eight poseable mannequins, and a wooden weapons rack. He tried to keep the price down and spent 55g total for everything.
On the opposite end of the bread rack. Ben placed the jewelry cabinet it was around seven feet high and two feet wide and had clear plexiglass to view the items inside. On the back of the cabinet, there was a tall locking door to remove and displayed the items inside and keep thieves from pocketing them.
Inside the cabinet, Ben displayed necklaces, rings, brooches, bracelets, earrings, and tiaras all made from gold and silver. Each of these pieces also had an option to buy them with or without the gems which were produced by the Gemstone Mine.
Each piece of displayed jewelry was beautiful, even the silver pieces without gems were all intricate and decorative copies of jewelry worn by kings, queens, and modern celebrities from Earth.
Moving on from the displayed jewelry the dress display stands and poseable mannequins were placed behind the vendor stalls. The stunning new Renaissance royalty dresses were all carefully hung on the display stands and marked for sale.
As for the poseable mannequins, Ben displayed the new Victorian-era men's formal wear along with reinforced cloth and leather armor.
After he had placed the poseable mannequins in different action poses, Ben finished off his display with the weapons rack. He put on display the earlier made steel longsword, steel hollow shaft spears, steel shortsword, black steel daggers, wooden recurve bow, and steel recurve bows. These were all the weapons that he had made before he had upgraded the weaponsmith so the bonuses were not all that impressive.
These weapons were steel weapons which had not been introduced to this world yet. They were also not made with a hammer and anvil so there was not a single hammer or tool mark on them. Every blade is smooth and polished with a mirror finish.
Not only are his blades groundbreaking the recurve bow was as well. With the thicker curved limbs on the recurve bow, it was much harder to torque the limbs to the side when pulling the string back. The unique shape of the recurve bow also provides it with more power allowing the arrow to move faster, fly further, and penetrate deeper.
Ben now had just about everything put out for display that he was currently producing. He picked up his Spirit Food sign and attached it to the top of the center vendor stall and removed the blankets which were hiding his displays.
The sudden unveiling instantly drew the attention of everyone walking by. Not because he was known as the spirit food cultivator, but due to the assortment of foreign goods and the way these products were placed on display.
These people had never seen a plexiglass display case, mannequins, or canned food before. Merchants, tailors, and seamstress would lay clothing out on tables or fold them and stack them on shelves. It made it difficult to know what an outfit would look like until it was tried on. When they looked at the mannequins or dress stands it was like seeing a person already wearing it and they knew exactly what they would look like with it on.
While the surrounding people began to stop and look over his goods, Ben came up with another idea. He purchased a small propane camp stove and a few small bottles of propane and began to fry up diced cuts of beef, chicken, and pork. Ben placed these small cuts of cooked meat out on a plate as samples for the curious customers.
He even opened a can of beef stew to heat up so people could try a spoonful of it. He knew once they tasted the stew made at the cannery they would fall in love with the taste and want more.
Because Ben had spent most of the day at the palace and his store he only had a couple of good hours of sales. The one good thing that came out of it was, he could get the word out that he was back and had even more spirit food to choose from along with new and exciting products they were unfamiliar with.
As the sun was beginning to set, Ben helped his last few latecomers who had, heard he was back at the market and had rushed over after work. When everyone was finally gone he scooped everything up into his inventory and walked across the square to his store.
*Click*
Ben unlocked the store's front door and then locked it behind him. Now inside the store he crossed the first floor while heading toward the back storage room.