It was the usual evening, and the city of Ferdon was as bustling ever. Daron sat in a seat on the terrace of a busy restaurant, surrounded by countless people, chatting away about their daily lives, and waiters shifting around in a great hurry, serving the customers with their utmost.
He opened the newspaper and read the date, "17th December of the 10233rd year of the holy calendar."
Daron thought to himself with a long sigh, 'It has already been 5 months,' before carrying on with the text on the newspaper.
It created a rather odd scene, seeing a 12-year-old child leaning leisurely on the table, casually flipping through a newspaper.
What they did not know was that Daron was actually only 10 years old! However, the customers at this store did not find this scene to strange, since they had seen this 'young' owner of the restaurant on a regular basis, enjoying his free time on this terrace in the evenings.
When the sun finally set, Daron would close the newspaper, and just like every day for the past 5 months, he did not. Standing up, he wished all the customers farewell with a smile on his face, and nodded to the waiters on his way out.
Daron had renamed his company. From the originally rather childish name of Blaze, to Daron Company. Due to the influence of Traitorous in the capital, Daron was able to successfully buy this name from another incredibly small company.
His original reason to keep the same name was changed by Traitorous before they registered, 5 months ago, just as he had successfully advanced to Intermediate Knight…
…
"You know, keeping a childish name like that is not good for business."
"… I guess so. But, old man, you need to know that I need to use this name in case my family hears its name and can find me."
"Then use your own name. Also, you will be leaving in a few months, you cannot possibly grow your company so large that it will spread to every corner of the continent before you leave!"
"…" Daron remained silent for a long time, before sighing and nodding.
…
The new name of the company was Daron Company. And under that, there were exactly 3 subsidiary companies, namely; Gourmet, The Maradona Times, and Forge.
Gourmet, had 12 restaurants in the outer districts of Ferdon, and 2, incredibly high-end restaurants in the Inner district of Ferdon. The one Daron was currently in was Gourmet 11, in the 11th district.
The Maradona Times, was a newspaper company, in fact, it was the very first newspaper company in the three kingdoms. In order to utterly crush competition, Daron had spent 3 months to actually build up his 'Information network' within Pierre, and only after successfully setting it up and collecting enough news, he began publishing the newspapers.
Just like back in Bard, there were countless people who tried to imitate Daron, but the recipes were under contractual restrictions, preventing them from even coming close in terms of Gourmet, allowing it to be an instant hit in Ferdon. There were even some investments made for further expansion into the other cities around Pierre.
The Maradona Times on the other hand did in fact face competition. There were countless others, especially in Ferdon, who had far better information networks, with spies everywhere. However, most of these people were high-nobles at the level of Count and above. They would not lower themselves to competing with a child for some measly profits.
The lower nobles like Barons naturally tried. However, their Information networks were not targeted at normal information, and instead towards spying on other nobles within Pierre, and other kingdoms, and to keep them in check, while preparing for sabotage. Therefore, their speed of collecting information was rather slow, however, what was even worse was the pathetically low costs that Daron was selling the Maradona Times at. It was essentially just 10 copper coins more than the cost for each paper.
However, the sheer volume of sales was enough to not only cover the cost of printing them, but also the cost of teleporting the 'reporters' as Daron called them, from all over Pierre. Naturally, the cost of printing was still most of the cost per paper, due to the fact that Daron was not using the modern system of printing. Naturally, he was not using the inefficient and unreliable method of hand-writing each paper. Instead, he had built a system which did not require any complicated systems.
Essentially, it was the earliest methods used for news-paper making, having many skilled craftsmen carve slabs of stone with the words for each page, and dip the stones in ink, and the stamp out the pages of the newspaper.
Naturally, this was rather slow, especially the carving process, and therefore Daron had hired nearly 50 craftsmen and women for this task, allowing him to finish making the stones for 10 entire newspaper, which usually had around 10 sides, within a few hours.
Then, he had another 30 workers to dip, stamp, move the paper, and re-dip, and repeat the process for nearly 6 hours, to finish nearly 3600 papers. This effectively made him 36000 copper every time he sold all his newspapers, which he sold every other day, to be able to accurately collect all the information before beginning a new round of 'pressing'.
The last subsidiary company was Forge, which for now was only a name, with nothing to it, but Daron had expectations for it. However, that would have to wait till he returned, since today was the day he would leave for the Lang of Mages!