Chapter 13 : Marcohoff’s Targets

The Empire.

Gratz, a city known as the capital of culture and arts.

On the streets of Gratz, bards, songstresses, and musicians could be seen performing.

It was a romantic scene that would captivate any tourist…

“Sister… I’m hungry…”
“I’m hungry too, so be quiet…”

…But in reality, most of these artists were struggling to even afford a single meal a day.

The only ways for artists to earn money were through patronage from nobles or begging for a few coins during street performances. While those who had learned classical music might be in demand for performances or in churches, most bards were nothing more than homeless beggars without a roof over their heads.

Their instruments were crude string or percussion instruments they made themselves.

A street bard’s greatest instrument was their voice, but even that could only attract the attention of a few people. Those with good tone and vocalization might become songstresses in taverns, but they couldn’t command a space with their voice like opera singers.

A voice that could only reach a small area… at most, a 20-foot radius. That was the limit of a street bard who couldn’t even eat properly.

“Sigh… Let’s sing.”
“I’m too hungry to sing…”

“You’ll manage. We need to attract attention to buy even a piece of bread.”
“Bread…!”

Mint and Vanilla, sisters living in Gratz, were two such songstresses.

Beggars who scraped by, receiving coins from tourists in Gratz.

That day, like any other day, they were singing.

[“Hello, everyone. The mage is here!”]

“Ah! The mage’s broadcast is starting!”

As the broadcast began, Gratz, which had been filled with the songs of bards, suddenly fell silent.

They knew no one would pay attention to their songs now.

“Hee hee, I love the mage’s voice.”

Mint, the younger sister with sensitive hearing, smiled brightly and listened to the broadcast.

Vanilla also sat down on the ground, closed her eyes, and focused on the voice. Stories from various people, news from the other side of the continent, useful but mostly useless trivia…

Whenever Vanilla listened to this mage’s broadcast, she felt herself becoming incredibly small.

She didn’t know why. Perhaps she was envious because her own voice couldn’t even stop a single passerby, while this mage’s voice had the power to silence Gratz.

A few stories and the mage’s jokes passed by, and then…

[“Thank you for the story. The next song is ‘Under the Sea-Colored Sky,’ uploaded by ‘Mint and Vanilla’ from Gratz in the Empire. It’s a song about a girl who has never seen the sea, imagining a sky-blue ocean.”]

“Huh?”

A familiar name and a familiar song title reached her ears.

The song she and her sister had written. It was playing on the mage’s broadcast.

And Vanilla had never uploaded this song to the Network Magic…

“Mint… Did you upload it?”
“Yup!”

The culprit could only be her sister, Mint.

“How?”
“I suddenly got connected on the street the other day! One of the tourists must have had a magic tool. So I quickly uploaded it!”

“I see…”

It was indeed something her energetic and passionate sister would do.

[♬ Ah! I see waves dancing like a flock of white birds! ♬]

Hearing her own song with her own ears felt strange.

It was different from the voice she knew. It was strange and mysterious. Her ears tickled, and her face felt flushed.

And…

It was also amazing.

The silenced Gratz, all the artists on this street, were listening to her song.

It was so amazing… she couldn’t bring herself to look up.

[♬ The sand grains scatter like sunlight, the wind is salty like pearls ♬]

“Hee hee, those are my lyrics!”

The song they created together, the lyrics they wrote together.

It was said that they had a siren among their ancestors. A monster who lured sailors with her song in the sea and then devoured them.

Mint and Vanilla, having never seen the sea, could only imagine the scenery from their mother’s stories.

White waves resembling flocks of birds, sand grains scattering like sunlight, the sea blue like the sky…

The sea in their imagination was an inverted sky. Because their mother always likened the sea to the sky.

“…I wish I were a siren.”

Vanilla sometimes dreamt of becoming a siren.

How grand and magnificent would a song echoing over a stormy sea be?

How beautiful and alluring would a song that captivated and consumed sailors be?

These were all talents Vanilla didn’t possess.

The range of Vanilla’s song that could touch hearts was 20 feet. A fleeting song, like bubbles that dispersed after six steps.

[♬ Like a white bird, like that cloud ♬]
[♬ Under the sea-colored sky… ♬]

And the song ended.

Mint, who had been delighted, let out a sigh of regret, but even that sigh was soon drowned out by the mage’s voice.

[“Wasn’t that a great song? If you have any other good songs, please upload them to the Music Sharing site. Ah, ‘Mint and Vanilla’ perform on the streets of Gratz, so if you liked their song, you can go and listen to them in person. Gratz is known as the capital of culture and arts, right? Then the next story…”]

The mage moved on to the next story as if nothing had happened.

No, nothing had happened. Only Mint and Vanilla were left dazed, as if they had just woken from a daydream.

And…

The next day…

“You must be the Mint and Vanilla sisters, right?”
“Y-Yes? Who…”

“I am Marcohoff, the head of the Marcohoff Trading Company.”
“Yes?”

“I have a proposition for you.”
“What kind of…”

“I will provide you with enough gold to live comfortably in the capital for the rest of your lives, and a space where you can use the Network Magic Tool. Please become songstresses for our Marcohoff Trading Company.”

The two sisters’ lives changed.

Listening to the song on the mage’s broadcast, Marcohoff, the merchant of the Empire, was deeply moved.

“…This… this is money.”

Art was the exclusive domain of the wealthy. Because if you weren’t wealthy, you couldn’t learn it in the first place.

High-quality paints were more expensive than the same weight in gold, it took a craftsman a year to make a single keyboard instrument, and to become an opera singer, you needed vocal training from a young age.

The poor artists of Gratz? Most of them were closer to begging paupers than artists.

Songs and paintings were merely tools for begging. They would never truly stand on a stage or display their art in a gallery.

That is, until now.

“…”

As the mage distributed more magic tools as gifts, more people would connect to the network.

Currently, there were only tens of thousands of users at most… but as the number of users increased, so would the number of people listening to music on the ‘Music Sharing site.’

Great artists who drew thousands of spectators a day?

Through this ‘Network Magic Tool’, they could make their voices and names known to tens or hundreds of thousands of people a day. What the mage was doing now, users of the ‘Network Magic Tool’ would soon be doing themselves.

That was the future this unknown Archmage envisioned.

The mage had said from the beginning that their goal was to connect the entire world with magic, and these magic tools were distributed for that purpose.

“The age of the network…”

And…

If such an age arrived…

If he could monopolize the ‘market’ of this Music Sharing site from the beginning of the network era…

How much money could he make?

“Haha…”

The fact that music could be listened to for free on the Music Sharing site wasn’t important. Artists didn’t make money from ticket sales, they made money from their name value.

The pride of nobles who sponsored artists for fame, the extravagance of the wealthy who invited artists to parties to flaunt their wealth, these were the real money-makers. Marcohoff, as a merchant, knew this very well.

And…

In Marcohoff’s judgment…

Now was the ‘bottom’, the cheapest time to monopolize this market.

“I must go to Gratz right now and bring these ‘Mint and Vanilla’ songstresses—no, I must go and escort them myself.”

Songstresses whose names were known on the ‘Mage’s Broadcast.’

He had to find them before other merchants realized their value.

[“I’ll be sending magic tools as gifts to 20,000 randomly selected listeners who sent in stories today. Then, have a good night everyone, and sleep well.”]

“Master, you’ve worked hard. Here’s some water.”
“Ah, Sylvie. Thanks.”

Reading even a few stories like this was surprisingly tiring.

I drank the water Sylvie brought me and sent out more magic tools across the world. Replacing skills with magic was going smoothly, and at this rate, I should be able to distribute a million magic tools within a year.

‘The internet boom is coming!’

My goal was singular.

To connect the entire world to the internet.

‘A world without internet is too boring…!’

This reincarnator, who had lived in a fantasy world for hundreds of years…

…Craved the dopamine rush of the internet.