WE ALMOST ENTERED A CASHLESS SOCIETY
That day, Halkara was working from home, so she stayed in the dining room after breakfast.
There were piles of notebooks on the table, labeled with words like Accounts and Financial Reports and Proceeds.
“Oh… This is such a pain… What a massive headache… Is there any way to make this any easier…?”
“Oh yeah, it’s already winter. That time of year to get all your finances in order, hmm?”
I wasn’t in that department when I was a corporate slave, so I wasn’t really clear on the details, but the end of the year and the end of fiscal quarters were busy no matter where you were in the universe. They must divide the year around the same times, too. People would sure get confused if someone decided to cut their year into three-eighths…
Also, I should’ve mentioned this a while ago, but I’m really glad this world worked on a base ten system. If it was all base fourteen or something, I’d need another couple centuries to get the hang of it, I bet.
“I’ll leave this much of our sales with the bank… And we’ll put this in secure storage in the vault…”
“Sounds like you have a ton to take care of. Are all the cowlicks in your hair because of the stress, too?”
Places in Halkara’s hair were sticking up like she’d just woken up.
“Exactly. It is not easy to store all the money we’ve made~ We need a good vault to make sure no burglars get in, and the vault takes up acreage.”
“Acreage?”
“Yes. That is where we store all our coins, after all. Some vaults are like little seas of them.”
“Oh right! All your money is in coins!”
We had coins in my past life, but if you talked about large sums of money, you’d imagine light stacks of paper. A hundred thousand yen or a thousand dollars weren’t normally too heavy to carry. Nobody walked around with that amount in five-hundred-yen coins.
“Some provinces or regions have local paper currencies, depending on the lord’s policies. They are generally not very creditworthy, however. It was a bit before I was born, I think, but there was a regional lord that went bankrupt and his paper money became essentially worthless. The turmoil was awful.”
“Yikes.”
Regional currencies weren’t all that reliable after all.
But maybe people were more trusting of real coins, at least, even if they were heavier. The world I used to live in centered mainly on physical coins for a really long time.
“Back when I was working in Hrant, I always bought gold ingots and silk thread in case my money lost value, but…that’s such a difficult thing to take care of.”
“Money problems can get heavy, huh?” I didn’t mean for it to come across quite so flippant, but witches didn’t pay much attention to money.
Our work was nothing compared to Halkara’s, who was running a whole factory.
The cashless society still hadn’t made its arrival here yet.
Still, opening all the notebooks to calculate felt more pastoral and more of a relief than struggling to work in front of a computer.
Sometimes an email would come right before it was time to go home for the day, and replying to that would only delay going-home time, but then as you were writing the response to the first email, another one came… But not here.
—Then there came a voice from the garden.
“Here, a gift. Your fertilizer.”
“Thanks. Demons are so generous.”
“I am quite rich, you know.”
Beelzebub was here—or I hoped it was her. It’d be super weird if that was Natalie from the guild; I didn’t know if I’d trust a guild staff member who talked so pompously.
Not long after, Beelzebub came into the house. I’d already taken a head start to get the tea going.
“I am here~ Ah, I wasn’t expecting to see you at this hour, Halkara. Taking the day off, are we?”
“It’s a desk-work day today. I’m planning on doing employee assessments later, so I thought it would be best to do so in a place without any of my employees.”
Ah. Not only was she doing her accounts, but she also didn’t really want anyone else to be seeing her.
“I never know when you’re going to show up, Beelzebub.”
“I had to work over the weekend some time ago, so I am using my compensatory days off. In my position, I am often obligated to attend events that occur on holidays.”
They sure were cultured, considering they were giving her compensatory days off. Working on weekends and holidays didn’t mean that she should get fewer days for herself.
“Oh yeah—is it accounting season for the demons, too?”
Beelzebub’s expression suddenly turned into something unbelievably terrifying. “…I’m gonna $#@$&!*% kill the audit bureau!”
“Yikes, you scared me there!”
“My apologies. ’Twas just a little bout of frustration. ”
I get being frustrated, but I could tell this was serious.
“You see, they are in the process of developing a new form of accounts management. I brought it with me today. It quite nicely solves the problem of jangling change.”
“Oh, are you switching to paper bills as your main deal?”
The demons struck me as the type to put that into practice first.
“We had a brief demonstration experiment with those in the past, but they would instantly burn up in the hands of fire salamanders, so we canceled it.”
So many kinds of people fell under the demon umbrella, so I could see the trouble with that… That was a problem only the most diverse societies would have.
“Additionally, the problem of counterfeit bills was quite the hassle. Someone once hired experienced dwarven craftsmen to print bills even more exquisite and refined than the real articles. The counterfeits then held more value, which made the chaos worse. The problem was that the criminal organization hired a craftsman who was too skilled.”
“There’s so much to comment on, I honestly don’t know where to start.”
“He made an impressive-looking watermark with a simple woodblock. The counterfeits had the demon crest as a watermark on it, so one could tell right away it was fake.”
“What were they thinking, putting a watermark on their fakes?!”
Why would they go out of their way to make it obvious?
“As I said, the problem is that they hired a craftsman much too skilled. He was motivated to make an article of a better quality than the original, and the bills ended up an exquisite piece of paper. There was even a myth that the cat drawn onto the bills came alive and leaped out of the image.”
I had no idea if this guy was a genius or an idiot.
“After that craftsman was arrested, he was forced to work as an engineer at the mint.”
“The demon government does whatever it wants, huh…”
“Anyway, paper bills are not in circulation among the demons. No matter how nice an article is, there is always someone out there to create a copy. On the other hand, the cost performance of creating coins is not optimal for anyone to create fakes. ’Tis not worth it.”
Right, no one would make fake hundred-yen coins if it cost five hundred yen to do it.
“Well, that was a rather long explanation, but here is the new technology that solves the coinage problem.” Beelzebub produced a single card.
There was a magic circle drawn onto the face of the card. It reminded me of the demons’ magic—but not quite the same.
“Did you work with the Thursa Thursa Kingdom to develop this?”
“We did not work together, no, but we referenced their technology. In the future, we may be able to pay for everything with this one single card. Although it would take quite a long while to have our society as a whole accomplish that.”
Were they really planning on bringing a cashless society to life?
When I looked at Beelzebub’s proud expression, I could tell that there was incredible technology behind that little thing.
The demon kings had kept demon society in peace and stability for a long time, so they could drastically change all their payment methods without having their creditworthiness plummet. In that regard, it would make it very easy to revolutionize how they paid for things.
But when I looked at the card, I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t exactly sure what made it amazing.
“Don’t the stores need payment devices?” I asked. “The card wouldn’t work without one of those, right?”
She showed us the card, but obviously, to us, it just looked like a card. Plus, the store would have to buy the infrastructure for them, so I could see shop owners hesitant to adopt them.
“What is this nonsense of which you speak? I will show you exactly how amazing this card is. You may express your grievances afterward.”
Oh, so she did come here to show it off.
“Halkara, I purchased three cases of Max Heart Nutri-Spirits on my tab the other day, did I not?”
Hey, I didn’t know Halkara made different versions…
“Oh, yes, you did. It is on your tab. You will be paying later since you only have demon currency.”
Halkara remembered, too. I guess regular customers could set up a tab?
“I shall pay all I owe you right now. Hah!” Beelzebub’s hair lifted into the air a bit as the whole area around her crackled with energy. “Haaaaaaaah!!”
For some reason, Halkara’s documents laid out on the table started floating, too.
Why was this starting to look like a scene from an action manga?!
“Wh-what is going on?!” Halkara was shocked, too.
This isn’t what I normally imagine when you talk about paying a tab…
“Silence. I must concentrate, lest it fail. Haaaaaa!”
Beelzebub whipped up the hand with the card into the air and—
“Yaaaah! Appear before meeee!”
She slammed down the card.
When she did, coins suddenly appeared from out of it!
And not just one or two—a whole pile of them!
As Halkara and I watched this happen, Beelzebub’s battle mode (or whatever this behavior was) also came to an end. Her hair fell back down into its normal style, too.
“Aye, a success. Confirm the amount is correct, Halkara.”
“Huh? Oh…okay! One, two, three, four…” Halkara started counting her coins. “Exact change! You have paid fourteen thousand four hundred gold for three cases of Max Heart Nutri-Spirits!”
Her voice went higher. That was how surprising this whole thing was.
“What? What just happened? You made money from nothing?”
Society would be thrown into chaos if that were the case, but it wasn’t totally beyond the realm of possibility for this ancient magitech…
“Fool. Society would be thrown into chaos if I created money from nothing,” Beelzebub replied. Of course a minister would have economic sense.
“Then where’d all that money come from? I can’t tell where its source is. This isn’t an illusion, is it?” I asked.
“I cannot accept an illusion! You must pay real money!” Halkara cried in alarm.
“What a foolish thing for me to do. What about any of that would be new technology? Using illusions to avoid actual payment is thousands of years old—one of the oldest criminal tricks in the book.”
“Ah, the classics…”
There was illusion magic in this world, so anyone could have done something like that. In Japan terms, that would be like a fox or tanuki using a leaf as money.
“That is legitimate money of the human government. The new technology is that I manifested it with this single card.” Beelzebub smugly crossed her arms. She could sit down now, if she wanted to.
“Okay, then tell us about this new coin-manifesting technology. How’d you do it?”
“Oh-ho-ho. You want to know, do you? Hmm? You want to know? Very well, then I shall tell you about our transcard system.”
I wanted to know, and good thing, because if I didn’t, she’d get super angry… I didn’t really have a choice.
And Beelzebub finally sat in a chair. “A unique magic circle is drawn onto this card. The same magic circle is in one of the rooms of my house.”
“Yeah, I got that much.”
Beelzebub nodded. “So by holding the card and activating the magic, it connects with the circle in my house and teleports the exact amount of money I need here!”
“Oh! It’s a type of summoning spell!” I had no idea you could do that.
I knew the demons had summoning magic, like the kind I used to bring Beelzebub over. They were using it to summon coins now.
“Put simply, yes. However, in the summoning magic of yore, one must draw the circle and recite the incantation for each individual use. A failure could result in the summoned target appearing in the wrong place and whatnot.” I had the sense Beelzebub might be glaring at me, so I looked away. “Some summoned people may end up in the bath and emerge completely soaked, for example.”
“Wow! Has that ever happened?” I asked aloofly. For various reasons.
“You could at least stand to drain the water from the bath beforehand.”
“Oh, whatever! It’s all water under the bridge now! Ha-ha!”
Pronunciation for demon magic was hard. I couldn’t help it.
“That goes to show just how difficult summoning magic is. Not only that, but coins are small. A shift could be catastrophic if, for example, you went to pay at the tavern, but the money appeared in the establishment next door.”
“Right. You have to get the money to the person you’re paying.”
If you dropped it on the wrong table, someone would just swipe it.
“Also, the older summoning magic would have manifested a single coin, but a whole selection of specific coins would have been too complicated.”
“Oh right, because you’d be summoning multiple targets simultaneously…”
“It would take an impractical amount of time and energy to summon seven individual one-hundred-gold coins seven different times. That said, even with the ability to summon multiple coins at once, it was essentially impossible to produce the exact amount needed to pay. However”—Beelzebub stuck out her card to us—“with this transcard, one can do all that!”
The card, with its simple magic-circle design, started to look like a vast treasure vault.
“Oh-ho, Miss Beelzebub, does that mean that if I place many coins into a room with a corresponding magic circle, I can draw out the exact amount of money for my accounts?” Halkara seemed to have a perfect grasp on the card, too.
“Exactly. You can do all the shopping you like without carrying around a single coin, all with this one card! ’Tis an invention of dreams!”
And that claim was hardly an exaggeration.
It was tremendously freeing to be able to walk around without carrying your money with you. People would be thankful, especially when paper bills had proven to be a nonstarter. Coins were really heavy…
“Oh, I can imagine so many uses. Simply carrying the amount we made in sales to the bank has always been a big job~ And then bandits could attack… I could move all the sales money to the bank with the card!”
“You would get attacked by bandits, wouldn’t you?”
“It’s only happened three times so far!” Halkara held up three fingers with her left hand.
“That’s still a lot!”
She was always having a hard time with one thing or another, to the point that I was starting to wonder if she was born under some unlucky alignment of the planets.
“Of course, I could hire people to carry it safely, but the costs are quite steep, and one of the guards could be a bandit themselves. That did happen once.”
This world suddenly felt a lot more fantasy-esque. It was hard to imagine a security company actually being a part of a bandit organization. Guess it was a thing in the Middle Ages.
“But I can prevent that danger with that card!”
“Indeed. This will not be just a revolution in payment but a revolution in distribution!” Beelzebub was practically floating with rapture now, but I left her to her euphoria.
A revolution in distribution was far from unusual. This technology would allow a delivery mage to show up empty-handed, then produce whatever it was the customer ordered right on their doorstep.
Mail shopping would get a refresh, basically.
Also, mail orders already existed—it was wyverns that typically delivered. We used this service ourselves sometimes.
The problem was that things could get quite expensive; it wasn’t a service universal to everyone.
But a delivery person could carry around just the one card, and all those travel barriers would practically vanish.
Now that was truly incredible!
I quickly described my own thoughts on this game-changing development to Beelzebub.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho~ Do you see what I mean now? Do you see~? Yes, such things may be possible not too long from now. History is changing~”
Beelzebub looked even more confident than before.
I had no idea that one ancient civilization could grease the wheels of society so much. I guess these things happened when you lived a long time.
“I wonder if someday in the near future, I’ll take a single card shopping to Flatta. A lot can change in three hundred years.”
“Please let me see it, Miss Beelzebub!” Halkara pointed to the transcard on the table. She was way more keen on issues of money than I was.
“…Go on, then.”
I wondered why Beelzebub had paused before she answered. Halkara wasn’t well versed enough in magic to steal the technology; pharmaceuticals and magic were totally different concepts.
But the reason behind that soon became clear.
The moment Halkara took the card in her hands—
—the card crumbled to pieces, like paper to sand, and spilled all over the table!
“Ahhhhhh! It’s so brittle! More than brittle! What is this?!” Halkara screamed. There was nothing in her hands anymore, and what used to be the card was now a pile of medicine-like powder on the table. “Oh dear! We should sweep it up, quickly!”
Fwooo!
A breeze came in through the open window and blew the little pile away…
“It’s gone… Like it was built to destroy evidence of itself…,” I wondered.
“Oh no, oh no… Don’t tell me that those with sinful hearts destroy the card by touching it…”
“Aren’t you embarrassed to say things like that, Halkara?”
That was a bit beyond self-deprecating. But at least she wasn’t constantly preening about being the finest elf ever created…
Beelzebub sighed, apparently expecting this.
“No need to worry, Halkara. The same would have happened even if you did have a pure heart.”
So you think she has a sinful heart, too, huh?
“The card carries quite unique magic on it, but the paper fibers cannot withstand the burden. It crumbles to bits once it’s been used.”
It’s disposable?!
“Then why not draw the magic circle on metal?”
Beelzebub shook her head. “The card requires a delicate magic circle, so it is not possible with metal. It must be paper.”
“O-okay, then… Well, paper is light, so you could carry around as many as you need for how many payments you’d be making…”
“It costs time and money to apply such a special magic circle, you see, so one card costs about three million gold.”
“Then you’d walk around with coins anyway!”
Even though it was only in the experimental phases, that was still way too expensive. People could live an entire year on the cost of the card alone.
“And there is another problem.”
Uh-oh, what else?
My view of a card-based society was rapidly vanishing into the distance.
“Only those of the highest standing who can use summoning magic—one in ten thousand demons—can use it.”
“Now it sounds like a sword only the chosen one can use!”
Even being able to use the card was a status symbol now (unlike premier credit cards, the base assumption is that you can’t use one)…
“There are yet other drawbacks here…” Beelzebub’s head drooped.
“Okay, well, you’ve already given us enough problems that no one will want one anyway.”
This was starting to sound like an exchange of trade secrets.
“No, this…has to do with all of you, so you must listen to me.”
How were we involved with any of this?
“This is quite a unique spell, so one is beset by intense drowsiness after use… Ooh… This is worse than after working all through the night… My head feels so heavy…”
“The barriers are way too high for this!”
You really had to be ready to face the worst if you wanted to use this card.
“’Tis why I sat down… I will be unable to move from here… Carry me to the guest room when I fall asleep… Zzz…zzz…”
“You’d pass out on the floor if you used this in a shop!”
The only thing I felt now was the drive to make sure this card never got widespread use…
Beelzebub looked like she was fast asleep now, so I picked her up in my arms.
“Yeah, we’re a long ways off from a cashless society. It might not come for a very, very long time…”
Now I knew why Beelzebub went out of her way to come here.
She could only test it in places where she could afford to fall asleep, like at a friend’s house. If you invited someone to a café to talk about this, it’d only cause problems later.
“Agh! H-help me! Gaaah!”
“She’s even having nightmares!”
“Paladins from the audit bureau are attacking me! They will shout their spiteful nonsense at me again! Over and over!”
“Now she’s up against weird enemies!”
Was she conscious of how much she hated the audit bureau?
Did this mean that both humans and demons had money problems?
When I came back to the dining room, Halkara was silently checking over her documents.
“I knew something like that would be too good to be true. Administrative work must be done slowly and carefully. Even the most insurmountable pile of work will eventually come to an end if you take it one step at a time.”
“That’s right. But don’t work too hard.”
“I will do what I can to get one job done before dinner. I should make it at this rate.”
It was a good thing to set a time limit and not drag it out too late.
“I don’t allow work after meals anyway. You should be resting after you eat.”
“Yes, and how awful to do administrative work after getting drunk at dinner! I will not push myself too hard!”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
I had a feeling that getting drunk wasn’t great for her health, but maybe that was more normal for elves.
When the food was ready, I went to the guest room to check on Beelzebub. I had to see if she was going to eat dinner or not.
She was still tossing and turning. I called out to her, but it didn’t seem like she was going to get up. I had no real choice but to let her sleep, what with all these nightmares. So should I forcibly wake her up instead?
“Damn! My attacks do nothing! Why are you doing this?! Why will you not accept these documents?! We do accounting work outside of our usual business as well! Will you not let this go?!”
“Hearing her talk normally (?) makes her seem more a corporate drone…”
That day, I felt a bit of sympathy with and compassion for Beelzebub.
“Oh, you two! You saved my life!”
Oh, good—glad her dream was working out.
I guess I’d just let her sleep, then.
“Falfa, Shalsha, I am so proud of you, my daughters!”
“You can’t just claim them as your daughters in your dreams!”
“There, there, I shall distribute all my assets between the two of you. Aye, work hard, play hard~”
Wow, what a nice dream she’s having. Yeah, I know it was just a dream, but it was getting on my nerves.
“Ah, you wonder how your auntie in the highlands is doing? Well, why don’t we go visit her another time?”
Now I’m the auntie?!
“’Twould be a good thing to see your sister Sandra every now and again. Aye, we shall visit your aunt.”
“All right, dinnertime! Yummy dinner’s waiting for you! Wakey, wakey!”
I shook Beelzebub and didn’t stop until she was awake.
“Mmh… I’m…in the house in the highlands… But I was just having the loveliest dream.”
“Dinner’s ready, so I came to get you,” I said with a pleasant, surface-level smile.
“You did not wake me simply because you found my dream disagreeable, did you?” Beelzebub eyed me doubtfully.
“No? I don’t know what you were dreaming about.” I kept smiling. “C’mon, Falfa and Shalsha are waiting.”
A grin crossed Beelzebub’s face. “Indeed. I shall be at the table~ ”
Again, I was reminded that I couldn’t let my guard down around her as I watched her walk away with a spring in her step.
I had to stay alert to keep my priceless daughters safe.
The End
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