BXBX NOVEL Chapter 71: The way Rich people use money
Claire squinted her eyes as she looked at the list before relaxing her face and putting the device away only to get herself comfortable on the cushions while bringing a piece of cake to her mouth.
"Au wewwy sufe?" she muttered while munching on the fruit-tart, before licking her lips clean and swallowing the treat. "Are you really sure?" she asked again, this time using proper words, before moving her hand and tapping at the device with the joint of her forefinger. "You spent a mere three hundred thousand. I came here expecting to throw at least several million down, you know?"
I reached out for the cup… Only to change my mind mid-move and grab an entire bottle of soda instead, taking a second to twist its cork open before passing it over to Clarie.
Given how dry that tart looked to me, I couldn't help but worry Claire might end up choking on it.
"Thanks," the girl happily grabbed the bottle from my hand before taking a swing in a manner that only further reinforced the sense of gap moe I'd first noticed when she was orgasming all over my hands. "But really, I mean it. I understand if you come from a place where you didn't really have money, so it might be hard to stomach it, but…"
Claire bit down on her lips as she stopped herself from saying whatever it was that she had on her mind.
"Feel free to say it," I quickly reacted, hoping to nip all of the potential problems with communication we would have in their bud before they could grow into an actual problem. "It's okay if it's something that I might personally dislike or don't agree with. You know the world of rich a lot better than I could ever hope to know it and I'm not stupid enough to put my pride above your wisdom."
Just like I knew how to deal with most of the issues of operating a small shop at its bottom-most level from proper ways of stocking the shelves according to first-in-first-out rules, to how to merchandise the wares to make the customers more likely to buy them and the likes, Claire knew better how to move around in the world of rich people.
And so, having her hold her advice back just because it was something my poor-person mindset would interpret as insulting or aggressive would be nothing short of short-sightedness if not outright ignorant arrogance!
"There's value to spending money, even if it's on things you don't really need," Claire finally gave up as she revealed what she had on her mind.
A thought that sounded like bullshit that only a rich person could ever come up with, yet another motto used by the rich when addressing the masses that couldn't be any different from what they were actively doing themselves.
"Could you elaborate on this point?" I requested while leaning forward on the cushions and lowering my eyelids as I focused my sight on Claire's lips, ready to catch every last word of hers.
"I mean…" the girl hesitated for a bit while looking away. Ultimately, however, she brought her eyes back and looked straight ahead, taking my stare head-on and responding to it in kind. "When you spend large, you change how other businesses view you.
In the case of this merchant shop, by spending a lot, you continuously bring down their premiums all the way to the point where they make literally a single spiritual coin on every item you buy. But then, there's more.
From how most of the items are appreciates at a better rate than money, through how you can manipulate the prizes of those very items just by stocking them, all the way to protecting yourself from white-intelligence…"
"White intelligence?" I asked, unfamiliar with the term.
"Open source intelligence, stuff that doesn't strictly relate to what you are researching…" Claire stopped for a second and took a moment to find the best possible answer to my question. "Do you know how there's this pizza-unrest index?" she suddenly asked, coming up with yet another term I didn't know about.
"It's from back in the old days when several pizza shops would be swamped with orders whenever a long set of meetings would be scheduled at a nearby government's office. Those intense, long, and successive meetings can then translate to that government agency intensifying its efforts in preparation for something big to go down," Claire explained before leaning back and smiling.
"In other words, you don't look for the bread, you look for the crumbs left in the wake of whoever carried it away," she explained, simplifying the entire thing to a much more palatable example.
"And in this case, by buying a bunch of stuff that we don't need or are simply going to turn empty credit into a value that actually appreciates, we can maybe not exactly stop others from figuring out what we are actually using…"
"But we can cloud the waters enough for our transactions with the merchant house not to be a manifest of what we are using to produce things that never existed in this world before," I finished up the explanation just to see if I've got it right.
"Pretty much, yeah," Claire nodded her head, her smile growing just a little bit more as we grew ever-so-slightly closer now that we were on the same page.
"Can I leave it to you to buff this list up, then?" I asked, only to lean over at the device and quickly scroll through the list again. "Oh, and while you are at it, can you add a bunch of basic stuff that's likely to come of use?
That, and," I smiled, as I finally formalized the path to making the one item that I had kept thinking about since a while ago, "and there are just a few more things that I think we might need from here."