Chapter 394
They had been gone for a little more than a year and work had piled up, all of which needed to be cleared out before they could dive back into delving. The moment they arrived home, they all split up, having decided to dedicate a month to catching up before going back to advancing.
The first thing he and Liz did was visit their capital island, which was still floating in the ocean.
Isabella and Cato both immediately went to check in on their respective people, while Matt and Liz went and talked with the nobles who had been waiting for them. Thankfully, none of the meetings were urgent, and it was mostly a few of their nobles trying to petition them to move against their rivals or the like.
Only one, an initiative by one of their Viscounts, caught their eye.
Viscount Mathias Harte had been encouraging a yearly competition of crafters in a few of his larger cities, and had seen great results as the various people pushed their skills to new heights. In turn, his actions had made their crafted goods more valuable, giving his otherwise unremarkable world an export. These were all fantastic things, but he, or rather his crafters, were running into the end of the publicly available crafting and enchanting methods.
He was asking for Matt and Liz to assist in the negotiations for the licenses that he was looking at purchasing. Interestingly, it wasn’t a question of money, or at least not directly. The companies he was looking at didn’t like their methods being so open or easy to spread without certain guaranties. They wanted their standard contracts to apply to anyone who selected one of their products as a reward, which would have, at most, allowed masters to teach their journeymen and apprentices, and would incur burdensome costs for all parties involved.
Viscount Harte was willing to pay a higher upfront premium to remove that clause, but the companies in question wanted what could only be considered an extortionate amount of money. Their stance was clear: they didn’t want to accept, but were unwilling to directly refuse, whether for his own status or fear of Matt and Liz’s backing.
Both Matt and Liz liked the program and the results Viscount Harte was seeing, and so agreed to assist in the next round of negotiations, but also offered their own alternative licenses for him to consider.
What he was trying to do wasn’t unheard of, but was rare thanks to the expenses involved, and most nobles instead entered into partnership agreements with the licensing companies. That route was cheaper, but it also came with the downside of effectively locking the entire planet into a single company's crafting methodology. That could limit their upward potential due to incompatibilities and other companies’ unwillingness to sell to known practitioners of another method, which was something none of them wanted.