Chapter 30 - Boasts and Beliefs
Benton waited outside the gate with the siblings for the six harvesters to show up. He sensed a handful of spiritual beasts in the area, but none higher ranked than two and none nearby enough to worry about.
“Senior Brother,” Yang Xiu said, “I thought about a question a lot last night, and I still don’t understand. Why are we so interested in this wood?”
Feeling very wise, Benton said, “What conclusions did you draw?”
“Well, Senior Brother, obviously this wood is valuable, and you’ve stated that the sect needs money. You also said that cores are valuable, though, and we’ve got a lot of those. Is the wood worth that much more?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure how many, say, rank two cores it would take to equal the value of, say, a ten-foot log of the spirit wood. The absolute value of the two resources isn’t as important as things like diversification.”
She obviously didn’t understand that last word.
“Having one income source is risky,” Benton said. “If we overhunt the spirit beasts and they all die out, we’ll no longer have money coming in. Diversification means that we find other sources of income to hedge against that eventuality.”
Yang Xiu nodded.
“You should also think of it this way,” he said, “who gets richer—a hunter or a guy who owns a cattle ranch? Without my spiritual sense, you’d find your hunts to be a lot less productive. Creating an industry, though, allows you to optimize your process to make it efficient.”
It seemed to Benton that she wasn’t just asking out of curiosity and that something about it was bothering her. “Why are you struggling with it so much?”