My Anime Shopping Tree & My Cold Prodigy Wife!
Episode : 134

Chapter: 267

Her expression, however, sobered slightly, the pragmatist reasserting itself over the triumphant strategist. “But it has also created a significant problem, my lord.” She gestured to their limited, neatly stacked inventory of finished, bottled elixirs. “Our success is now our greatest weakness. We have cultivated an atmosphere of extreme scarcity, and it has worked wonderfully. But it is an illusion that is becoming dangerously real. Master Valerius and his artisans, even working around the clock, can only produce about twenty of the dispenser bodies per day. Our own team can assemble and fill them, yes, but the bottleneck is the craftsmanship of the bottles themselves. At this rate, it will take us weeks to fulfill the current back-orders, let alone meet new demand. The frenzy could turn to frustration. The desire could curdle into resentment. We risk damaging the brand’s reputation before it is even fully established.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes serious. “We have stoked a fire, my lord. A very large, very profitable fire. But now, we are running out of wood to feed it. What is our next move?”

Lloyd listened to her assessment, a slow, almost lazy smile spreading across his face. He walked over to the corner of the office, where a large, heavy, canvas-draped object had been sitting, untouched and uncommented upon, for the past week.

“Wood, Mei Jing?” he said, his voice laced with a theatrical amusement. “Who said anything about running out of wood?”

With a deliberate, almost dramatic flourish, he gripped the corner of the canvas and pulled.

The heavy cloth slid to the floor, revealing what lay beneath.

Mei Jing stared. Her jaw, usually so firm and controlled, dropped. Her sharp, obsidian eyes went wide with sheer, unadulterated, comprehensive disbelief. Alaric, who had just entered with a new batch of pH readings, audibly gasped and dropped his entire ledger, sending a cascade of meticulously documented vellum across the floor.

Stacked neatly, row upon gleaming row, reaching almost to the ceiling, were dispensers. Hundreds of them. Oak-and-steel bottles, identical in every detail to the ones that were causing a near-riot at their front gate. They gleamed in the light of the office, a silent, magnificent, seemingly endless forest of luxury.

“But… how…?” Mei Jing stammered, her voice a thin, reedy whisper. She walked forward, her hand outstretched, and touched one of the bottles as if to confirm it was real. It was. “Master Valerius… his workshop… he could not possibly have produced this many. We received his entire output.”

“He didn’t,” Lloyd confirmed, his smile widening into a full, triumphant grin. He was enjoying this. Immensely. “Master Valerius and his team produced two hundred and ten units. Ten for the initial gifting event, two hundred for the ‘concession release’.” He paused, letting the numbers sink in.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the magnificent, towering stack of dispensers that filled a quarter of the office, “is the other eight hundred.”

Mei Jing’s head snapped towards him, her mind, a finely tuned engine of commerce and logic, struggling to process the impossible data. “Eight hundred…?” she repeated, bewildered. “But from where? Who could craft such items with this precision, this speed… and in such secrecy?”

This, Lloyd thought, was his own masterstroke. His own secret, held close to his chest until the perfect, dramatic moment. “An advantage of being the Arch Duke’s heir, my dear Mei Jing,” he said cryptically, “is access to… specialized resources. Let’s just say I have a… personal artisan… whose skills are unparalleled, and whose discretion is absolute.”

He wasn’t, of course, going to tell her that he had spent every spare moment of the past two weeks, late at night, in the solitude of his suite (while Rosa slept, or pretended to sleep, on the other side of the room), painstakingly, exhaustingly, using his own Ferrum Steel power to personally forge the intricate bronze-and-steel-alloy pump mechanisms, and then, using a different application of his Void control, shaping and finishing the oak bodies he had procured in raw, unmilled form through Ken’s network. It had been a draining, mind-numbing, repetitive task, a true test of his control and endurance. But the result… the result was this. An army of dispensers. A secret weapon.

“You… you had these all along?” Mei Jing breathed, the full, breathtaking scope of his strategy finally dawning on her. “You let me worry about supply? You let the market descend into a frenzy? You deliberately held back eighty percent of our inventory?”

Chapter: 268

“I did,” Lloyd confirmed calmly. “Because true scarcity, my dear Mei Jing, is a temporary advantage. But the illusion of scarcity, carefully managed, can be a weapon of immense, enduring power. We didn't just sell out because the product was good. We sold out because people were terrified they might never get another chance. We didn’t just sell soap; we sold fear. The fear of being left out. And that,” he grinned, “is the most potent marketing tool in the entire world.”

Mei Jing stared at him, her earlier admiration transforming into something else. Something closer to… awe. She had thought herself a master of commercial strategy, a shark in a pond of guppies. But this… this was another level entirely. He hadn’t just anticipated the market’s reaction; he had engineered it, controlled it, from the very beginning, with a foresight, a ruthlessness, a sheer, audacious brilliance that was almost terrifying.

She slowly began to laugh. A low, appreciative chuckle at first, which quickly grew into a full, delighted peal of pure, unadulterated, professional joy. “My lord Ferrum,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief, her eyes shining with a newfound, almost fearful, respect. “You are not a devil. You are a monster. A magnificent, terrifying, wonderfully, brilliantly, profitable monster.”

She turned back to the towering stack of dispensers, her mind already racing, recalculating, reformulating their entire strategy. “This… this changes everything,” she murmured. “We don’t have a supply problem. We have an allocation problem. We can control the market. Release them in small, tantalizing batches. Reward loyal clients. Punish hesitant ones. We can… we can build an empire on this.”

Lloyd watched her, a quiet satisfaction settling deep in his soul. The illusion of scarcity had worked. The secret inventory was revealed. The floodgates were about to open. And the gold, the beautiful, life-changing, power-granting gold, was about to pour in. His daily System Coin conversions, which had been a slow, painful trickle funded by his dwindling personal reserves, were about to become a steady, reliable river. His balance, he noted with a grim smile, was already at 130 SC. Soon, it would be much, much higher. The path to Ascension, to power, to survival, had just become significantly shorter. And it was paved, gloriously, with soap.

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The controlled release of the next batch of AURA dispensers was a masterclass in psychological manipulation, orchestrated with chilling precision by Mei Jing. It was not announced as a new supply, but as the "Early Fulfillment of the Premier Waiting List." A select hundred names from the top of the four-hundred-long list were sent personal, discreet missives, informing them that their “patience and loyalty to the Aura brand had been noted,” and that their pre-paid order could be collected at the manufactory gate at a specific, designated time.

The effect was exactly as they’d planned. It didn't satiate the demand; it inflamed it. Those who received their dispensers became even more insufferably smug, their status as ‘preferred clients’ a new, even more potent, form of social currency. Those still on the waiting list became even more desperate, their anxiety mounting. And those not on the list at all? They descended into a state of frantic, almost hysterical, envy.

The manufactory, once a forgotten ruin on the edge of the estate, became the most popular, and most chaotic, destination in the entire Duchy. The narrow lane leading to it was now perpetually clogged with a motley, jostling assortment of humanity. Ornate carriages belonging to furious nobles who had been overlooked were parked wheel-to-wheel with the sturdy wagons of wealthy merchants demanding to know why their gold was not as good as a Baron’s. Ambitious artisans, successful mercenaries, and even a few well-to-do farmers who had heard the whispers of this new miracle soap, crowded the gate, waving pouches of coin, demanding, pleading, arguing.

The problem was no longer scarcity; it was success. A crushing, overwhelming, chaotic success.

And at the epicenter of this daily storm was Jasmin.

The once-timid butcher girl, now the proud Forewoman of the most talked-about enterprise in the city, found herself utterly, hopelessly, out of her depth. Her quiet competence in managing production, her gentle but firm authority over Martha and Pia, was useless against the tide of entitlement, aggression, and sheer, desperate desire that crashed against their factory gate each day.

She tried. Gods, how she tried. She stood at the gate with a ledger, her face pale, her voice trembling, attempting to manage the queue, to answer the barrage of questions, to placate the frayed tempers.

“Yes, Lady Agatha, you are on the list, number two hundred and seventeen. We will send a missive when your order is ready.”