The First Store System

Chapter 768: Assistant Selection(5)

The participants’ lives continued to move forward as fifty years slipped away.

“Why didn’t the medicine work?” Evelyn yelled in exasperation.

The boy she had saved on her first day in the world turned out to be a fortunate event for her. The boy’s talent in medicine was second to none, so he grew to be a better vial maker than Evelyn.

Evelyn’s store continued to grow with the help of the boy as he would make the vials, and then Evelyn would sell them in the nearest city. At the same time, she would donate some of the vials for Ghaorat to the people fighting disease in the area. The timely donation helped Evelyn stay away from any riot by the people in the area, and her store continued expanding.

At first, her store was only fifty square meters, but after ten years, it had turned into a large two-story building spanning over two thousand square feet.

At the same time, she and the boy never lacked test subjects. It only took a single silver coin and a vial of Ghaorat to have the people volunteer for the testing of new medicine.

It was unethical, and Evelyn even got caught many times by the law enforcement agencies, but due to the lack of evidence and any honest alibi from the people, she got free.

After staying twenty years in the impoverished area, Evelyn finally had enough savings to open a brand new store in the city, filled with wealthy people from all walks of life.

In the twenty-first year of Evelyn’s stay in this world, she moved to a newer place. The property here was several times more expensive than her last residence, so Evelyn could only rent a hundred square feet shop for a monthly rent of three hundred gold coins.

(A/N: The currency rate is simple. Silver, Gold, Platinum, with each currency having an exchange rate of one hundred to one with one level higher coin.)

Despite working hard for more than twenty years, Evelyn had only saved around a thousand gold coins, so paying one-third of her savings for just a month’s rent was a life-changing decision to make.

In the end, Evelyn decided to continue owning the building in the dirty street while also renting the store in the city.

The boy would stay in the dirty street and do experiments while Evelyn would sell medicines here.

Evelyn’s plan worked. In the first month of her store opening, she succeeded in making around two hundred gold coins. When the cost of the materials and the rent were combined, she was at a loss of around one hundred and fifty gold coins. Evelyn didn’t mind it since it was a good start.

The most she had made in the dirty street in a month was fifty gold coins, and when the cost of the material and the donation got deducted, her profit was only around thirty gold coins.

In the next few months, her losses decreased with each month. At one time, she had to get a loan from the bank by using the recipes as the stake. The boy’s immense talent in medicine helped Evelyn as she was eligible to get a loan of ten thousand gold coins from the bank. If she were to sell the ownership of the recipes, Evelyn would have made fifty thousand gold coins.

Evelyn didn’t lack that much money, so she only took a loan of five thousand gold coins, with a monthly interest of two percent. The interest rate was very high, but Evelyn had no other choice.

Evelyn finally made her first profit in the seventh month of her entering the city. It was only a profit of seventeen gold coins and thirty-four silver coins. But still, it was finally a positive start for the store.

Her profits continued to rise, and when thirty years had passed since the contest began for her, Evelyn’s medicine store had a monopoly over the city’s medicine market.

It was time for Evelyn to expand, so she found the nearest city, and the process of setting up another store began.

Having a monopoly over the medicine market in a city was great as well as terrible publicity for the store. People decided to check it, but the store owners didn’t like it, so they decided to force the store to its end.

It isn’t possible to end things whose time has come, so the store only rose further in popularity, and everything about it had to do with the boy.

Evelyn’s confidence continued growing as she saw her fortune rising. It took Evelyn thirty years to create a monopoly over the medicine market in a single city. But in only the next ten years, Evelyn became the big boss in an entire province.

Her store was the largest in the entire province, and at the same time, if there were other medicine stores, they also bought medicine vials from Evelyn’s store, becoming a tributary to the store.

The dirty area where Evelyn had first appeared had now turned into her domain. More than ten thousand people worked under her. The boy experimented with medicines while the other workers made the vials, maintaining the high selling rate of the store.

As good as fortune was, it was never without setbacks. Evelyn finally had her first setback in the forty-eighth year of her stay.

While experimenting on the medicine, the boy suddenly crashed to the ground.

Since Evelyn wasn’t an ordinary store owner, she lived in the province’s capital with other wealthy families in the city. When she heard the news of the boy crashing, she rushed straightaway to the dirty street.

Since the province’s capital was three thousand miles from the dirty street, it took her several hours of air journey to reach the closest airport and then several hours of travel by road to reach her destination.

When Evelyn reached, she got the shock of her life as the boy’s body had turned pale while he was shivering from cold in the heat of the summer.

Since Evelyn was also an expert in the medical field, after studying all the side effects, she found the root of the boy turning ill, and her face also turned pale from shock.

The disease was untreatable by the current medical standards, and only one in the billion would get diagnosed with it.

In the fiftieth year of Evelyn’s stay, the boy finally faced death despite Evelyn searching heaven and earth for successful medicine.

The boy was the fortune jewel for Evelyn, and his death began showing its reaction to the store.

Evelyn was also an expert, but like the boy, she couldn’t dedicate herself to the field of medicine all the time. Evelyn tried to search for another genius, but her efforts proved to be nothing, as she never found one.

Her monopoly over the province continued. Whenever a new store tried to rise against her, she used her financial power to crush them. But it was the limit as she failed to expand her business to other provinces since she didn’t have a new batch of vials to show her store’s uniqueness over others.

Evelyn had no choice but to slow her expansion of the medical store and give some time to research. She had a perfect medicine and test subject in her mind.

The boy had done wonders for the store, and Evelyn wanted to create a vaccine for the same disease that killed the boy.

Since there were only one in a billion chances of someone getting diagnosed with the disease, it was nearly impossible to find a test subject for the virus.

Since the boy had helped the store, Evelyn sincerely wanted to thank him. First, she added a statue of the boy in front of the headquarters, and then she decided to create a holiday on the day the boy went to his afterlife.

***

Time flew by, and just like that, around thirty more years had passed.

To be precise, today was the end of the eighty-first year since the participants entered this world.

The participants hadn’t aged at all during these years, but that was all at an end after today.

Without getting any life-extension medicine, the participants would live for only eighty-three years, completing their lifespan to hundred years.

The aging would start from now on till they got a life-extension medicine, or it would end in their death when the hundredth year had passed for the participants.

As participants saw the first wrinkle in all these years, they turned flustered. Many didn’t care as they had enough money in their hands to buy life-extension medicine.

The majority was taken aback, not due to them beginning to age, but by noticing how many years had gone by while they still hadn’t achieved something in the world.

The contest had a deadline of five hundred years, so around one-fifth had already gone, and they still hadn’t achieved anything substantial in the financial world.

More time flew by, and finally, the last day of the eighty-third year in the world arrived.

When the contest had begun, there were more than five hundred million participants. In those eighty-three years, only three contestants had faced disqualification since they ended up getting captured by law enforcement and failed to prove their innocence, and faced execution in punishment.

Getting captured in prison in the world was akin to failure since even the lowest punishment by the judge was twenty-five years. The participants would still stay in the game since Aakesh couldn’t just disqualify them for spending years in prison. A single moment can change the destiny of the contestant, so only those participants who got execution in the punishment became disqualified from the contest.

***

A/N: Sorry, only one chapter today. I will be busy with some personal work, so I won’t be able to write the second chapter.

It is also the month where I haven’t missed a single day after some time. Thanks for supporting the book! I really appreciate it.