"Hehehe! You really know how to dream, little girl."
Shirahoshi laughed so hard her body shook. Then she changed the subject and deliberately teased her, "You heard wrong. By exchanging identities, I mean giving up your current job as a cleaner in the Holy Land and going to the East Blue countryside to take over her little tavern that only earns 4,000 berries a month. Would you switch?"
"Huh? Go to the countryside and be a commoner making 4,000 a month? I'd rather die than switch!"
The fanatic look on Aliya's face vanished instantly. She turned pale and shook her head wildly as if she had just heard a vicious curse.
She stumbled back two steps in panic, picked up her rag again, lowered her head deeply, and desperately wiped a table corner that did not have a speck of dust on it.
She looked so nervous that it was as if she feared Shirahoshi might actually fire her and send her back to that free but poor world of the lower class.
"This... what is this..."
Looking at Aliya's reaction, Makino opened her mouth and admitted that a strong sense of bitterness had risen inside her.
Although she now carried the title of God-Chosen Princess and had heard that she could receive three million berries every month, she had exchanged all her dignity, freedom, and even the constant risk of losing her life for it.
But honestly, she knew very well that if she had not been forcibly taken away by the World Government, wth the completely ordinary path her life had been following, if she continued running her tavern in Foosha Village, earning 4,000 berries a month, even if she saved every coin for a year without spending anything, she would end up with less than 50,000 berries.
Even if she worked until she was seventy years old and labored for forty years, her total lifetime income would only amount to about two million berries.
That was not even enough to match a single month's base salary as a God-Chosen Princess.
Even more ironic, if she really calculated it carefully, she, the proud commoner who always claimed she earned her living through hard work, could spend forty years working and still save less money than a low-level cleaner in the Holy Land could earn in a single year.
That brutal difference in class and wealth made her pride suffer badly.
"But... if you earn such a high salary of three hundred thousand a month, your work must be very, very hard, right? Do you have to work day and night?"
Still unwilling to give up, Makino tried to recover a bit of her mental balance.
"No, not hard at all."
Hearing Makino's sympathy, Aliya immediately shook her head again and hurriedly explained as if presenting a treasure.
"Princess Makino, our cleaning department uses a very strict four-shift system. We're only required to work less than eight hours a day. As long as we finish the basic cleaning in our assigned area, even if we sit around daydreaming afterward, our supervisor won't say a thing. And every week we get one or two guaranteed fully paid days off."
"What? You not only get two days off every week, but you don't even work eight hours a day?"
Makino's voice rose again without her noticing. Her tone was filled with disbelief, and even carried a hint of jealousy.
"That's right! If you're assigned to the morning shift or afternoon shift, you even get a one-hour paid afternoon tea break."
Aliya seemed completely unaware of Makino's collapsing state and continued smiling happily.
"But personally, I prefer fighting for night shifts. The night shift runs from eleven at night until seven in the morning. All the important people are sleeping then, so we hardly have to do any heavy work. We just keep the area quiet. It's so idle that mushrooms could grow. The best part is that if you keep working night shifts, you get two guaranteed days off every week."
"So that's why you girls have been arguing lately over night-shift spots?", Listening from the side, Shirahoshi pouted with some dissatisfaction, "That won't do. I'll have to suggest something to Aunt Stella later and have her increase the allowance for day-shift employees. Otherwise you'll all be fighting over night shifts just so you can slack off."
"Y-you want to raise it even more?"
Makino felt the whole world had become absurd.
She thought back to her life in Foosha Village.
Every day she had to get up before dawn to buy supplies, prepare ingredients, and clean the tavern. She would stay busy until late at night when the last customer finally left.
She spent at least fifteen hours on her feet every day.
And when business was good, she sometimes did not even have time to close her eyes and rest, let alone enjoy fixed weekends off.
For a small business owner at the bottom of society, taking a break meant closing the tavern. It meant not earning a single coin that day while still suffering losses from purchased supplies.
But now?
The 4,000 berries she earned through exhausting labor for an entire month was not even a fraction of what these Holy Land cleaners earned while working less than eight hours a day and enjoying weekends off?
The huge difference made Makino feel deeply unbalanced.
What special skills did cleaning require?
All it took was strength and careful work.
If she could really earn three hundred thousand berries every month, Makino felt that with her efficiency in cleaning a tavern, she could handle half the cleaning work in the entire Jaygarcia family palace complex by herself.
'Wait...'
Makino's thoughts suddenly stalled.
'How many auxiliary workers like Aliya did Shirahoshi say there are serving the Jaygarcia family?'
'More than ten thousand?'
If those ten thousand cleaners, cooks, gardeners, security staff, and others all earned at least three hundred thousand berries every month... then how enormous would the monthly payroll be?
"My god..."
Makino could not help covering her forehead.
She realized her brain could no longer calculate a number that large.
In her understanding, the total amount of money used to pay all those lower-level workers was probably enough to buy the entire Goa Kingdom several times over, king's underwear included.
Besides, no matter how luxurious and enormous the Jaygarcia palaces were, did they really need to support over ten thousand highly paid cleaners and servants?
They did not need to pay that much.
For cleaning and daily work, people would rush to do it for ten thousand berries.
"What? Can't do the math anymore? Do you think supporting this many people and paying these salaries must be extremely difficult or unbelievably excessive?"
Shirahoshi seemed to see through Makino's limited understanding of economics. She smiled and glanced at her. Her thin red lips parted as she casually revealed a set of large-scale figures.
"Let me put it this way. During the past year alone, counting only the businesses owned by the Jaygarcia family and excluding all taxes, our family's total net income was 19.2253 trillion berries."
"And the total annual labor cost used to pay the tens of thousands of service staff in the Holy Land, along with several million employees, was only 215.3 billion berries."
Shirahoshi spread her hands and spoke casually, "See? If you compare that expense to our total income, it only accounts for one percent. We're basically supporting these people with crumbs slipping through our fingers. So it really isn't much."
"How is that possible..."
Makino was completely stunned by those godlike numbers.
But Shirahoshi had no intention of letting her off and continued using sharp words to dissect the cruel truth of the world.
"Let's use your beloved hometown as another example."
"The Goa Kingdom claims to be one of the largest and most prosperous member nations in the East Blue. According to reports from the World Government Finance Department, your country earns around 125.1 billion berries every year through taxes and export trade."
"Even after deducting the roughly 50 billion berries that must be paid to the government annually, the national treasury still retains more than 70 billion berries in legal surplus revenue."
Shirahoshi's expression became playful.
"But big sister, did you receive even a single copper coin from that seventy billion? No. Because out of that remaining seventy billion, more than sixty billion flowed directly into the private pockets of the royal family and nobles."
"Then, under the names of diplomacy and pilgrimage, they bring that money to the Red Line and spend it freely."
"So do you understand now?"
Shirahoshi looked at Makino with ridicule.
"The Goa Kingdom is actually very rich. Resources are not lacking. It's just that the people in power genuinely believe that mud-footed peasants struggling at the bottom like you don't deserve that much money. In their eyes, your labor is only worth that pitiful 4,000 berries."
"That's nonsense!"
With red eyes, Makino instinctively shouted back.
"Every coin I earned came from selling drinks and working from dawn to night! Whether the Goa Kingdom treasury has money or whether the nobles are greedy has absolutely nothing to do with it!"
"It's only because my tavern is in a remote location, there aren't many customers buying drinks, and I sell my alcohol too cheaply because I want to help poor people!"
At least according to Makino's simple values, her poverty came from limited ability and poor market conditions, not exploitation from above.
"Idiot."
In response to Makino's argument, Shirahoshi simply stopped smiling and looked at her as though she were an illiterate person beyond saving. She shook her head with a bit of pity.
"That's exactly why I've always felt that people from the old era who constantly talk about freedom and human rights are really just vandals who know how to destroy things but don't understand how society works."
"You still don't understand the basic logic of how wealth moves."
Shirahoshi sighed and patiently explained as if teaching an elementary school student.
"The seventy billion surplus earned by the Goa Kingdom through foreign trade each year is called a trade surplus in macroeconomics. That huge amount of wealth represents the total value created by the entire Goa Kingdom, including all the ordinary people like you engaged in fishing, farming, and handicrafts."
"But this enormous sum, which should have been used to improve domestic infrastructure, increase imports, and raise the minimum income of ordinary citizens, never entered market circulation. Instead, it was intercepted by the nobles and spent entirely on the Red Line."
Step by step, Shirahoshi pressed against Makino's mental defenses.
"For the economic foundation of the entire Goa Kingdom, this means social labor worth seventy billion simply vanished and was consumed for nothing."
"The registered population of the Goa Kingdom is currently 2.31 million. If that stolen seventy billion could return equally to every citizen, even in the form of the most basic public welfare..."
Shirahoshi paused and stated a precise number.
"Each person would receive roughly an additional thirty thousand berries in annual income. It may not sound like enough money to completely change your fate."
"But big sister, think carefully. If you received an extra thirty thousand berries in government subsidies every year, wouldn't your proud annual income, which doesn't even reach fifty thousand despite all your hard work, instantly double?"
"You... you can calculate it like that?"
Makino froze completely.
Terms like macroeconomics and trade surplus were things she had never heard before. The little mental capacity she used for calculating tavern accounts had already reached its limit. She could only barely remember Shirahoshi's final conclusion.
Reason kept telling her that Shirahoshi's argument was correct.
Because among ordinary people, everyone had always complained that the disgusting nobles of the Goa Kingdom squeezed them with excessive taxes, making it impossible for commoners to escape poverty no matter how hard they worked. That was common knowledge.
But her instincts also filled her with fear.
She felt that the sixteen-year-old girl before her was not simply calculating who had stolen her money.
She was using a cold macro-level truth to peel away the layers of society's nature.
She was also completely destroying the naive revolutionary idea that Shanks and the others had always believed in, that the world would become free and prosperous as long as the World Government was overthrown.
Because in the end, wherever people existed, the things Shirahoshi described would also exist.
Even Shanks and his group earned huge amounts of money elsewhere and then spent it in places like the Goa Kingdom or on the Grand Line.
According to Shirahoshi's theory, if money did not flow back into the economy, ordinary people would merely be creating wealth for those who already possessed money and power.
"That's not right!"
Makino suddenly realized something and quickly raised her head.
"That sixty billion was spent on the Red Line. But if they spent the money on the Red Line, then the people there earned that money."
"The Goa Kingdom didn't benefit, but the common people on the Red Line did."
"Good. You're very smart."
Shirahoshi looked at Makino with surprise.
Without studying these things systematically, she had still managed to spot the issue immediately. That alone was enough to make Shirahoshi take her seriously.
"If you aren't selected to become a divine attendant in the future, you can come work in my finance department."
Someone with brains and ideas was worth training.
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