Chapter 384 For the Money Bag
A lot happened in August 1918. Following the failure of the Hundred Days Offensive, Germany failed again in the Second Battle of the Marne. It could only retreat significantly and retreat to the Hindenburg line, completely losing the battlefield initiative and hope of victory to the Allied Powers; the epidemic of disease It has been brought under control in some areas, but the overall spread continues to accelerate. Many people have even experienced the second and third rounds of infection. Their resistance is getting weaker and the mortality rate is getting higher. The Quidditch World Cup has therefore been suspended. In the first session, a guy named Zhao Mai spent the remaining gold coins in his hand to buy a shop in Hogsmeade Village, started to decorate it, and also started a plan to open a magic shop.
Passing the ordinary wizard level examination is equivalent to "coming of age" in magic, and Zhao Mai has some corresponding rights. He can wear a pointed hat and wizard robes with official insignia like a real wizard, receive regular services from Gringotts, and buy his own wizard house and land. Someone happened to be selling a house in Hogsmeade. Zhao Mai looked at the price and thought it was more suitable, so he bought it.
This is a thin and narrow two-story wooden building with a thick chimney on the side and a storage attic above Zhao Mai's height. The original owner used this place as a place to rest in summer and winter, but it was always harassed by Hogwarts students, so the frequency of visits became less and less. The house had been neglected, had accumulated a lot of dust, and had basically become a shelter for all kinds of critters. Before the house fell down, the original owner decided to sell it at a random price and move completely to the sunny and sandy Mediterranean coast.
When Zhao Mai took over, the house was already shaky. Zhao Mai also deliberately pushed the wall with his hands. His huge power enhanced by psychic powers pushed the old house, making it scream "Stop pushing, you can't stand it anymore, let me die", thus Successfully cut the selling price by half. After he took over the "dangerous building", he just bought some wooden boards, used wood plasticity (wood shaping technique) to transform them into a soft and permeable state, and drilled them along the gaps in the damaged wooden walls. Go in and fix the broken places. Some termites that lived in this house structure and fed on the wood, causing the quality of the house to deteriorate, were driven away by Zhao Mai using the power of nature to find new homes elsewhere, and would never come back to harass this house again.
The house thus becomes clean, solid and vibrant.
"Don't you need to get rid of those mice and spiders?" Xiao Hua flew around the house, looking for gaps that Zhao Mai might have missed, and naturally found some small creatures that did not follow the advice.
"I don't mind them being here, but they are likely to bite the medicinal materials we bought and the magic potions we made." Zhao Mai thought for a while and said to Xiaohua: "You can find a place to place them in the house. Just They say it’s a safe zone and you can move around freely, but you have to bear the risk when you leave there.”
"I don't want to talk to them." Xiaohua shook her head and said: "I am the Enlightenment Tree. I am very clean. Not to mention mice and insects, even birds can't come to me. You can also use the animal conversation technique yourself. , it’s better to go by yourself. There is a small window that opens outward in the east corner of the basement, leave it to the animals.”
Zhao Mai nodded and summoned the force of nature to strengthen his understanding of animals in order to achieve the purpose of communication. Although he has full knowledge of all languages, the animals' conversations cannot be translated. The sounds made by animals can indeed express emotions and different meanings, but they cannot be regarded as a language. Most of these sounds are a sound reflection passed down through the reproduction of ethnic groups according to the needs of the environment, expressing responses to specific stimuli. The most important element of language is to produce abstract concepts, which come from real objects and are higher than real objects.
The same animal will produce completely different sound signals due to different living environments and ethnic groups. This requires natural force to strengthen the ability of "animal understanding and communication" to achieve a state similar to conversation. It is necessary not only to understand the animals, but also to let the animals understand what the Druid means. Zhao Mai cast a spell and saw the food reserve on the way to find mice and spiders, and was suddenly curious about what it would say.
"A Liang, what are you thinking about now?" Zhao Mai squatted down and poked it.
Reserve turned his head and exposed his belly. He was about to scream a few times when he suddenly felt something was wrong. It looked at Zhao Mai, sniffed, then opened its mouth and stuck out its tongue, breathing "ha... ha...".
"Come on, tell me something? For example, what do you want to eat most?"
Reserve Food's eyes rolled around, he got up and licked Zhao Mai's face with his tongue, wagging his tail vigorously, but he didn't speak, not even the original "woof" or "woof", and Zhao Mai couldn't tease him no matter what.
I don't know if he is really stupid or too smart. In short, he doesn't reveal anything about his heart to Zhao Mai. There was no time to spend the whole day with it, so Zhao Mai shook his head and left. Li Liang watched his master leave, his eyelids shook, he looked around, and continued to lie down to sleep. It feels that not being stupid but pretending to be stupid is the highest creed. Take the spell dodge training for example. After hard training, it is not too difficult to dodge various wand rays, but if you end the training, you will suffer a loss. Reserve Liang knew that as long as it made a few deliberate mistakes, it would allow Zhao Mai to continue training. Then keep the success rate higher and it will always have extra meat to eat! You can't tell anyone something like this...
Zhao Mai settled the miniature residents in the house, and then used magic to let the dust go into the trash can, and let the broom and mop work automatically to clean the house. He plans to divide the rooms on the second floor so that everyone has space to live, rest and study. The first floor serves as his potion laboratory and also serves as a workshop. He had very few gold coins left, and in order to conduct more research, he needed a way to make money. Potions are currently his best field, especially some potions that are used in large quantities. His production efficiency is much higher than that of textbooks and the cost is lower than that of outside pharmacies. There should be a good market.
As for sales, using a vending machine is a great option. In terms of automation, or "magicization", the progress and development of the wizarding world far exceeds that of the outside world. Most clothes have the function of "folding themselves" or "automatically climbing onto the hanger", and shoes can "mop the itch on their own". "Automatic Spell" allows items to determine simple conditions and then do things, just like a programming language. The mechanical vending machine has been invented. What Zhao Mai needs to do is to use the automatic spell to make it more advanced. In an era when computers were still nearly 30 years away from being invented, Zhao Mai could try simple programming.
For Zhao Mai, this process will be full of fun.
From the outside, it looked like the house had been undergoing renovations and there was no intention of opening the door for a while, but inside, everything was actually basically in place. Zhao Mai turned all the raw materials into a panacea for treating colds and packed them in bags. Looking at the almost empty medicinal material cabinet, Zhao Mai knew that he had to solve the problem of raw materials. The remaining gold coins needed to be spent carefully, and he really didn't want to take the gems to the Goblin Bank to be exploited. Just kidding, letting goblins take charge of the banking industry, I don’t know what the wizards think. If they knew about the Destiny Gold Coin, they might have sighed deeply and would rather start another war with the goblins than take back the bank, right?
By the way, wizards defeated elves, so they enslaved them into "house elves". Was there ever a battle between wizards and goblins? Who wins and who loses? Zhao Mai thought for a while, the exam had just passed, but it seemed that the entire history of magic had not written about this matter, which was a bit intriguing.
Bankers who have mastered the power of money dominate everything in wizards' lives. Could it be that the goblins win and the wizards lose?