Chapter 1201 - 703: Becoming the King of the World!

"We’ve more or less got the numbers now."

The next day, Lily went to find Sage and reported yesterday’s battle results.

The Pirates that were invited and actually came definitely didn’t reach the thousands, but if you squeeze it a bit, you can still pull together a few hundred Captains.

"A total of three hundred and seventy-four Pirate Captains showed up, registration was at a full hundred percent. Yesterday, two hundred and eighty-three Captains paid and placed orders, the rest are all stuck on money issues and are trying to scrape funds together."

Lily said, "But everyone who paid only put down the three hundred million Belly deposit; they all took out standardized loans."

"That’s fine."

Sitting behind his desk, Sage lit a cigar and laughed. "Of course they’re only going to pay the deposit. Who’d be dumb enough to pay in full? Being a Pirate is licking blood off the blade. If they don’t die, they can always pay it back somehow. If they do die, then they don’t need to pay, and I don’t lose out anyway."

Forget whether it’s the Grand Sailing or not—on a world with oceans this big, where the only means of transport is ships, the shipbuilding industry is guaranteed to be profit among profits, especially in O’hara, where raw materials are cheap, technology is solid, and there’s a complete shipbuilding chain from low-end to high-end.

To build a ship, three hundred million Belly is more than enough.

And that’s already factoring in workers’ wages and benefits, plus profit-sharing for the raw-material workers; otherwise the costs could be even lower.

Things aren’t like they used to be. Back then the territory was small, but both domestic and export production were high, so raw material issues were handled by local merchants, who hired locals at high wages to go deal with raw materials.

Later, after a round of purges, plus territorial expansion and the impact of war, exports got cut off, and in certain sectors domestic demand lost momentum. Quite a few merchants just threw in the towel.

An industrial chain has to be continuous, every link tightly twisted together. Once one link goes wrong, it’s not a minor matter—it’ll affect upstream or downstream, and the impact won’t be small.

So back when Doflamingo suspended smuggling to go after Straw Hat, even though it was only for a short time, Sage’s weapons factories couldn’t ship out their output in time. At the time they forced production to continue just to make sure the downstream iron mining industry wasn’t hit, but even so, part of warehousing and transport still took a hit.

And warehousing and transport are directly tied to the livelihoods of those working in them. If a day’s Sailing doesn’t happen, that day there’s no profit, and along with that, other cargo can’t sail either, triggering a chain reaction.

Once you have a lot of industries, it’s like a net—snap one strand and the shock spreads far.

Sage had actually halted things for a while; there were still materials in stock, domestic demand could be supplied, even if he had to front the money himself.

But the impact on weapons and shipbuilding was significant. You simply can’t sell those things off; even if you supply the recruits with them, it’s still not as good as having a constant export flow. Once capacity is damaged, of course that ripples down through all the sectors below.

The most direct impact was on lumber and iron ore. Output in that sector dropped; merchants weren’t making enough, yet still had to pay workers high wages. Losses got too big, so they just up and quit.

There was no way to stop that. Most of the merchants who quit were independents, not people who’d been converted from under Sage’s command. Those converted subordinates, Link included, kept grinding through losses, because it tied directly into their boss’s plan, and nobody dared slack off.

But the independent merchants, even if they were O’haras, had no choice but to shut down when losses got too heavy.

And Sage had to support these people.

If merchants wouldn’t do it, the only option was to pull money out of the treasury, keep buying up the workers’ raw materials, and guarantee their need for work.

He’s a landlord, after all, not a profit-chasing merchant; what he wants is stable rule, not tossing people away once they’re no longer useful.

But if things kept going like that, the model just wasn’t right. If waging war only meant losing money, that didn’t fit Sage’s way of doing things.

In the end he simply switched to a base salary plus profit-sharing system and started giving the raw-material workers annual pay.

The regular monthly wage was low, matching the cheap pricing of raw materials, but not so low people would starve. They could still eat their fill and stay clothed and warm.

And at year’s end, the profits from the industries that used those raw materials would be split, with a portion allocated to the workers at the raw-material stage.

Run the numbers, and those workers ended up making slightly more overall than under the previous setup, and now they had something to look forward to—as long as business was good, they could earn more.

The ceiling for the sector wasn’t so low anymore.

As for whether anyone had the guts to try and monopolize everything, then refuse to pay people or only pay them a pittance, basically leeching off what Sage had granted...

Guts alone aren’t enough. Without real strength, you’re doomed sooner or later.

This place is no "civilized society."

Only with this model can those low-end folks also share in the radiance under Sage’s prosperity.

Without all that, prices would plummet to who-knows-where.

But Sage isn’t short on money.

His wealth depends on how prosperous O’hara is within its borders, not on stacks of paper or Gold alone.

The money those Pirates hand over, the profits earned from it, will still be fed back into O’hara as it is now, to develop more territory, recruit more talent.

"Alright, we’ve more or less consolidated everything. Let me run through the territory we currently cover. We just completed a major survey recently, and the stats are ready to report."