‘For this to become troublesome… of course, it’s very much possible for the promissory notes I write to become useless.’ 

“There’s no need for your useless worries. I’m a busy person, so hurry up and get me the Talents,” 

“Yes, my lord,” 

Rockefeller immediately headed to the back of the shop to see Carter, who had the key to the safe to get the Lord the Talents he asked for. 

Carter was sitting at his desk with a sour expression on his face. Rockefeller could roughly guess what he was feeling when he saw the bundle of Lending certificates he was holding. 

‘Those are the contracts for the money that is yet to be recovered. In terms of the lord’s credit, it’s not a huge amount, but for Carter, it was worth feeling bad about,’

Those contracts had to be returned to the lord and come back as gold coins. 

That too with, with interest. 

However, the lord had only been signing promissory notes and taking gold coins from the shop from some point on. 

Therefore, as he watched his gold coins turn to scraps of paper, Carter’s expression was not pleasant. 

“Excuse me, Ajusshi? The lord is here. He’s asking to borrow 100 Talents. What should I do?”

At Rockefeller’s question, Carter nodded his head reluctantly, even with the frown still on his face. 

His opponent was the landowner, saying no wasn’t an option. 

“If he wasn’t the lord, then I swear I would have gone out there and had a fight,” 

After the usual procedure, the lord took his borrowed 100 Talents from Banco and left, and Carter came to Rockefeller with his complaints about the lord. 

“I mean, it feels like he was only here yesterday to borrow money, but why did he come again? Does a young man like him lack anything?” 

“What’s the problem, Ajusshi? If someone like the lord, with excellent credit, borrows more money from us, then isn’t it a good thing?”

Carter raised his hands that held the lord’s promissory notes and waved them around in front of Rockefeller. 

“Borrowing should be done appropriately too! Is it a good thing when all he does is borrow money without paying anything back? Rockefeller, this stuff, it’s just a useless stack of paper at the end of the day,” 

Rockefeller was quite sympathetic to Carter’s anxiety, 

‘That’s right, as you say, those are just pieces of paper with no use,’ 

Carter took out a gold coin from his pocket and continued speaking, 

“This is real money, not this piece of paper,” 

Rockefeller opened his mouth with a friendly smile to try and calm Carter down a little, 

“But as long as this land doesn’t face any issues, I don’t think there should be any issues with the lord’s credit either. If he’s paying the interest on time and there’s no risk of falling into default right away, it’s good for us to lend out a lot. It’s borrowed money so getting it back isn’t an issue, right?” 

Carter was a fairly experienced goldsmith. Therefore, he was very aware of the process in which an extremely good (prime) debtor turns into a defective (subprime) debtor.  

“Rockefeller, you don’t know what a bad debtor looks like. Not all debtors were bad debtors from the beginning. Most of them were extremely good debtors with good credit and paid back interest on time, just like the lord,” 

He continued his speech with a look full of dissatisfaction, 

“But if such good debtors start to not pay back their interest on time and only use their credit to carry on receiving gold coins, then they’ll turn into exactly the kind of bad debtors we shudder to think of,”

Carter’s gut instinct was telling him right now; the lord had the send of a subprime (bad) debtor. 

“If he slows down on principal repayment and then slows down with repaying interest, he will be no different from the people with bad credit. Especially people like the lord, who have power, they are worst debtors than any poor bastard without money,”

“In the future, even if it’s the lord who comes in, don’t lend out money straight away. First, you have to act innocent and tell them there’s no money left to lend. And only when they start properly paying back the money they borrowed you can start lending it out to them then. It’s not like we get the money off of trees – we can’t keep lending it to someone who doesn’t pay the money back, can we?” 

Rockefeller also understood Carter’s worries, but his thoughts were different. 

Carter was worried about the lord defaulting on his loans. On the other hand, Rockefeller saw it as an opportunity to ‘eat him up.’ 

‘I don’t get why he’s already being so cautious of the guy with no brains. I would properly weave the net and neatly take over everything at once if it were me.’

Carter was flustered and worried because he was afraid he would never get his money back from a debtor with the title of ‘Lord’ if there were a problem in the future that caused him to default on the loans. 

The lord was the ruler of the land who had his own forces and held all the authority. 

How would a goldsmith who pays taxes to such a ruler fight against him? 

However, Rockefeller was different. 

‘Didn’t you add in the condition that the promissory note could be traded with other people with the intention of getting the money you lent out back in the first place?’ 

The loan certificate – a promissory note signed by the lord – was not necessarily traded only within the land. It was a product that could be traded elsewhere with other, powerful people. 

So it wasn’t just a piece of paper after all. 

It was a death trap that could take everything away from the lord within a single moment.

‘I’ve been thinking about how to get a hold of this land for a long time. I’m finally starting to get a rough picture of it,’ 

It was foolish to want to buy a decent piece of land at a fair price with his own money. 

‘There’s a better way than that – not at a fair price, but a way to hit hard properly – at a meagre price,’ 

Banks didn’t lend out money with excessively polite expressions because they were nice. 

There was something even worse than demons behind the masks they were wearing, and Rockefeller knew how to use them. 

‘Killing people with knives is rather primitive and low-level anyway,’ 

Those who know how to kill people want to kill them with their own flair. 

‘If you want to kill someone gracefully, you should lay them down in a shroud of debt.’