Waking up to the new notifications gave me a bit of a pep to my step, not having realized I came to start liking ranking up. The obvious showcasing of my progress made it easy to validate each days work, and with my first day at “work”, and ironically it turned out to be Monday, I really needed that. I went through the rest of my morning prep not as under the weather as I may have been during a Monday morning, getting my “work” clothes on while I had the servants bring something small to eat, since I probably wouldn’t eat anything until I came back to my room for self-studying in the early afternoon.

With everything done to get ready for the morning, I cast the Telekinesis formation on a few administrative books I had looked through earlier, making them levitate close to my body, while I am grabbing a couple writing utensils, a notebook or two, and a few spare sheets of paper in my hand. With about 15 minutes left before I need to be at my desk, I got a cup of coffee in a large cup and headed off to my morning job.

After the quick walk, and brief “traffic jam” I make it into the room where my office is, a handful of minutes earlier than 8am. Noticing that only a few people were actually in here already, and of those, they were almost all fairly old, aside from one person roughly my age. One of the older men who worked in the lone large “cubicle” looked up when I came in and waved me over to him. Along the way I did a brief nod and hello to those I came across, wanting to be friendly. I come up to the man, saying hello, and he stands to address me. He proceeds to tell me how he is the main secretary for this room, and that while he does not largely work under me solely, for the duration of my time here he would be more available to me. He gives me a brief rundown on how the administration in this room works, going in almost a tier system. There are seven lead administrative staff, six of which are Young Masters, which includes me, and one who is older, largely in charge of the whole room. Next there three secretaries for the whole room, acting as the middleman between the lead staff and the multitude of lower ranked workers. These workers may be anything from project leads to supply coordinators for a specific foodstuff. Each of the leads have a specific group of clansmen who do the same general work, making any things that need to be signed off, reviewed, or otherwise get work assigned to, have it all coordinated between the secretaries. Typically the two undersecretaries are the ones who handle all direct paperwork between the leads and other workers, while the head secretary coordinates projects between the leads, as well as to secretaries in other rooms. Before I headed off to actually work, he told me about an advanced function of one of the filing cabinets in the offices. The black filing cabinet I was seeing everywhere turned out to function almost like a messaging system, as the space in the filing cabinet was shared between all sister cabinets, with the top shelf only being able to be opened by leads and the head secretary, with the other shelves being opened by larger groupings of people, but was mainly only opened by the lower ranked workers.

I walked into my office, to see a small stack of papers, only really a few inches high. Even though this may seem still seem like a lot, this was largely due to a big folder of documents dominating the pile. It was marked with the name of a specific farm we owned that grew spirit herbs. Putting the folder aside, I quickly went through the other documents, finding that these were largely just forms needing my signature for the receiving and transporting of supplies between the compound and various farms, wholesalers, or specific families within this Branch. Doing some due diligence, I looked up the standing orders and general request forms on file that would indicate the history for these forms. Finding that the numbers and items on these largely added up to their historic amounts, or in all but one case, found the reasons why they differed. One of the forms seemed to have an error in the amount of gold authorized for purchasing, an extra zero added, making it a thousand coins instead of a hundred. I denied this particular form, noting the reason why being a seemingly simple clerical error, and no evidence to back up why it would’ve been increased. I put this back in the filing cabinet for my section. After all the simple stuff was filed away in its approved slot, I placed the big folder in front of me.

I did a quick read through of the different order forms and yield reports from this farm. I started to notice that for the yield reports for this year there was a slight, but noticeable decline in yields over the year. There was only really a five percent difference, a couple dozen less spirit herbs, so not significant in its own right. But to just follow up, I looked a bit deeper, finding that while the yields were within the allowed amount set forth by contract, it was only just high enough. Thinking something might be weird, I put in a records request for the past ten years on this farm. I noticed that for nearly eight years the yields were always the max allowed by contract, with some notes about how yields exceeded expectation and were given a special allowance to sell any extra to the wider market.

I kept looking and found that at the two year mark a change in management occurred, with the son taking over the farm while the father went on to do other things for the Clan. For the first six or so months the yields tanked, not bellowed the allowed level, but just no longer way above the standards it used to hold. After another couple months, the farm had largely recovered, at the upper end of its contract allowed amount, before it dropped slightly again, and every so often would drop slightly more, until we hit this month’s yield report, at the lower end of the allowed amount. I did another request for yield reports of nearby farms, finding there were no noticeable drops in their production. Thinking that maybe just the farm was beginning to fail until I saw no purchase orders or other indications of attempts to correct problems on the farm. However, I did notice small additions to the wider spirit herb market, noting they were matching up with the amounts the farm was underproducing. I began to circle and highlight the pieces of my evidence, writing up a small report about the possibility of embezzling and selling Clan spirit herbs without authorization, and set it aside in the top drawer of the filing cabinet. I looked at the clock on my desk, noting it was almost time to leave. I stepped out of my office real quickly to tell the Head Secretary I will be leaving soon, and of the findings I noticed with the spirit herb farm account. He told me he will look into it, but it will probably take until tomorrow before an answer will get back. I ended up just finishing up any side tasks I found, such as familiarizing myself with the major accounts in the folder associated with my “department”, before getting things out away and heading back to my room.