A Conspiracy and a Reunion

“Looks like a ghost town.”

“Yeah.”

On the afternoon of our seventh day since leaving Seiryuu City, we arrived at an uninhabited village.

I had noticed a broken barrier post from the road, so I’d stopped by to check if something had happened. Now that we were here, we could see that whatever had happened had likely been years in the past.

I took the younger group with me to search the town and left the older group near the horse-drawn carriage to keep watch and start preparing lunch.

Judging by the broken barrier posts and craters in the ground, my guess was that a large monster had flown in and destroyed the village. Could have even been the work of that hydra.

Four of the usual six barrier posts were damaged, and there were only holes where the remaining two would normally have been, as if people had pulled them out of the ground.

All the posts were hollow on the inside.

While I examined the scene with Pochi and Tama, Mia and Arisa called out behind me.

“Satou.”

“There’s a well over there, but it smells unpleasant, so I don’t think we should use it.”

“Hmm. This place is pretty close to Sedum City… I wonder why they left it like this.”

Why wouldn’t they just rebuild the barrier and the town?

“Hmm. In places like my hometown, they import barrier posts from the Saga Empire, so maybe they’re too far away from any territory that makes them?”

Oh, I see. I’d been thinking of them like telephone poles, but barrier posts were also a kind of magic tool.

I took Arisa and the others with me to survey the village some more.

Apparently, pottery had been the main livelihood of the village, with kilns and areas for collecting clay in the hillsides nearby.

Two of the three kilns were broken, but one seemed to be intact.

Pochi and Tama clearly wanted to play with the clay, but I told them not to for now.

Following the path of broken bowls and plates, I walked toward the village square where our carriage was parked.

Along the way, Tama spotted some russet wort, an herb used for MP recovery potions, and we collected it as we returned to the others.

We had an early lunch in the village square. Just as I’d promised the day before, I cooked up some of the brown wolf meat.

It was a pain to keep grilling it in batches, so I made steaks too big for the plates for everyone who wanted one.

Because it was more sinewy than the rocket wolf, steak wasn’t necessarily the best way to prepare it, but Liza praised it for “feeling wonderful under her teeth.” Pochi’s and Tama’s enthusiasm as they tore into their steaks was adorable, too.

For the others who couldn’t chew it as well, I cut their steaks into small cubes.

I stir-fried vegetables for Mia again, but I mixed it up with different ingredients. I chopped some of the pickled vegetables that Arisa had bought and tossed them in along with some herbs to add to the flavor and aroma.

I’d limited the portions so nobody would overeat, but once we’d finished, everyone was still too full to budge for a while afterward.

During our break after lunch, I formulated some elixir to use for transmutation.

For practice, I started out with one of the crimson needle bee cores from the Cradle.

First, I crushed it into a powder. I used a tool from the alchemy set that resembled a screw-style nutcracker to smash it, then ground it into a fine powder with the mortar and pestle.

Since the process was a bit of a pain, I decided to try crushing the core with my fingers the next time.

After that, I mixed the stabilizer. All I had to do was throw in a pinch of the powder I’d gotten in the alchemy shop, which contained bat wings, charred newt, and a bit of salt.

With a core that was only the size of the tip of my little finger, I could make twenty potions’ worth of elixir.

I stored the completed elixir in the Alchemy folder under the subfolder Elixir/HP Recovery Potions/Russet.

I was curious how effective of a potion I could make, so I practiced with a low-grade HP recovery potion.

Perhaps because I’d gotten the “Magic Manipulation” skill, operating the Transmutation Tablet seemed easier than before.

My completed magic potion came out as Highest Quality.

Since the salesperson at the alchemy shop had wanted red grade-3 cores or better, I had assumed rank was critical for potion making, but it could be done even with grade-1 cores.

This time, I tried a recipe from Trazayuya’s documents for brewing five potions at the same time. Unfortunately, these ones came out a rank lower, at High Quality.

Next, I tried it out with rank-2 and rank-3 cores. The results came out as Highest Quality, even when I used the five-at-once recipe.

Basically, the grade of the potions was based on the grade of the cores used, it seemed.

Most likely, the reason I could make high-quality potions even with low-grade cores was that I had a maxed-out “Transmutation” skill.

I had plenty of red cores from grades 1 to 3, so I made twenty of each kind into elixir. It would be a huge pain to put them all into little packages; I just stored the powder on its own.

While I was at it, I used some of the russet wort we’d picked earlier to make a few low-quality magic recovery potions.

Since Mia and Arisa had mentioned the terrible taste, I tried to reduce the bitterness by adding small amounts of honey and thorn licorice sap.

The efficacy fell slightly, but in exchange they came out surprisingly tasty. I’m sure my “Cooking” skill had something to do with that.

For the potions I didn’t have any empty vials for, I made folders to keep them in liquid form in Storage.

I really want to stock up on vials for potions soon…

I’m sure I’ll be able to get some if we go to Sedum City.

“Master, suspicious individual detected inside the forest. The target has already fled, but it is possible that they have already signaled reinforcements at this time, I report. Recommending an increase in alertness level.”

“Fishy.”

On the main road a little ways away from Sedum City, Nana gave a report while she drove the carriage, supplemented by Mia.

There was indeed a person in the forest. It was a man belonging to a guild I’d never heard of called “Duckweed.”

The guild was probably local to Sedum City. Since some of its members had bounties like Murder on them, I guessed it was a criminal guild like the Street Rats back in Seiryuu City.

Furthermore, more men from the same guild were lurking up ahead: a few at an intersection and twenty or so in a little clearing by the bank of a river on a side road.

Just to be safe, I took the reins from Nana.

The men waiting at the crossroads up ahead definitely looked like crooks to me. They were blocking the road with a crudely made bar.

“Hey, the coachman ain’t a lady!”

“There’re some brats riding in back, so it’s gotta be this one.”

“No, didn’t he say it’d be an old hag and a little girl?”

My “Keen Hearing” skill let me detect what the villains were muttering among themselves.

So these guys are only targeting carriages with either elderly people or young girls as their coachmen? This sounds awfully suspicious to me.

Well, not like it’s any of my business.

Determining that we weren’t their target, the ruffians moved the roadblock out of the way.

“Did something happen?”

“No, nothin’. Just keep movin’.”

I had addressed them politely, yet the group of scoundrels chased us off with a deliberate display of the machetes hanging at their waists.

I certainly wondered about it, but you wouldn’t catch me complaining about avoiding trouble.

Putting the suspicious matter behind us, we passed the roadblock and arrived at Sedum City.

This place was a castle city about the same size as Seiryuu City, but with at least 20 percent more people. There were even fewer demi-humans here than in the last city, though the proportion of catfolk was a bit higher.

Along the outer wall a little ways away from the city gate were clusters of emaciated people in dirty, tattered clothing living in little shacks.

According to the AR display, they weren’t citizens of Sedum City. Their titles read Refugee, so they’d probably come here from other territories or kingdoms.

While I was paying the city entrance tax at the gate, I inquired about it and learned that they had fled from the Muno Barony some twenty years ago. The fight between Zen and the Marquis must have been to blame.

Over the course of two decades, most of the people had moved into the city or nearby villages, but about two hundred people who hadn’t been able to relocate still remained.

After this conversation, I reported the suspicious bunch we’d passed by to the Sedum City gatekeepers, and a knight assured me that he would take some men on patrol to investigate.

Despite his haughty mien, he accepted the job without even asking the details. I guess you can’t always judge a book by its cover… I shouldn’t have assumed that he was a no-good layabout guard based on his appearance.

“Yes, they are demi-humans, but they are my master’s beloved slaves. As you can see, they’re wearing expensive clothing, so it would cause some trouble if they slept in the barn and were robbed. And if their clothes were stolen, would the inn be able to compensate, I wonder?”

“No, we wouldn’t.”

“In that case—”

“Which is why we must decline. They cannot stay in our inn.”

Not even Arisa’s nigh-invincible negotiating skills were enough to overcome the thinly veiled rudeness of the clerk at the inn near the gate.

After our arrival, we’d visited the nearest inn in the hopes of establishing a home base, but we were curtly rejected.

Oh, I wonder if I can use that introduction letter here.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I pulled out the letter I’d received from the constable’s aide at the public office in Noukee and showed it to the ill-mannered clerk.

I wasn’t sure whether an authority from another town had much clout here, but since it was technically a letter from a noble of the same territory, maybe it would have some influence.

“Th-this is from the baronet…? P-pardon my rudeness. We will prepare a room for you right away.”

His face stiffening as if in a silent scream, the clerk quickly changed his tune. I guess the letter of introduction works in this city, too.

Arisa shot the clerk a withering look of contempt as his attitude changed.

“You’re going to ruin your cute face,” I hissed quietly to Arisa before discussing our room arrangements with the innkeeper.

The biggest room they had was for six people, so we decided to rent it for five days. I tried to rent another single-bed room for myself, but a chorus of protests from my group shut down that option. It was too late for that now, since they’d grown accustomed to sleeping in a huddle.

Since we’d racked up a long list of things to buy, I asked the inn’s clerk where I could find a company that sold a wide variety of products.

It would be a pain to go around and negotiate with each individual workshop. I figured it’d be easier to order a bunch of things in one place.

Since we were limited to items they could get their hands on during our stay, we wouldn’t be able to find everything we wanted. Still, since I told the merchant from the outset that I’d be willing to pay up to three times the market price if he could get things in time, chances were good we’d get close to 90 percent of the goods we wanted.

It wasn’t as if I were buying a large quantity, so paying triple the going rate wasn’t a big deal.

For more specialized parts, like materials for magic tools, I went directly to the workshop contracted with the company to order them in detail.

I ordered all kinds of potentially useful metal fittings, too, like tubes, wires, nuts, and bolts. With that, I should be able to concoct anything I came up with on the spot.

Most of the blacksmiths were busy producing or repairing armor and weapons for fighting off the kobolds in the silver mines, but luckily I got a chance to work out a deal with the company’s exclusive artisan.

After ordering parts, I chatted with the head of the workshop and got him to tell me more about the menace. He explained that the viceroy of Sedum City was stubborn and unyielding, so he had strong-armed the administration into aiding him with a knight-led force to help exterminate them.

I also learned that kobolds and dogfolk were different species. Specifically, kobolds were a race of evil fairyfolk characterized by their pointed ears, a doglike mouth, and blue skin.

According to a rumor going around, they had a stronghold deep in the mountain range just northwest of the Muno Marquisate.

Strangely, not even the magic and alchemy shops in Sedum City sold magic potion vials.

The company I’d been ordering from dealt in potions but not vials. I’d had them introduce me to a local pottery studio, but they brusquely informed me that I would have to wait a trimoon and drove me off. A trimoon… So at least ten days.

It was like someone was beating me to the punch for the sole purpose of harassing me.

Just in case, I asked the person in charge of fulfilling my order back at the company to ask around for anyone selling vials and to buy them if he found them.

Since most of my shopping was finished, I decided I’d spend the next day checking out the marketplace and the rest of the city.

My frustration had started to build again, so I slipped past the watchful eyes of Arisa and the others and headed out into the city at night.

Unlike the town of Noukee, the red-light district of Sedum City was about the same size as the one in Seiryuu City.

It seemed uncouth to make a beeline for one of the shops I was there for, though. First, I decided to stop in at the tavern responsible for the smell of some delicious grilled chicken.

“Welcome! Today’s specials are grilled grass pigeon skewers and whole-roasted sparrow. We do have ale, but we’ve just gotten in an excellent order of Noukee cider—you might like to try it.”

A charming young waitress greeted me with a bright smile and guided me to a table.

The dishes and leftovers of the previous customer were still there. The waitress briskly collected the dishes on a tray and swept the food scraps off the table with a cloth.

It seemed unsanitary to me, but I supposed it was normal in this world, so I didn’t say anything.

Scanning the tavern, I saw that a lot of the other customers were drinking hot ale and snacking on plump grilled sparrows.

I ordered a cold ale and grilled skewers. One of the customers had something that looked like daikon radish boiled in soy sauce, and I ordered that, too. My total came to the very reasonable price of one copper coin.

I preferred not to drink alone, so like I’d done in the tavern in Kainona, I joined the ranks of the locals by treating them to a whole cask of ale. Even in a parallel world, nobody could say no to free booze.

“You seem like a well-to-do fellow. Now, normally I’d only offer this to regulars, but…”

Now that the cask of ale was ready, the waitress started talking me up for a sale.

“The shop manager has a special aged brew from Muno called ‘Giant’s Tears.’ It’s pricey, but it’s a hidden gem that you can only drink right here in our tavern. People have even come from all over just to drink it.”

Judging by the name, it must be made by giants. I decided to go ahead and order it, and it tasted like sweet brandy. It certainly was delicious, but it seemed to have a high alcohol content, enough to knock out a lightweight.

While I drank the sweet liquor, I convinced a chatty older fellow to tell me about some of the famous attractions of Sedum City.

As I noted the places that sounded like they’d be good to check out with everyone, I heard a suspicious conversation from a table across the room.

“…So how’d it go?”

“Nothin’ yet.”

“Seriously? The cutoff is the day after tomorrow at sunset! Most other years, it’d already be here by now.”

“Don’t ask me. Isn’t it better if it’s slow anyway? Even if we can’t steal it, once they’re all broken, the pact’ll still be—”

I found the source of the voices—a few hooded men drinking at a table in the corner.

One of them had long silver hair spilling from under the shadows of his hood, and he tucked it back in irritably. If it weren’t for his distinctly masculine, sagacious voice, I would’ve mistaken him for a woman.

Just as the suspicious conversation was getting interesting, the old man grabbed my shoulder to get my attention.

“You listenin’, sonny?”

“Yes, of course. The statue of the ancestral king in front of the government office sounds magnificent.”

I poured some of the cider I’d ordered into the old guy’s cup. A bit of ale was left in the bottom, but he didn’t seem like the type to care.

“…and if we can get our hands on that, we could even build a new town.”

“If you’re going to be viceroy of a new town, sir, I hope you’d at least promote my family to be your assistants.”

“Sure. I always reward loyalty. But don’t get the wrong idea… I’m aiming to be the lord of my own territory, not just a viceroy.”

“Hey now, that’s awfully greedy…”

The silver-haired man’s frosty voice had fooled me. I’d thought they were discussing some kind of conspiracy, but now it sounded more like the drunken ramblings of a ruined noble.

Based on what Arisa had told me, building a new town or getting a City Core would be no easy feat. It’d probably be impossible unless you found a core underneath a fallen city or something.

“Hey, listen when your elders are talkin’ to you!”

My wandering attention had put the old man in a bad mood.

“I was listening. You were saying that there’s a monument to people who passed away in the epidemic five years ago in front of the viceroy’s castle, right?”

“Oho, so you weren’t ignorin’ me after all. My old lady almost died of that disease, too, but she survived thanks to medicine from the witch of the forest. We really owe her one.”

Whoa, so aside from the regular delivery of the stamina recovery potions, she does stuff like that, too? If we were a little closer in age, I could end up falling for her.

“Hey! I brought the guy we was talkin’ about!”

Now another drunken customer brought me a sober-looking middle-aged man.

…Who were we talking about again?

“So it’s you? You’re the rich guy who wants to order pottery?”

Oh, right. When I was discussing the shortage of potion vials earlier, somebody said they’d go get a friend of theirs who works at a pottery studio.

“Oh, wow, thanks for going out of your way for me…”

The middle-aged man was the owner of a little studio with its own kiln. Since the pottery guild had a monopoly on magic potion vials, he couldn’t just make them without permission.

“…But there is a way around that.”

I listened to the studio owner’s explanation. In brief, we could make them ourselves in his studio under the pretext of a “pottery class.”

“But there’s just one problem…”

“What is it?”

The man hesitated, furrowing his brow.

I thought he was going to hit me with a high price, but that wasn’t it.

“My studio’s a poor one. I’ve only got one humanfolk apprentice, and the rest of ’em are just demi-human slaves for manual labor. The slaves are the ones who knead the clay we use in our pottery. So if you ain’t comfortable handlin’ clay made by demi-humans, we got nothin’ to talk about here.”

The workshop owner was grimacing, but I told him it wouldn’t be a problem and asked whether he’d be able to accommodate a large group of people, explaining how many of us there were.

“Yeah, that’s fine. The shop used to turn a big profit in generations gone by, so the place itself is pretty big. We have enough pottery wheels for lotsa people, too. So about the price…”

I accepted his offer without even trying to negotiate. He must’ve been poor for a while, because the price he offered was so low that I felt bad about it.

I invited him to stay and have a drink, but he said that he had to prepare for the next day and left with an extra spring in his step.

After I’d enjoyed chatting with the regulars for a while, one of them offered to take me to the best brothel in Sedum City.

However, shortly after we left the tavern…

“Master, we’ve come to pick you up.”

“Let’s go.”

“Master, it is well past the recommended sleeping time, I report.”

Somehow, Arisa, Mia, and Nana had managed to find me and come to bring me back to the inn.

“Heyo, if you’ve got three pretty wives like this, you oughta go home to them! See ya later, and thanks for the great drinks! Let’s do it again sometime!”

“Thank you for taking care of my husband. I hope you’ll stay friends in the future.”

Arisa, in a good mood after being referred to as my wife, bade a polite farewell to my drinking companions. Though really, her comment sounded more like something a mother would say than a wife.

While Arisa spoke to the men, Mia and Nana were quick to grab hold of my arms. My left arm was envious of the right one in Nana’s grip.

When she turned back to us and saw that the other two had already claimed my sides, Arisa threw a tiny fit. I only have two arms—what do you want me to do?

I gave in to the three and let them lead me back to the inn.

I asked on the way how they’d found me, but Mia replied only that it was “secret.”

She’d probably used some kind of Elvish technique. But I’d like to think they went around town asking about me or some other answer from a fantasy.

“Ahh, it’s no use, sir! This is no good at all, sir!”

“N-nooo… Ahh, I can’t do it!”

At Pochi’s and Lulu’s wails, I turned around.

“The clay man just won’t calm down at all, sir!”

“I’m afraid I’ve failed.”

After lecturing the misshapen lump of clay on the pottery wheel, Pochi began rolling it into a new ball.

Lulu, also balling up her failure and starting from scratch, met my eyes and smiled bashfully.

On the eighth morning since our departure from Seiryuu City, we had stopped in at the pottery studio.

The master had taught us only the basic steps and how to operate the pottery wheel, then left the rest to the catfolk slaves and resumed his own work.

It would have been too difficult for us novices to suddenly start making vials, so we started out by attempting teacups.

Pochi’s and Lulu’s adorable little incident was a fair representation of our progress so far.

“This is somewhat more difficult than I expected.”

“It is difficult to calculate the centrifugal force, I report.”

Liza and Nana were also struggling to shape the clay properly. They did well at first, but their pieces broke near the end of the process.

Mia, on the other hand, had some experience with making pottery in her home village and was showing some of the others how to do it.

“Watch.”

“Mia, please supplement your demonstration with language, I entreat.”

“Watch this.”

Mia’s wordless instruction confounded Nana and her theoretical understanding of things, but the more practical Liza had no such problem, it seemed, and completed her first vessel.

Examining her handiwork, Liza’s face crinkled into a smile. The wide opening made her project look more like a small bowl than a teacup, but since she was so pleased, I didn’t want to discourage her.

Smiling fondly, I turned back to my own work with a comment to Arisa as she fashioned a suspicious-looking object next to me.

“So, Arisa, what are you making?”

“What do you mean? A figure, obviously!”

“I don’t think so.”

I reached over and crushed the bizarre object under my fist.

“Aaah! Not ‘Statue of My Beloved Master’! I was almost finished, too!”

“I’m banning you from making anything that would be offensive to public morals.”

I cut Arisa’s protests short. Normally I would let her make whatever she wanted, but I wasn’t going to allow a nude statue of me or any similarly dubious figures to exist on my watch.

“Aww… All that was left was to design and sculpt the lower half…”

I ignored Arisa’s mourning and continued to work. The others were all making teacups for their own personal use, but I’d decided to try to sculpt potion bottles.

For the clay I was using, the catfolk slaves had prepared a combination of regular clay with a special formula for vials that I’d made back in the inn. I’d decided to try out the old witch’s secret recipe.

By the time I’d made my tenth vial, I had successfully optimized the process.

Roughly, it went something like this—press a small lump of clay down with my thumb to make the base, squeeze the clay in my other hand into a smooth string, then swirl it around on top of the base to form the shape of a vial.

Then I just had to lightly rest my fingers on it, spin the potter’s wheel, and it was finished.

This impressive finesse was all thanks to my skills, of course. Since I got the “Pottery” and “Clay-Working” skills as soon as I made my first clay base, I immediately put the max amount of skill points into both of them.

At my fastest, I could make one in about six seconds, but I didn’t want to attract any trouble by leaving everything to my skills and surpassing the confines of humanity, so I limited myself to a speed of one or two vials per minute.