Chapter 5—Let’s Make Some Nonperishable Food!

“All right, we’re all going to prepare the meat and dindel fruits before we go off to practice our skills for the rest of the day!” said Haruka.

In front of Haruka was a backpack full of dindels, a leather bag full of the remaining meat from the tusk boar, and some tools like a barrel and pot that we had bought on our way back to the inn.

“Hey, I have a question!”

“Go ahead, Touya!”

Haruka pointed at Touya, who had energetically raised his hand to ask something.

“Is this something I can do?”

“Of course—anyone can do this. That includes you as well, Nao. Let’s start with the meat first.”

Haruka lined up three cutting boards and placed some meat on them.

“First, we need to slice this meat into portions that are easy to eat. The portions should be about one centimeter thick, and they should be about half the size of your palm.”

Haruka gave out instructions as if she was following a recipe. She specified the portion size after she glanced at Touya for a moment. Mm, it’s dangerous to give ambiguous instructions to a beginner, Haruka. Instructions like “a little” or “a pinch” wouldn’t make sense to people who didn’t know how to cook. It was very likely that Touya would cut an extremely thick slice if left to his own devices, since he would consider that easy enough to eat.

“Remove the bones cleanly afterwards. You should also remove the parts that have a lot of fat.”

“Hm? Are we going to throw away the fat as well, Haruka?” Touya asked. “The fat of this meat tastes really good, though...”

The cooked meat would give off a bit of the fragrant smell of dindel fruits from the fat. I thought it was great. It seemed like it would be a complete waste to throw the fat away.

“Yeah, I know, but it would be bad for dried meat if the fat were to oxidize.”

Hmm, okay. I didn’t really know what Haruka was talking about, but she was the one who was good at cooking, and she even had a skill for it now, so it would be best to follow her instructions.

“Can I at least try for just some portions?”

“If you’re willing to dispose of them yourself, then sure, Touya. Only a few portions, though, okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

All right, I’ll have some myself if they end up tasting good. If they don’t, then Touya will be responsible for stuffing them down. He’s the one who brought up the idea in the first place. Quite cruel, if I do say so myself.

There was a lot of meat to go through, since it was a whole boar’s worth. While Touya and I were slicing the meat and meticulously removing the bones and fat, Haruka mixed some herbs, salt, and spices along with small slices of dindel fruit skin in a pot. She joined the slicing team after she finished that and easily overtook us in no time; soon, the meat piled up in her area. Haruka sprinkled some salt she’d prepared on the meat that couldn’t fit on the cutting boards and then tossed it into the barrel.

“How do you two think dried dindels are made?”

Haruka brought up the question as we were preparing the meat, and I responded with the thought that had come to my mind earlier. “I think we should either boil them and then dry them afterwards or coat them with preservatives made from herb juice before we dry them. Given the size of the dindels, they’d normally just go bad and rot if we dried the entire fruit, right?”

“They’ll probably still rot eventually even if we boil them, but the preservative idea sounds like it could work.”

That made sense. The bacteria would be dead right after we boiled the fruit, but new bacteria could grow over time. Well, they wouldn’t if we could place them in a completely sealed space like a retort pouch, but yeah.

“Any ideas on your end, Touya?”

“Hmm, well, it’s not going to get cold anytime soon, right?”

“Hm? Yeah, it won’t get that cold. It’ll still get colder since winter is approaching, but apparently it won’t drop below the freezing point here even at night. That includes the coldest time of the year as well.”

Oh, that’s good to know. It wasn’t like I couldn’t stand winter, but there were no airtight houses or central heating in this world. We didn’t know if there were puffer jackets or anything like that in this world to keep us warm either, and they would cost money even if they did exist. Warm weather would help us save money just by removing the need for goods to survive in cold weather.

“I guess that means what I had in mind won’t work. I thought we could take advantage of the temperature if it did drop below the freezing point. Like, have you heard of Andean potatoes before?”

“Oh yeah, those do exist.”

I felt like I had heard about them before during a class. People in the Andes Mountains area would expose harvested potatoes to freezing temperatures outside. The potatoes would freeze overnight, and then, at noon, people would tread on them to squeeze out the water. After that was done, they would then dry the potatoes to preserve them. Dindel fruits would probably get completely crushed if we stepped on them, but if we could remove the water with a different method, then we could dry dindel fruits without them going bad.

“Wait, boiling water has nothing to do with this, though.”

“Well, maybe that water was just used to make staff meals or tea for the people working on drying the dindel fruits?”

Touya paused for a moment in thought and then bluntly stated what he thought about that hint we’d gotten from Diola-san. If he was right, it basically meant that hint was completely useless.

“Hmm, that might be a possibility. Technically speaking, Diola-san didn’t specifically say boiling water was required to make dried dindel fruits.”

I mean, yeah, you’re right, Haruka, but still! That makes me look like an idiot for wasting time thinking about how to use boiling water for this process!

“What do you think the boiling water is used for, Haruka?”

“Me? I thought it might be something similar to how it’s used for dried persimmons.”

The basic way to make dried persimmons was to peel the skin off of astringent persimmons, and then you would just suspend them on a string to dry them, but there were also variations where you would dip the persimmons in boiling water. Haruka’s idea was to use the same method for dindel fruits.

“That means the boiling water’s used to kill bacteria, right?” I asked. “It would only deal with the surface of the fruit, though. Is that enough?”

Killing bacteria with boiling water would be better than washing the dindels by hand, since there would be a lower chance of mold growing on the fruit, but it seemed a bit too easy.

“Dried persimmons can be made that way just fine, so I think it’s possible that it’ll work for dindels.”

“Aren’t there other factors involved in the process of making dried persimmons, like winter temperatures, ventilation, and the fact that persimmons have their skin peeled beforehand? It’s warmer in this world and the dindels aren’t peeled. The only good factor in this world for this is that the humidity seems to be low here.”

Temperature and humidity were two big factors that influenced how fast food would go bad. Humidity was especially important, and it played a key role in drying fish that would go bad easily. Dried persimmons were fine because they would dry out before they went bad, but I wasn’t sure if it was possible to dry something as small as a dindel fruit while leaving the skin intact.

“I think that part requires expertise. It wouldn’t be a secret if it was so easy to make dried dindels.”

“That means your Dry spell lets you skip over the required expertise, right, Haruka?”

“Skip over makes it sound like I didn’t work hard for this. It took me quite some effort to develop that spell, you know?”

“Yeah, I know.” After all, I hadn’t been able to develop a unique spell of my own yet despite my efforts! It wasn’t something I could be proud of by any means.

“Actually, aren’t we forgetting something? We haven’t seen a dried dindel ourselves in the first place. What if mold is used to make them, like how mold is used for bonito flakes?”

“Well, that would change everything,” said Haruka. “Good job thinking that up all of a sudden, Touya.”

“I don’t know of any dried fruits that are made with mold, but I guess it’s not impossible,” I said.

“Well, if that’s the case, then it’s not something we can do in a short period of time, so let’s not worry about it for now. All right, this should be it for now.”

Touya and I, along with Haruka, had continued to prepare the meat as we were chatting. Haruka had joined us midway through, but she had finished before us and managed to slice the most portions of meat; later, we finished as well. All we had to do now was to move the meat to the barrel and then pack it completely with salt to finish. We could just throw the removed fat and bones into leather bags and then throw those bags away in the forest tomorrow while we were doing work.

“Both of you, hold out your hands and knives.”

Haruka used her Purification spell to completely clean our greasy hands and knives and the cutting boards as well. It really was a convenient spell. It was basically better than kitchen detergent. I didn’t want to think about how we would have to deal with this grease without it.

“Is that all we have to do for now, Haruka?” Touya asked.

“We’ll have to wait at least a few days or even a week for the meat to absorb the salt. After that’s done, we’ll lightly wash the meat with water and then start to dry it.”

“Hmm, that’ll take a while. Do we need to buy extra barrels?”

“How much dried meat do you plan on making, Touya...?”

“Huh? Just all of the meat that we got from the boar, that’s all.”

Touya apparently thought his idea was obvious. Haruka and I looked at each other and sighed in unison.

“You know we won’t be able to eat all of the meat, right?” I asked.

“Really? Even if we made one ton of meat, it would be less than one kilo per person over a year for the three of us. Is it a bit too much?”

“It’s more than just a bit too much!” Haruka exclaimed. “Meat by itself is fine, but if we eat that much salted meat, then we’ll die from excessive consumption of sodium!”

It sounds dangerous even without salt. Does the Robust skill help protect against lifestyle diseases too?

“Do you really want to go through the process of preserving meat every day, Touya?” I asked. “I definitely don’t want to.”

It wasn’t that much trouble to remove the bones and slice the meat, but it would be annoying to remove the fat. Touya seemed to recall how annoying it was, and he grumbled in disappointment.

“If we could just leave the fat as is for the taste, or if Haruka could use a spell to remove the fat easily...”

“How much do you intend to rely on my magic, Touya? Well, I can probably do it, but still.”

“You can?!”

I would expect nothing less of the amazing Haruka-san.

“Hmm, I could use the melting point of lard as a reference point and try to squeeze it out like that. The only problem would be the amount of mana required.”

Unfortunately, our status display windows didn’t have an MP bar or number anywhere, but I had a rough feel of something being spent when I used magic. I felt like I was able to use magic for a longer period of time now, but I wasn’t sure if it was because my mana pool had increased or if it was just that I had gotten better at using magic. It could also be that I was now able to squeeze out every last drop of my mana. I wish I knew. If there was a concrete number I could check, it would be very helpful for my experiments with magic.

“MP potions aren’t worth it, since they’re rather expensive, and Haruka’s the only one among us who might be able to craft some for us...”

It wouldn’t be an issue if we were in a game, but this was reality, so it felt like Touya and I had made some wrong choices with our skills. We were useful during combat, but neither of us was very useful during daily life. If we didn’t have the skills we’d been granted, then both of us would just be ordinary people in terms of our abilities. All we could really do were menial tasks.

“I would have to dry the meat as well, so it would be great if you could remove most of the fat, Touya. It would reduce the total amount of mana I would have to spend.”

“What, really?! You can count on me! It’s time for my Disassemble skill to shine!”

“Touya, you really do love meat, eh?”

However, he didn’t actually have the Disassemble skill yet.

“Well, it’ll help us save money on food expenses, and I’m willing to help since Touya said he would help as well. Nao, how much have you mastered your Accelerate Time spell?”

“Uh, I can increase the flow of time by three times, and it’ll last for a bit less than ten hours if I use up all of my mana.”

“I guess that means it’ll save about two days or so if you cast it on this barrel and we leave it for a few days. We can’t exactly have you cast it again tomorrow morning.”

“Mm. It would be okay if we were taking a break from work, but otherwise it would be a bad idea to have no mana for combat if we were to go to the forest.”

I hadn’t really used magic recently during combat, but it was necessary as a backup measure. We still hadn’t encountered any goblins yet, after all.

“If we’re going to let the meat absorb salt for about three days, then we’ll need another barrel,” I said. “Barrels are actually more expensive than I thought they would be.”

I couldn’t really compare because I had never bought a barrel before back on Earth, but barrels in this world were about two sizes smaller than a metal barrel, and their price was roughly three thousand Rea apiece. The barrel was a bit more expensive than the pot that we had bought along with it.

“Actually, it’s not like we need a newly made barrel for this, right? Let’s ask the innkeeper here if he has any spare used barrels that he can give us. Business here seems like it’s booming for him, so surely he has to stock up on some food or drinks stored in barrels, right?”

“Oh, that’s a great idea, Touya!” Haruka exclaimed. “Yeah, used barrels would do just fine for soaking meat with salt! It’s not like we need to worry about the smell.”

We went to ask the innkeeper later, when he had spare time, and he gave us barrels for free in exchange for some of the dried meat we were going to make. The barrels were full of alcohol and a bit smaller than the one we’d bought, but he gave us multiple barrels, so we didn’t have to worry about a lack of barrels. We looked up more information about barrels at a later time, and apparently used barrels were sold normally on the market, with barrels in good condition (not much visible damage and no bad smell) being sold for about half the price of a newly made barrel, so we shared some dindels with the innkeeper to express our gratitude, since he’d basically given us barrels for free.

We moved to the well at the inn. Next to it sat a simple stove and pot; we had permission from the innkeeper to use them.

“All right, we don’t have much time, so let’s hurry,” said Haruka.

We had taken quite a while to prepare the salted meat earlier, so we didn’t have much time left before sunset. Back on Earth, people would still be at work past that time, but it was common sense in this world that sunset was the signal for work to end for the day. We could use magic to create a light if we wanted to continue working, but the only one among us who could use a spell like that was Haruka, and it would also make us stand out too much. Our surroundings would be almost completely dark while we continued to work with a bright light around us, so we would be bound to attract attention, which could cause some trouble if people noticed that we were working on valuable dindel fruits.

“We need to boil some water first. I’ll leave that to you, Nao.”

“Okay.”

“While you do that, Touya and I will remove the calyxes from the dindels and wash them.”

All I could really do easily was light up the firewood, and then I would have to wait for the water to boil. If I tried to use the Ignite spell continually in place of firewood, I would probably pass out before the water reached its boiling point. Thus, after the flame became stable, I went to help Haruka and Touya with washing the dindels. I placed the dindels into strainers after I washed them. These strainers were also something we’d bought today. A simple way to describe them would be as a tool for drying things like salted Japanese plums. However, the strainers we were using were made out of something similar to eulalia grass instead of bamboo. Eulalia grass, or Miscanthus sinensis, was a plant that was easy to obtain in the mountains before winter. This kind of strainer was a handicraft that farmers made to earn spare money in the winter months. That meant that we had been able to purchase a set of ten strainers for fairly cheap.

The water had started to boil by the time we were halfway done with washing the dindels.

“What should we do now, Haruka?” I asked.

“Well, all we can really do is soak the dindels in the boiling water, right? Let’s try soaking them for different lengths of time and see what happens.”

We left one dindel as it was, soaked one dindel for a brief moment, and soaked one dindel each for between one and five minutes for a total of seven different attempts. We threw six dindels into the pot and took them out accordingly to place them in separate strainers. We had to count the time for each one since we didn’t have a watch.

“I wish we had a watch for situations like this.”

“Mm, we’ve gotten used to the sense of time in this world, but a watch would still be useful,” said Haruka.

Watches and clocks weren’t common in this world, so people were very casual about time. Well, there was a town bell that rang five times total during the day between sunrise and sunset, so it was possible to know roughly what time it was based on that, but it wasn’t possible to know when the bell would next ring, so it was hard to specify a time to meet up with, like, a certain number of rings. Thus, it was common for people to just use measures like “Meet up at a certain place after the bell rings,” and you would have to put up with this kind of loose sense of time to get by in this world. In addition, the bell wouldn’t ring after sunset, so there wasn’t a specific time when places like taverns and inns would close shop for the day. The inn we were staying at had closing times that depended on when the innkeeper felt like closing, so there were times when the inn would stay open until every customer left, and there were times when the innkeeper would chase customers out. This is just what we knew based on what we had heard from downstairs; we would stay away from the dining area after dinner, since people would be drinking.

“All right, this might not exactly be perfect, but it should be good enough,” said Haruka.

The seven dindels that were lined up in the strainers didn’t look much different from each other. Well, the one that had been boiled for five minutes looked a bit softer and more tender than the one that hadn’t been soaked at all, but it wasn’t something one would notice unless one looked and compared the two carefully.

“Hmm, they don’t look much different,” said Touya.

“Yeah, we wouldn’t be able to tell if we mixed them together,” I said.

“Mm. Is this just how fruits turn out when boiled? I’ve never actually boiled an entire fruit before in my past cooking experiences...” said Haruka.

Yeah, most people just eat fruits as is. Fruits would have to be boiled to make jam, but that was more like crushed fruits that were boiled down instead of just boiled whole.

“Well, I guess we’ll see what happens. Dry!”

“Whoa!” Touya and I exclaimed together at what looked like a time-lapse video playing out before our eyes. As soon as Haruka moved her hands over them and cast the Dry spell, the puffy dindels shrunk in no time.

“Hm, this should do.” Haruka lowered her hands when she said that, and the spell’s effect stopped immediately. Before us were a bunch of dried dindels. From start to finish, it hadn’t even taken a minute. Even modern science would be no match for her when it comes to this, right?

“Damn, this was amazing. Now this is what I would call magic,” I said.

“Yeah. In a way, I’m more impressed by this than I was when I first saw the Fire Arrow spell.”

Hmm? Are you dissing my strongest spell just because it happens to be Level 1, Touya? I kind of feel the same way as you do, though, so I can’t really retort!

“Heh, feel free to praise me! It was quite a struggle to develop this spell.”

Oh, it’s rare to see Haruka’s smug face. She normally doesn’t boast about her efforts, so it was probably actually really hard for her to accomplish this. Touya and I looked at each other, then applauded in unison as we praised Haruka, who seemed like she was quite proud of herself.

“Whew, you’re amazing as always, Haruka-san!” Touya exclaimed.

“We’re only able to survive thanks to you, Haruka-san!” I exclaimed.

“Would you possibly grant us the honor of referring to you as Haruka-sama?”

“Or rather, should we refer to you as a goddess instead?”

“Let’s create an altar to worship her!”

“That sounds like a great idea!”

We were both praising Haruka nonstop, but she eventually responded with a bitter look on her face, and she raised both of her hands up in the air to stop us.

“Okay, that’s enough. You two don’t have to go that far with the praise. Stop with the stupid combined barrage as well.”

It looked like she wasn’t very pleased with our praise. We were overdoing it on purpose, of course.

“All right, let’s try these dindels out,” said Touya.

“Yeah. Can you slice them for us, Haruka?”

“Really, you two...? All right, then. Let’s slice them into four equal parts first, then.”

Haruka seemed like she was almost at a loss for words as she sighed at us, but she sliced the dindels, and we started to taste them one slice at a time. Well then. They tasted quite different than they did raw. They had a sweet taste, but it wasn’t the kind of sticky sweetness that normal dried fruits would have. It was more similar to something like red bean paste, so it was easier to eat. They tasted a bit different depending on how long they had been boiled, but they were all delicious. Haruka had managed to create these dried dindels easily, but it would normally take a few days to dry them, so it made sense that they were expensive.

“Okay, we’ve tried them all out now. Which ones tasted the best?”

Touya and I spent some time in thought before we answered.

“For me, I think it’ll have to be the one that was boiled for one minute,” said Touya. “The raw dindel and the one that was taken out right away had hard skins and tasted a bit bitter.”

“I’d say the two-minute one for me. Actually, something a bit less than two minutes would be perfect.”

As Touya had mentioned, the bitter taste and the hardness of the dindel skin would go away after being boiled. The skin wouldn’t really be edible while raw, but it would merge with the fruit and improve its taste after it was boiled and turned into a dried fruit. In fact, the skin was exactly what made the dried dindels so delicious. I described it as similar to red bean paste earlier, but perhaps it was more like it had the same role as the skin of a confectionery like manju. Manju would taste better than just straight up eating the red bean paste as is without the outer skin. That was basically the best way I could describe it.

“Hmm, something between one and two minutes? I think they’re already delicious enough as they are right now. Maybe it’s the difference between the fruit being fully cooked or not. I wonder if we have to cool them rapidly like soft-boiled eggs.”

After she heard our opinions, Haruka pondered the results as she tried out her own slices. According to her, you would have to precisely measure the time for soft-boiled eggs and then run them under cold water right away after the boil time was over. This was necessary because otherwise the yolk would harden from the leftover heat if left as is. Her theory was that it would be similar for dindels. If we took out the dindels after the skin was properly boiled and then cooled them, the insides of the fruit would remain raw and would be more delicious that way.

“Let’s try cooling these dindels after two minutes of boiling this time. Prepare the water, Nao.”

We used two dindels this time and went through the boiling, cooking, and drying process. After we were done, we sliced them in half and tried them out.

“Mm, it tastes better this time. What do you two think?”

“Yeah, it does,” I said. “It’s a small difference, but it still tastes better.”

“Honestly, I can’t really tell, so I’ll leave it to you guys to decide,” said Touya.

We had two yes votes and one abstain vote.

“Let’s just make dried dindels this way for today. We can have Diola-san try these out tomorrow and then ask her how close they are to the dried dindels on the market. Even if they’re different, we can just eat them ourselves instead, since they’re delicious.”

“That makes sense, since we’re also going to harvest more from tomorrow onward.”

If we were going to make these as nonperishable food for ourselves, we wouldn’t have to match them with the ones on the market to make a profit. It wouldn’t matter if our dried dindels didn’t sell, since we would be more than happy to consume some delicious food for the time being. These dindels would go to good use either way.

“Touya, can you make some toothpicks with some kind of mark on them and then stab them into the dindels?” Haruka asked.

“Sure.”

“Oh, that’s a good idea, Haruka. That way we won’t confuse them with regular dindels.”

I’d thought we would have to put the dried dindels into a completely separate bag. Toothpicks would be more than enough if we were just going to bring them to the guild tomorrow.

“If we had something like a bento box with a mark to distinguish them, we wouldn’t need toothpicks, but oh well. We’re going to mass produce these dried dindels.”

This batch of dindels was from a completely filled backpack, so it was definitely mass production. Most of the hard work would be on Haruka since only she could use the Dry spell. All Touya and I could really do was take care of the other tasks that didn’t involve magic.

That day, Haruka ended up using her magic until she was completely exhausted. She was so exhausted that she fell asleep while she was eating, which wasn’t normal for someone as reliable as she was. I carried her to her bed after we were done eating and then passed out myself after I had used most of my mana to cast Accelerate Time on the salted meat in the barrel. Touya was still energetic that day since he was the only one who hadn’t used magic. I asked him the next day what he’d ended up doing, and apparently he’d practiced his sword abilities after Haruka and I had passed out. It was reassuring to hear that, but he sure was tough in terms of vitality.

★★★★★★★★★

I felt fairly okay when I woke up the next day. It was good to know that I would recover just fine the next day after a good night of rest even if I had used almost all of my mana. Well, I only had a rough feel for my mana pool, so I wasn’t really sure if it had fully recovered to max or not. It would be great if I knew a specific number for my mana pool, but when I asked Haruka about the idea of trying to measure how many times we could use magic, she asked me if I could “place a total of five kilos of weight on a scale one hundred times with perfect accuracy” as an example, and I gave up right away after I heard that. The fact that we could adjust the potency of spells also meant that the amount of mana spent could differ as well. There was also the problem of how efficient we were with our mana, so the mana spent on a spell with the same potency wouldn’t always be the same. We were currently able to use more magic for a longer period of time compared to when we’d first started, but it wasn’t clear if it was because our mana pools had increased or because we had become more efficient with our mana usage. Magic was a difficult field to master.

“All right, time to get up!”

The bell that indicated sunrise had already rung, so it was already later than when I usually got out of bed. I got up from my bed and noticed a rare sight: Haruka was still asleep when I looked at the bed next to mine. She was usually the first of us awake to prepare for the day, so the fact that she was still asleep was evidence that yesterday’s task had been quite a burden on her. I reached out my hand to wake her up, but I changed my mind midway and stopped myself. We would normally head for the forest right after breakfast, but our plan for today was to head to the Adventurers’ Guild first to have Diola-san try out the dried dindels we’d made. However, if we left the inn at the usual time, we would arrive at the guild during a busy time of the day, which could possibly cause some trouble for Diola-san. We would have to head out a bit later to avoid that. That meant it was fine to let Haruka continue sleeping for a bit longer.

I looked at the bed on the other side and there was nobody there. Based on his usual routine, Touya was probably training by himself right now. He hadn’t exactly been the type to go jogging early in the morning back on Earth, and he hadn’t been the type who was serious about club activities either. However, ever since we had arrived into this world, he would spend his free time training, since he was very passionate about improving his abilities with a sword. I would spend free time training as well, but we were definitely putting more effort into it now that our lives depended on it. I mean, who wouldn’t put in more effort in circumstances like these? The only kind of people who would continue to be lazy in a situation like this would probably be extremely carefree people, people who had confidence in themselves with no concrete basis, or delusional people who thought they would be fine no matter what since they were the protagonist of the story or something. The scary part was that I couldn’t say for sure that there weren’t people like that among my classmates. It was quite possible. I didn’t fall under any of those three categories, of course, so I didn’t plan on slacking off at all.

I grabbed my spear for some self-training of my own and did my best to leave the room without making any sounds. Haruka woke up a bit after that, and we had her cast Purification on us when we all met up before going to eat breakfast. We took a short rest after that and then headed towards the Adventurers’ Guild with the samples of the dried dindel fruit we’d made yesterday. We rarely visited the guild at this time of the day, but there were only a few parties of adventurers inside, so the peak time had already passed. There was nobody at the counter where Diola-san sat, so we headed towards her right away.

“Good morning, Diola-san,” said Haruka.

“Oh, it’s quite unusual to see you all at this time of the day. Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Touya said.

“Good morning. We’ve brought some samples of dried dindel fruit that we made.”

Diola-san looked very surprised when I mentioned that.

“Already?!”

“Would you like to try them out?” Haruka asked.

“Yes, it would be my pleasure to do so! As a dindel connoisseur, I’ll give these dindels a fair and harsh rating!”

Her surprised expression quickly turned into one of joy. She said that she would be fair and harsh with her ratings, but it was probably more like she would happily indulge in the opportunity. In any case, it would be helpful to have Diola-san rate our dried dindels. We didn’t have any of the dried dindels that were sold on the market, so we had nothing to compare ours with at the moment. That meant we would have to ask someone who had eaten regular dried dindels to compare, which in this case was Diola-san.

“Thank you very much. It would help us out a lot.”

“Not at all. He he, I love this part of my job.”

Diola-san whispered those words after she responded to Haruka. I heard her just fine, but it wasn’t anything bad, so it didn’t matter.

“By the way, Diola-san, have you really eaten enough dried dindels before to consider yourself a connoisseur? They’re much more expensive than regular dindels, right?”

“O-Of course. Dried dindels go for an average of about one thousand Rea each.”

Well, well, her eyes were swimming around in every direction as she said that. Nervous, are we? If I had to compare the speed of her eye movements to something, a swimmer doing the butterfly stroke would be the closest example.

“I seem to recall you mentioning something about how it was difficult to purchase and obtain raw dindels as well, right?”

“W-Well, yes, and dried dindels are more expensive than—”

“Dried dindels aren’t brought here to the guild either, right? After all, they count as processed materials.”

Haruka cut her off, and we all stared at her together. She desperately tried to avoid meeting our eyes, but eventually it seemed like she couldn’t stand the looks of doubt that we were giving her, and she swiftly lowered her head to apologize.

“I’m very sorry for not being truthful! I haven’t eaten enough dried dindels before to be able to rate them as a connoisseur! But, well, I have eaten some before, so I can compare these samples to them!”

We asked her for more details as she continued to hang her head in apology, and she explained that she had only eaten dried dindels a few times, and that those dried dindels had been gifts from other people rather than ones that she’d bought herself. The way she put it, it sounded like those dried dindels were the equivalent of gifts one would bring when visiting someone in the hospital.

“I mean, as long as you’ve eaten some dried dindels before, then that’s all that matters,” I said.

“Mm, we just want you to compare our dried dindels with the ones you’ve eaten before. Give these a try first.” Haruka placed some samples of the dried dindels we’d created yesterday on the counter as she said that. She lined them up in random order so that the order wouldn’t affect how Diola-san would rate them. This came to mind yesterday as well, but the marks on the toothpicks in them are the only way to tell them apart, since they look very similar to each other.

“Um, eight different types?”

“Yes. We made each one with a slightly different method. Try them out and compare them, please.”

“Okay.”

Diola-san tried out a bit of each dried dindel from right to left as she compared them. She muttered words like “Hmm” and “This is...” as she nodded and lined them up again in what seemed to be the order of her rating. I didn’t expect her to rate them this seriously. I thought she would just devour them and yell something like “Delicious!” as she went along.

“Okay, I’ve tried them all out. The ones from here to here are the ones that tasted better than the dried dindels I’ve had before.”

I looked at the ones she mentioned, and based on the marks, they were the ones we had boiled for one minute, two minutes, three minutes, and the one we had boiled and rapidly cooled afterwards.

“This one tasted about the same as what I’ve had before, and these last two weren’t quite as good in comparison.”

Based on her ratings, the one we had boiled for four minutes was about the same in taste; the one we hadn’t boiled along with the one we’d dipped in boiling water only briefly and the one we’d boiled for five minutes were both worse than the dried dindels she’d had before.

“Thank you very much, Diola-san. Does that mean the ones on the market are the same as this one?”

Haruka pointed at the dried dindel that Diola-san had rated as about the same as the ones on the market—the one we’d boiled for four minutes. However, Diola-san shook her head in response to Haruka’s words.

“I’m not too sure, honestly. I don’t know how you made these dried dindels, but you made them yesterday, right? Dried dindels will still lose some of their taste depending on how well they’re preserved, and I don’t know if the ones I ate before were in good condition or not...”

That made sense. I hadn’t been sure if the flavor of dried dindels would deteriorate over time or if they would age well and become tastier, but they definitely wouldn’t remain the same. Ours had been freshly made just yesterday, so depending on how we’d preserved them, they could change over time even though they were the same quality now. Even if the taste wouldn’t go bad, there could be other problems; for example, it was possible that mold might grow on them easily. With all that in mind, perhaps we couldn’t sell these dried dindels as nonperishable food until next year. If we were to make absolutely sure that these were good for sale, then we would have to buy some market dried dindels and preserve both those and our own to compare in a controlled experiment. Well, there aren’t any labels to indicate expiration dates in this world, so we could just ignore all that and sell our dried dindels anyway, but still.

“However, this one is absolutely delicious! I think it’ll sell for quite a decent amount of money.”

The dried dindel that Diola-san pointed at as she said that was the one we rated as the best ourselves, which was the one we’d boiled and rapidly cooled afterwards. It looked like we’d had the right idea for improving the taste of the dindels.

“Oh, so we can sell our dried dindels by emphasizing the taste instead of emphasizing how long they would last.”

It seemed like Haruka had had a similar thought about the taste and had come to that conclusion after she’d heard Diola-san’s rating for our rapidly cooled dried dindel.

“Um, wait, are you going to sell these dried dindels yourself, Haruka-san?”

“We haven’t decided yet, but it would be fine to sell them via a stall at the morning bazaar, right?”

In the past, we’d taken a look at the morning bazaar before we headed out for work, and we’d seen farmers who seemed to be located nearby who would come to sell their produce. People were free to sell as long as they could get a space to do so. Most citizens would purchase their groceries there; the food that they bought in stores or other places was mainly things that would last for a long time, like grains and processed food. We weren’t able to set up our own store, but people sold fruits at the morning bazaar, so that was the best place for us to sell our dried dindels—or rather, it was the only place we could sell them. If we happened to set up a stall elsewhere without permission, then the Merchant Guild would come in and remove it. On a side note, if someone wanted to set up a stall to cook food at the morning bazaar, that also required the permission of the Merchant Guild. There wasn’t a health inspector or office that would issue permits for food stalls, but the Merchant Guild basically served that role in this world.

“Well, it would be fine to set up a stall, but I’m not sure if your dried dindels will sell or not...” Diola-san sounded a bit hesitant about our idea.

Haruka looked a bit confused when she heard that. “Huh? Didn’t you say our dried dindels would sell for quite a decent amount of money, Diola-san?”

“I mean, yes, I think they’re worth a lot of money. However, dindels are already expensive enough that even I can’t buy them on a regular basis despite the fact that my salary is rather decent compared to others. That’s how it is for me, so as for whether or not people who visit the morning bazaar could purchase these frequently, well...”

“Oh, yeah, that makes sense...” said Haruka.

“Yeah, I guess our dried dindels wouldn’t really fit the morning bazaar...” I said.

After Diola-san pointed that out to us, we looked at each other. If somebody asked me whether or not supermarket muskmelons that were priced as gifts for special occasions sold on a regular basis, I would have to answer with a no. Perhaps it would be different for the kind of muskmelons that were sold in boutiques in the basements of department stores or in gift shops outside of hospitals, but morning bazaars here were the most similar to nearby supermarkets back on Earth. Even if there was a place similar to a department store boutique that sold dried dindels, one hundred per day was definitely an excessive supply based on the population and average income of people in this town.

“Ugh, I can’t believe our plans were crushed like this all of a sudden!” Haruka sounded a bit devastated as she said that, and we all sighed in disappointment. The dried dindels would still go to good use for our own consumption, but while we were working on making these dried dindels yesterday, we’d been thinking about turning a large profit.

“Man, we put in a lot of work for this...” said Touya.

Well, Haruka did most of the work, but yeah.

“Hmm, wait, raw dindels don’t last for long, right?” Haruka asked. “How does the guild deal with raw dindels, Diola-san?”

“The guild has connections with nobles, merchants, and artisans as well. There’s enough demand for the ones your party brought in yesterday. As for dried dindels, those are sold to other towns as well, so it’s more like there’s a lack of supply.”

The Adventurers’ Guild actually did deal in dried dindels, apparently. Those goods were registered in the ledger first, so they weren’t something that Diola-san could purchase for cheaper than normal.

“Could you introduce us to some of those connections—actually, probably not, right?”

“Mm, I can’t do that. The wholesale commission fee for such goods is a major revenue source for the guild.” Diola-san had an awkward smile on her face as she said that. It made perfect sense, so we had to give up on that option. “Well, the guild does buy dried dindels in bulk, if that’s okay. It’s not as much as what you would get for retail trade, but your party would probably profit more by spending time on other things instead of on trying to sell dindels by yourselves.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” said Haruka. “What do you two think?”

“It’s a bit of a shame that we can’t make a big profit on them, but it’s probably safer to sell to the guild instead of trying to sell them ourselves, since we have no experience doing that,” I said. “There’s no point in forcing ourselves to do things we don’t have to.”

“I feel the same way,” said Touya. “We would probably turn a bigger profit via hunting or something.”

We weren’t merchants, and we didn’t have any skills that would help us in the field of trading either. There was a chance that we would get scammed by a shady merchant if we tried to sell dried dindels ourselves, so it wasn’t a bad choice to leave all the work to the Adventurers’ Guild. Sure, we would earn less this way, but we could consider that gap in profit the same as what we would have to pay as an insurance fee. Haruka grumbled to herself for a while as she thought it over, and eventually she sighed to indicate acceptance, then forced a smile.

“Oh well, that works. We’ll bring some more at a later time.”

“Thank you very much. Um, can I have one of these as a sample? The guild needs to assess how much to pay per dried dindel.”

“Sure, here you go.”

Haruka handed Diola-san one of the dried dindels that we’d kept around as emergency rations. We also had some other emergency rations on us that we’d bought from stores, but luckily we hadn’t needed to use them yet. I used the word luckily because we had all tried those emergency rations before once, and it was an experience more shocking than the one we’d had at the stall that we’d encountered on our first day. Thus, we were going to get rid of those emergency rations and shift to dried dindels and dried meat as soon as the dried meat was ready.

“Okay, thank you. The assessment will be done by the usual time in the evening, so I’ll pass on the results if your party comes to the guild at that time or later.”

“Thank you very much.”

It had been a mistake to count our chickens before they’d hatched. We were a bit dejected that our moneymaking plan had failed, and we bowed our heads slightly towards Diola-san to express our thanks before we left the guild.

★★★★★★★★★

“Ugh, we should have thought of this...” said Haruka.

“Yeah, we only thought about how much we would get from the price of the dried dindels,” said Touya.

“Expensive things wouldn’t always sell well no matter how good they were even back in Japan, so I guess our plan was bound to fail,” I said.

We were discussing what went wrong with each other on our way to the forest. We were walking faster than usual since we had spent some time at the guild.

“We should have thought about the demand and our customer base from the very beginning,” I said.

“Mm, it’s like how bento boxes from a department store boutique wouldn’t sell well at a convenience store.”

It would depend on the location, but there definitely would be plenty left unsold if one tried to sell premium bento boxes at a convenience store that was located on the way to a school. I think the guy at the convenience store near my parents’ house had mentioned how “Location, weather, season, and customer base are all factors that needed to be considered before deciding what to stock up on in order to make a profit” or something like that. I’d responded with just an “I see” back then, since I hadn’t been paying that much attention to what he was saying, but I guess it just meant that business wasn’t easy no matter what world it was.

“What should we do, Haruka? Should we continue to make dried dindels?”

“Hmm, well, what do you two think?”

It depended on whether or not the profit was worth the time spent.

“Most of the hard work for making dried dindels is on you, Haruka, so I’ll leave the decision to you, but I’m not as enthusiastic as before,” I said.

“My vote’s for more dried meat,” said Touya.

“Dried meat won’t sell, Touya. Besides, I don’t want to only eat dried meat all the time.”

We weren’t even sure if the dried meat we were making would turn out to taste good or not in the first place. It would be very depressing if the large amount that we’d prepared turned out to taste bad after all that work.

“Personally, I think it’s best that we continue to make dried dindels. We’ll still get more for them compared to selling regular ones as is, and we can motivate ourselves to make them by thinking about how they’ll make our daily lives better as rations that we can carry with us. Don’t you two agree?”

“Well, yeah, it’s a great source of motivation,” I said.

“Mm, it’ll help us ignore some unpleasant things,” said Touya.

The rations that we carried around as emergency food were what adventurers would eat when they camped out, and they were definitely high quality in terms of how long they lasted and how easy it was to carry them around. However, the trade-off was that they tasted horrible. It was hard to describe how “splendorous” their taste was. The closest example I could give would be something like eating paper clay. We hadn’t taken on any quests or work that required us to stay outside overnight yet, but if we did in the future, then we would have to think about what we would need for them. Our problems would be solved if I could craft a high-quality magic bag before we had to take on such tasks, but it wasn’t that easy to improve my magic to the point where I could craft magic bags. This world wasn’t kind enough to let people improve their magic abilities easily in no time.

“We’ll save money if we can prepare our own lunch. As for how we’ll divide the dindels, we can sell a third of them as is and then dry the other two thirds. We’ll sell half of those dried dindels and keep the other half for ourselves. How does that sound?”

“I don’t mind, but is that really okay with you, Haruka?” I asked. “The work yesterday was really exhausting for you, right? There’s also the dried meat to deal with.”

“Well, yeah, it was exhausting, but we could leave the dried meat preserved in salt in the barrels until dindels are out of season.”

The dindel season that Haruka mentioned was the period of time in which dindels could be harvested. That period would differ depending on the weather, but it would usually be around a month long. According to Diola-san, it was highly likely that there were only about one to two weeks left of the dindel season for this year. That would solve the mana problem for Haruka, but there was still a problem regarding the barrels. The innkeeper had promised us he’d hand over some barrels, but we didn’t know if there were enough for a week’s worth of meat, and even if there were, we didn’t know if we could fit those barrels in our room.

“How about we have Haruka take a break and rest when she’s not using magic, and we do the other tasks together, Nao? That should make things better, right?”

“Yeah, it should. That’s all we can do, I guess.”

“Mm, it’s not like we can use skill points to learn magic like in games.”

If leveling up would get us points like we’d had initially during character creation, then things would be much easier, but I guess the evil god wasn’t exactly kind enough to provide bonus services like that. Well, I’d like to ask him about it if we meet him again, but he seemed like he enjoyed our plight, so I doubt he would help us out.

“In that case, I guess it’s impossible for Touya to learn magic, right, Haruka?”

“Mm, it’s common sense in this world that learning magic is very difficult for beastmen. That probably has to do with whether or not a race has innate aptitude for magic.”

“Elves are fine in the aptitude department, right? Why don’t you try to learn Water Magic, Nao?”

“Ugh!”

It’s not as easy as you think it is! I haven’t even managed to level up my Fire Magic yet, even though that was the first thing I learned. It would be great and convenient if I could use the Water Magic and Light Magic that Haruka is capable of, but that would mean I would have less time to practice other things.

I looked at Haruka in the hopes that she would back me up, and she laughed dryly before she did. “Well, in my case, I took the aptitude skills for Light, Wind, and Water Magic along with the aptitude for alchemy. In Nao’s case, he doesn’t have the aptitude skill for Fire Magic, and while he does have the aptitude skill for Time Magic, that’s a type of magic which is difficult to master, so it’s only natural that he’s been struggling.”

“Yeah, exactly!” I knew Haruka would have kind words for me!

I sighed in relief at what Haruka said, but a playful expression appeared on Haruka’s face as she added more words for me. “However, since we’re elves, that means we can learn magic without the aptitude skills, so it might be a good idea for both of us to buy a beginner’s grimoire and learn the basics from that.”

“Okay...”

I couldn’t exactly say that I didn’t want to learn or study, so I nodded in response without complaining.

★★★★★★★★★

The price that the Adventurers’ Guild had decided on for our dried dindels was apparently eight hundred Rea. We could harvest about three hundred of those dindels in a day, so if we saved one hundred of those dindels for our own use and divided the rest between selling as is and selling dried, then we would be able to earn around one hundred thousand Rea per day. I can’t believe that in the beginning, we worked so hard only to earn one thousand Rea per person.

However, we had to work until we were completely exhausted to maintain that daily income. Most of the burden was on Haruka, as we’d expected, and even though Touya and I tried to ease that burden by doing all sorts of other tasks, we ended up with no time to work on dried meat. We switched to different dindel trees three times over the ten days since our first day of harvesting dindels, and we stopped harvesting them once our harvest had dropped below two hundred dindels per day. We could have continued to harvest more dindels for a while longer, but Haruka’s fatigue was building up to dangerous levels, so Touya and I decided to stop the dindel moneymaking schedule. Our daily income dropped as a result, but we were all glad to be able to finally get some rest.

As for goblins, we encountered them on our third day of gathering dindels. We really didn’t have to be worried about them at all. First of all, they weren’t very strong. They were a bit cunning, but overall, tusk boars were a tougher enemy to deal with, so goblins weren’t a threat. As for the fact that goblins were humanoid, that was also something we didn’t have to worry about. They didn’t really seem like they had human qualities. The only thing human about them was the fact that they stood on two legs and that they carried wooden clubs. Snow monkeys were more similar to humans than goblins were. Maybe it was because the skeletal structure of goblin faces was completely different. We were glad about that in a way, but it also meant that our plan to get used to fighting humanoid enemies wasn’t a success. Overall, these results weren’t exactly good or bad. Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider hiring someone like a combat instructor to get used to fighting against other humanoid beings.

After the dindel season ended, we took a break from work to rest for a few days and used some of our free time to work on making dried meat. We took the meat out of the barrels, washed it, and then lined the pieces up in strainers before Haruka used the Dry spell on them. She would then go back to our room to rest while Touya and I stuffed the dried meat into bags. After we were done with that, we would both start self-training until Haruka had recovered. We kept this schedule for our days off work. It wasn’t exactly a full break with just rest, but I had to continually use Scout when we were outside on the job to keep on guard against enemies, so the fact that I didn’t have to do so on break was more than enough for me in terms of mental rest.

As for self-training, it wasn’t like we trained to the point where we passed out and were tired the next day, so overall, we more or less got some good rest. Honestly, it was better to do something to avoid that uneasy feeling I got when I was doing nothing. Touya probably felt the same way I did, since he didn’t skip out on self-training either.

A more realistic problem to consider was what we would do if we encountered two wipe bears at the same time. We would probably all die. Or rather, definitely would be a more fitting word than probably. There was no way we could outrun those bears since they were extremely fast. Even a world record holder for sprinting wouldn’t be able to outrun a bear. Would we have been more easygoing and taken the time to enjoy sightseeing in this different world if we hadn’t encountered a wipe bear before? Maybe we’d already be dead due to that easygoing mentality. Well, we’re still alive now, and our livelihood isn’t that bad. That means we haven’t made any wrong choices yet, and that’s all that matters.

★★★★★★★★★

“Whew, our room finally has space again!”

“Yeah, our room wouldn’t have been so cramped in the first place if you hadn’t gone overboard, Touya...” said Haruka.

“Indeed,” I said.

Haruka and I looked at each other and sighed in unison at Touya, who was absolutely beaming with happiness. The reason our room had become tight and cramped was because of barrels filled with salted meat. We had made way more than we’d initially planned on, and by the time we were done, we’d had almost no energy left to even walk.

All of this was Touya’s fault, obviously. We’d kept a pace of just one boar per day at first, but once we had decided to leave the meat alone to dry while we dealt with the dindels, Touya had said “It’s okay to make some more since we’re gonna leave them alone, right?” which started all of this. Afterwards, he would hunt down tusk boars whenever he saw them, even if they were away from our usual path, which meant that there were plenty of days when we had to deal with two boars’ worth of meat. Touya volunteered to gut and prepare the meat of those boars himself, so it was hard to say no to him. The salted preserved meat had kept building up in this way, so we’d kept making dried meat like that for three days. After those three days were over, we had finally managed to remove all of the barrels of salted meat that had been taking up space in our room. The biggest victim of Touya’s meat adventures was Haruka, who’d had to keep using her Dry spell on the meat, but I’d done my best to help her as well. It was only natural that we would both be exhausted as a result of all this.

“We finally don’t have to suffer from the smell of the meat anymore,” I said.

“Mm, that smell was honestly quite unpleasant,” said Haruka.

We’d had to process a large amount of meat in our room, and it had continued to pile up as salted meat in here. Even the Purification spell wasn’t enough to remove the smell completely.

“It was worth it, though, right?” Touya asked.

“Well, yeah, I guess.”

Touya looked very smug for some reason when he asked that, but it was true that the finished dried meat was quite delicious. We could chew on it as is, or roast it, or even put it in soup. The innkeeper had praised our dried meat as well, and we’d traded some of it to him in exchange for a decent amount of money. As for the small quantity of dried meat with fat that Touya had made, the innkeeper had said that “This is edible, but the ones without fat taste better,” so it was about what I’d expected. We’d been right to spend the time removing the fat instead of avoiding that work.

“However, it was thanks to Haruka that the dried meat turned out to be delicious, so why are you so smug about this, Touya?”

“W-Well, I was the one who decided we should make a lot, which was a genius idea!”

“That meant a lot of extra burden on me, but oh well. I guess it’s okay since you helped a lot with gutting and processing the meat, Touya.”

Touya looked away as he made an excuse, but Haruka shrugged with a bitter smile as she backed him up.

“Thanks for being understanding, Haruka! Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something. I somehow managed to obtain the Disassemble skill after all of this.”

“Wait, really?!”

“Yeah. It’s Level 1, though.”

“You did work very hard on processing the meat,” said Haruka. “Well, you’re the first one among us who’s managed to obtain a new skill.”

“Yeah,” I said.

We had all put in a lot of effort for quests and training over the last half month, but none of us had managed to obtain any new skills or even level up the skills that we already had.

“Mm, I spent quite some time staring at meat. I didn’t reach triple digits, but I was definitely fairly far into the double-digit hours,” said Touya.

“Still, I can’t believe it took you that long to learn a fairly simple skill like Disassemble,” said Haruka. “I guess that means it’s not that easy to level up or learn skills.”

“Wait, hold on, didn’t you learn that Staff Fighting skill a while ago, Touya?!”

He had learned that skill fairly quickly while he’d been forced to use a long iron baton. I’d completely forgotten about its existence since he had been using a sword recently.

“Oh yeah, that technically does count as a new skill. I forgot about it since I haven’t used it at all, ha ha!”

He laughed about it in a carefree manner. You should at least remember your own skills, Touya.

“You haven’t managed to level up any of your skills, right, Nao?” Haruka asked. “I thought your Scout skill would at least have increased in level by now due to how much you’ve used it, but I guess not...”

“Mm, it’s still the same. I did a lot of self-training with my spear as well, but my Spearmanship skill hasn’t leveled up either.”

I would actively use my Scout skill almost the entire time we were outside of town, so it was my most-used skill. I personally felt like I had gotten better at using it by now, but its level hadn’t changed at all.

“You’ve still gotten better at using a spear, so the training didn’t go to waste. It’s normal not to be able to see your improvement via some kind of concrete number, so don’t worry too much about it.”

“Well, a while ago, I thought I would be able to motivate myself more if we could see concrete numbers via a status display screen, but now our status screen makes me feel like I’m being told that I haven’t made any progress at all...”

“Oh yeah, that thought has crossed my mind before too, Nao! I wish our status displays would display an experience points bar for each of our skills, like how it is in some games!”

Oh yeah, I would love for our status screens to have a function like that. There were many times when I wasn’t sure if I was doing things right during self-training. I had gotten better at combat compared to before I started self-training, so it wasn’t completely useless, but still.

“I think it’s best to not worry and just accept the idea that it’s very difficult to level up skills,” said Haruka.

Skills weren’t common knowledge in this world, so there was no concrete information about a level cap for skills, but apparently the highest level spell that was inscribed in a grimoire was Level 10, so we could use that as a reference for the level cap of other skills. Mages who could flawlessly use Level 10 spells were very rare, and it was normal to be unable to reach that level of mastery even if you devoted your entire life to magic. That was just how difficult it was.

“It’s probably easier to level up skills at low levels, but there probably comes a certain point where it’ll take years of hard work and training to reach the next level,” said Haruka.

“So we shouldn’t expect to get any results from just half a month of training?” Touya asked.

“We’ve gotten stronger than we were initially, so that counts as results. Since we’ve gotten results, we shouldn’t worry about whether our status screens reflect that or not.”

“Yeah, I guess we should just treat our status screens as something to check once in a while,” I said. “If we can do something new, then it’ll appear as a skill. It’s not the other way around.”

Touya’s Disassemble skill just indicated that he had gotten better at gutting and cleaning animals, but it didn’t mean that he had gotten good at it.

“Level ups in games would immediately improve your abilities, but I guess in this world you have to slowly improve your abilities over time, and you have to reach a certain point for it to be displayed as a new level on your status screen,” I said.

“That sounds normal, yeah, but it’s not gamelike at all,” said Touya.

“We can’t really trust everything the evil god told us,” said Haruka. “In a way, this is actually a good thing. The fact that things aren’t gamelike means that there’s no temptation to be reckless.”

“Oh yeah, indeed. If we could see an experience points bar for our skills, I would get an urge to earn experience points to level up,” I said.

“Yeah, I feel the same way! That’s the gamer spirit!”

Would anyone who calls themselves a gamer not try to level up if there was an experience bar in front of them? Of course not! The grind calls for a gamer!

“There’s no such thing as time loops via death in real life. Perhaps I should thank the ‘evil’ god that skills aren’t gamelike, considering how you two would act otherwise.”

“Trust me, we wouldn’t be reckless, since our lives are on the line here in this world!” Touya exclaimed.

“You sure? You sure you two wouldn’t say something like ‘I’m almost about to level up, so let’s slay some more goblins!’ in certain situations?”

I stared at Touya after Haruka said that. Our eyes met, and I felt a deep connection with him in my heart.

“O-Oh yeah, what are we going to do tomorrow?” I asked.

“That’s a very obvious change of subject...”

I mean, what am I supposed to say?! I can easily see myself or Touya saying something like that! It’s only natural for a gamer to be a bit greedy and push the limits, right? I’m pretty sure over ninety percent of gamers out there in the world would agree with me on this. Well, probably, at least.

“Fine, I’ll play along. Now then, I have an important announcement to make, since we’ve reached a milestone. We’ve managed to amass the amount of money for our short-term goal after we sold some of our dried meat to the innkeeper the other day!”

“Oh, finally!”

“That took longer than I thought! Yay!”

We clapped for a bit and then high-fived each other. Our initial short-term goal for money had been about five hundred thousand Rea, but that amount had disappeared in no time after we’d spent it on some general goods and our weapons. As a result, we’d increased that goal to one million, five hundred thousand Rea.

“This means we’ll be fine for a while even if Touya suffers some heavy injuries or if Nao gets stuck in bed due to an illness! Yay!”

“Don’t say ominous things like that, please!” I said.

Once again, she didn’t include herself. Sure, she was less likely to suffer injuries since she was our backline, but her Robust skill was the same level as mine, wasn’t it? Well, I guess I took days off school due to colds more often than she did back in Japan, but still.

“Our budget now has a solid buffer, and we have a clear vision for the future!”

“Stop, you don’t have to imitate tryhard talk, Haruka!”

She seemed to be very cheerful and happy at the moment, since she smiled and gave us a thumbs up, which was something she wouldn’t normally do.

“But yeah, this means we’ve established a stable lifestyle,” I said.

We had the equipment that we needed by now, and we wouldn’t have to worry too much about injuries or getting sick. That was just how powerful and great money was.

“Yeah, this is my first step towards a cute animal-ears wife!”

When did you start to emphasize the cute part for your animal-ears wife dream, Touya? Well, it’s your dream, so feel free to do so. I’m rooting for you, Touya.

“Mm, yeah...”

“Hm? Am I not allowed to aim for a cute animal-ears wife yet?”

Haruka had a slightly gloomy look on her face as she agreed with Touya. He tilted his head and asked her again to confirm.

“Nah, that’s fine. Feel free to go for that. But, well—okay, there’s something I want to discuss with you two.”

Haruka looked determined and serious even though she’d been a bit hesitant at first. She firmly declared the following words: “We should leave this town by tomorrow, or at least within the next few days.”