by Hiro Ainana
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…”
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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.
Despite that, I made no effort to disguise the quality of my work, and my vials were all as homogenous as if they’d been made in a factory.
Checking the log, I saw that I’d received the title Potter.
“Have you gotten the hang of the clay yet, mister? I’ve finished my work, so I have a little time to show you the— Wait, what?!”
Pulling his apprentice along, the owner of the studio came booming affably into the room, only to give a shout of surprise when he saw the number of bottles I’d lined up on the floor.
His reaction suggested I hadn’t held back enough.
“Damn, you’d never guess you made all these in such little time! We won’t even need to shave these down before we fire ’em. You’re not secretly some famous potter or somethin’, are you?”
“No, it was just a hobby of mine when I was young.”
In reality, before I learned the skill earlier, I had never touched a pottery wheel in my life, but t
he truth could hurt people sometimes, so I let my “Fabrication” skill help me out.
“Since they’re so thin, you’d only have to let them dry out for five days or so before we put them in the kiln, even in this weather.”
Amid his admiration, the studio owner muttered something that surprised me.
What was that?
“It’ll take five days before you can fire them?”
“Yeah, and thicker ones would have to dry for at least a trimoon. Otherwise they’ll crack while they’re baking.”
I thought they’d be finished later today…
Oh, right! If the issue is the moisture inside the clay, all we have to do is find another way to deal with that.
I based a new spell on the Water Magic spell Hard Dry. Instead of instantly evaporating water, it would gradually expel moisture from a vessel.
To help control the duration, I used bits of code from the Insect Repellent spell I’d made for Arisa.
Mia was free now that the workshop owner and his apprentice had taken over educating the other girls, so once I finished the spell, I got her to test it out. Since I was just concerned with getting results for now, the chant for the spell was rather choppy and uncool, but Mia used it without comment.
“… Clay Dry Nendo Kansou!”
Water droplets began oozing out of the surface of the vial and dripping to the floor. However, I must not have adjusted the speed enough, because the vessel cracked before the spell was done taking effect.
I improved it by adding in the humidity control code from the Water Magic spell Moisture Control so that it would stop at a certain degree of dryness.
This time, the drying process was successful, but the MP it required was way too high. At this rate, we’d be able to dry only twenty or so of the bottles before Mia’s magic ran out.
I decided to change my approach, and instead of leaving everything to the spell, I let the caster choose when the effect would end. Luckily, my “Pottery” skill would tell me when it was dry enough, so this wasn’t a problem.
I also changed the target range to an area of effect. Once I had Mia use the spell Clay Dry Second, we were able to finish drying all the vials.
