V1C9

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Osshan looks like he doesn’t find all of this talk about skills at all interesting. He’s sulking in his chair right now, looking completely disengaged from the conversation.

However, Old Man Japan seems to have one more bandage to rip off. He clears his throat and breaks the awkward silence. “So… there’s probably no way for you to return to Japan. You need to think about what you’re going to do going forward. How will you eat? Where will you sleep? As you can see, I’m quite old—while I might be able to give you useful information, I can’t look after you. The most I can do for you, my fellow countryman, is offer you somewhere to stay until you can support yourself.”

Panic creeps into Osshan’s expression as he listens. “Whoah, whoah, whoah! So what the hell am I supposed to do? I don’t know how to make money in this world!”

Okay, that’s not true. Weren’t you listening to Old Man Japan? You can capture slimes or hunt Shooting Beans.

Old Man Japan squeezes his eyes shut for a moment and takes a breath before reiterating gently, “The simplest thing would be to gather slimes. You can take them to the Slime Merchant in town. Each one is worth one copper. A single copper is roughly equivalent to ten yen. With fifty copper, you can eat your fill at most food stalls. If you can manage with only two meals a day, then your daily food budget would be one hundred copper. That means you’ll need to capture one hundred slimes every day.”

“Ugh! That sounds like such a pain in the ass. One hundred slimes for one day of food? That’s so freakin’ lame. Do you mean I have to get more than one hundred a day to even start saving up for a Skill Fruit?”

This guy never fails to surprise me with his behavior. There are so many people in this town who make their living collecting slimes. There’s nothing lame about it.

“Hold your horses, son. You won’t be able to think about buying a skill fruit for some time yet. Your first goal should be to find somewhere to live. I doubt you’ll be able to stay here forever—a young man like yourself would surely want some privacy, if you will, from an old man like me sooner rather than later.”

“Somewhere to live, huh? I guess I’ll have stay at an inn or something… which means hunting even more slimes day in and day out just to cover the bill…”

“Osshan, there aren’t any inns in this town,” I cut in.

An inn a place where traveler’s stay for a day or two before moving on, I think. When I was really little, Dad and I stayed in places like that a few times on our journey to this town. But there aren’t any of them here. Dad was surprised when he found that out. Apparently, not enough travelers want to travel to a country town like this for running an inn to actually make business sense.

“That’s crazy. So, like, what do merchants do when they come through? Where do they stay when they come with goods from other towns?”

Old Man Japan answers. “This town doesn’t attract wandering peddlers. The only merchants who come through come with goods specifically ordered by merchants in town. So, they simply stay the night at the purchaser’s home.”

*****************

“If you plan to live in this town, the best thing to do is to buy your own house.”

“Buy a house? Like a whole house? Isn’t that something you do in your thirties with a loan that you pay back over another thirty years or something? That doesn’t sound like something a teenager like me can afford. Or is there someone who’ll lend me the money to do it?”

“You won’t find a proper moneylender here. If there were one, it would almost certainly be one of those back-alley loan sharks—not that I’ve ever seen even that. However, if you go to the town hall, you can purchase a house just like this one in exchange for one thousand silver pieces.”

He really does mean just like this one. My house next door is the exact same size with the exact same floor plan.

Dad was so excited to be able to buy a home for so cheap. I’m grateful for it too, because I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it this far all on my own without it. If we’d been renting a room somewhere when he died, I wouldn’t have anywhere to live right now.

Osshan runs his fingers through his hair. “Is that a lot of money? I can’t tell.”

“Well, let’s think about what I’ve already told you. A copper is like a ten-yen coin. Because a silver is worth one hundred copper, one thousand of them is equivalent to one million yen. So, there’s nothing to worry about! If you can gather one thousand slimes a day, you can have your own home within three months!”

“Ugh. You want me to spend all day hunting slimes? One hundred for food and the rest to save for buying a home…” He taps his fingers restlessly against his leg before perking up. “Well, it’s not like I have a choice, since I can’t impose on you forever. But why is it so cheap? Aren’t houses supposed to cost like tens of millions of yen?

“There are a thousand houses just like this in this part of town. Apparently, there used to be a mine nearby, and these were the miners’ homes. But when the mine closed and the miners left, these houses remained, and there aren’t nearly enough people to fill them. I would venture that not even half of them have someone living in them. So, you see, there’s far more supply than demand, which drives the price down. Additionally, the local lord wants to increase the town’s population so that they can actually collect taxes.”

Dad used to say the same thing. He’d never seen it, since we sort of just ended up here by chance, but he told me a whole lot of people used to live here. I bet there was an inn and everything back then.

But now the whole town’s in decline, and this part is full of abandoned houses. It’s not all bad, though. Old Man Japan sort of mentioned it, but there’s no taxes here, which has been a great help for me personally. I can barely manage to make enough to feed myself; if I had to pay taxes on top of that, I don’t know what I’d do.

Why are there no taxes? Well…

“Hey gramps, I’ve got a question. If the mine closed, is that because there’s nothing valuable left—whatever they were mining?” Osshan asks.

Immediately, the smile disappears from Old Man Japan’s face and is replaced by a serious look. “No, the mine may very well still be usable. However, since nobody can get close, there’s no way to know for sure. It was closed—I’ve heard—because of a monster stampede, and, to this day, the area is swarming with powerful monsters.”

A stampede. A horde of monsters running wild. This town was lucky, since the stampede never made it all the way here. But not lucky enough, because they did make it to the mine—the town’s backbone—and everyone who was there at the time died. To make it even worse, a bunch of the monsters settled down there too.

“A stampede, huh,” Osshan muses. “That’s a common trope in light novels, but in real life it sounds kind of horrifying.”

“That’s exactly what it is: horrifying. At the time, miners worked in three shifts. One shift’s worth—one third of all of the miners in town—were killed. With the mine’s closure, the remaining miners and their families packed up and left.

“After that, as you can imagine, nobody wants to move here for fear of the stampede happening again. The talk around town is that, if a tax were to be levied, most of the remaining residents would simply leave. The local lord is afraid of that and goes out of their way to make the town appealing by imposing no taxes and selling houses cheaply.”

To be honest, I’m also kind of scared just living here, but I’ve got Dad’s house, and I don’t know if I could even make ends meet in another town. I’ve heard some of them have absolutely ridiculous taxes.

“This kind of feels like foreshadowing, like a flag, you know? Like, maybe I was brought here to protect the town from the next stampede or something. And when it happens, I’ll awaken into this town’s champion! Okay, I’m kind of feeling it now. Let’s go! Let’s freakin’ save up and buy a house!”

Foreshadowing? What is he on about now?

More importantly, what’s this about becoming a champion? That’s also weird. I’ve been told that being called a ‘champion’ is supposed to be very embarrassing.

Like, the butcher’s a champion, right? Even though he’s fat and ugly, he still proposed to the most popular prostitute in town. For that, everyone in town laughs at him and says stuff like “Wow, what a champion!” and “Go get ’em, champ!”. Is that something you’re aiming for, Osshan?

* Translator’s note: A single yen is roughly equivalent to one cent. So, Osshan’s house will cost him about $10,000.