Erudite Kingdom (8)

Current Shared Points: 4345.

Quests:

*Everyone enters Prune's apartment. 30P.

*Noel having tea with Liliath. 20P.

Prune making a dish with 100% Imagi ingredients. 40P.

*Noel and Liliath kiss. 50P.

Pet a slime. 30P.

Go stay a night at an inn with everyone. 40P.

Eat food prepared by royalty. 30P.

Kill a goblin with nothing but a stick. 30P

Everyone learns how to use their first magic. 30P

…

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"Prune, have you decided what you want to do? Like, do you have anything you want to try in this world?"

It's actually pretty late to ask this. We've been so busy trying to figure out how the world works, we totally forgot to try to tally our goals.

At lunch at the guild, we decided that we would go try to complete the G-rank quests tomorrow. We spent the rest of the afternoon getting used to the kingdom layout.

There were 2 main gates, we only managed to find one. It's just at the end of the street out when you come out of the guild. There's like a toll there managed by a few dozen knights. From our observations, adventurers get to enter and exit through a different path. So they don't need to queue with the merchants or peddlars.. and I must say, the stagecoach queue is crazy long.

Erudite, as Liliath said, was a kingdom built close to the sea, which meant that there was a harbour. But.. we couldn't find it.

"Excuse me, we're back," entering the florist shop, Nine called out.

"Huh? Customer-sama," the girl with the freckles, Jennifer greeted. When she saw the rest of us a perplexed expression surfaced on her face.

"Greetings, ah, could you be acquainted with Nine-sama?" a woman watching behind the counter called out, which I learnt that her name to be Miss Margrett later on.

"Sorry to trouble you, but this is all of us," Nine said.

"Um, could I ask where Nine-sama is?"

Prune, Liliath and I turned to Nine at the same time.

"Oh right.. "

With a snap, Nine turned back into a girl. Posing while saying "here I am!"

A random customer in the florist shop who saw that dropped his dentures at the sight.

As for what happened next.. I'll leave it to your imagination to decide. The random customer was made to believe what Nine did was quick change magic, luckily he accepted that lie readily. Quick change magic is actually a skill, I didn't know that.

Just that it was difficult to get him to believe that she-- I mean his clothing swap was so fast, you couldn't even see if you didn't blink.

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We had to ask for directions from Jennifer-san-- or chan--

She said it was quite a distance away, at least a 30 minute walk from here. So we decided to leave that to another day and explore places that were closer to the florist store.

The day ended pretty quickly with us spending the majority of our time just walking and exploring. We got to enter this bazaar market setting with all sorts of preserved foods, fish, fruits, vegetables and miscellaneous objects. Among them, Nine found a cursed ring equipment with his appraisal. We didn't buy it of course, it just happened.

We still haven't explored ateliers, bookstore or a weapon store yet. It's a mystery how the first store we ended up at was a florist though.

Man.. this place is huge alright. My map only shows areas I've seen, so the current kingdom exploration progress we've made was somewhere around 3 percent, give or take.

And back to the conversation--

"I don't know. I need some time to think about it," Prune said, dipping the mop into the bucket.

Currently, we were at the florist shop, more specifically, the room on the upper floor that Nine managed to arrange for us.

Prune took in a sharp breath and sneezed. The room is heck dusty.

"I'm sorry I dragged you into this," I said, wiping the wooden bed frame with a wet cloth. It's surprising how I'm not sneezing, maybe it's because I'm a demon lord now.

"It's okay. At least we know we'll get to return in the future..ha.. ha.. achoo!!"

"Well.. bless you."

I feel sorry for Prune.

After dropping the cloth into the wet bucket, I moved the boxes filled with unknown contents outside of the room. This place Nine got for us was just right. Too bad I'm not Japanese, else, I'd be using tatami mat calculation to describe the size of this place. In my words, it can fit about 10 queen sized beds if squeezed together. It's decent, I guess.

The lighting of the room was a single bulb and it was quite old, so Miss Margrett-san went to the local home depo to get a replacement--

And if you're wondering why I'm adding -san and -chan to names, it's because Miss Margrett-san explained that our manner of speech was an extremely obvious indicator that we weren't from this world. Thanks for the warning.. but I don't get how that would be an indicator when the 'heroes' from another Japan-- clearly not from the Japan of my world-- would use these honorifics naturally.

"Noel, help me with this, I'm going to wash my face." Prune asked me to change the bucket. She kept rubbing her nose.

"Okay."

While Prune entered her domain, I went downstairs. The upper rooms were connected to the kitchen area-- which connected to the small compartmented flower-filled backyard. Compartmented because, you know, this is a florist shop lot, not a house. I went to the well to draw up some water, it was the kind with a pump mechanism. I remembered to pour the dust-filled water down the drain before I refilled it of course.

Speaking of water, that became an issue while we were exploring Erudite Kingdom. A quick fix would be to use go to the apartment and get some water-- it's a mystery why the water filter is included in the package, thank you Unknown-- but in the case where we don't have that option, we decided to take Liliath's suggest and buy some water bottles.

Liliath and Nine went to accompany Margrett-san and Jennifer-chan to get some food, in a way, learning the ropes of where to get decent takeaways.

I came back upstairs with a new bucket of water.

Prune returned from her domain, leaving the conspicuous door there.

"Noel, what about we try meeting other races? If we're talking about goals, exploring other kingdoms should be on our list right?"

"Exploring is a must have for isekai. That's a good idea. But we'll see how to go about visiting other countries once we know how the world works. Money is still an issue."

"It is."

"But we'll get there."

In reality, waiting to explore other kingdoms.. it's not as easy as what's been mentioned in isekai genre novels? I feel like we need to get over our fears if we want to do that. The main problem now is that we know too little. It's kinda weird now to think that the normal route one would go if to sign up in a guild, hunt monsters and stay at an inn-- and then repeat until you gain enough money due to some cliche development and take on a quest to go to another kingdom.

I doubt we'd be leaving the capital kingdom all that soon. Since fear of the unknown plays a really big part in our decision making process. Moreover, does adventuring really pay well? Most MC don't get into 'proper' big, life threatening accidents when dealing with subjugation quests. Even if they did, they would come out a-o-kay. I don't know what are the chances of that happening to us, and I don't wish to know either.

"Noel.. do you miss home?"

"Home?"

Surely.

"It's been less than a day and I already feel homesick," Prune said with a sigh.

"Same here, it might get worse in time."

"Look at the bright side, at least I'm getting to experience something different… Noel, what kind of world do you think this is? It's based on a novel you've read right?" The way she tried to console herself wasn't really all that pleasant to hear.

"I have no idea actually. It's more of a mixture of novels, pieces here and there.. Some of it I've never read in a novel even, like this right here," I pointed at the door leading to Prune's domain.

I don't mean the realm, but the fact that the design door was the same as the one of our original apartment with the 244A serial number on it.

"I just hope it's not a scary world."

"Even if it is, our future selves made it back safe and sound."

"True," Prune stood back up, about to start moping again. When she sneezed, I said "bless you" once more.