The Master Of My Place Of Service

Two days later, the bandit extermination was carried out, and the bandits were wiped out to the last man. The money and goods they had stolen were still in the hideout, and those were apparently recovered.

Since it was treated as though I had reported the location of the hideout, I was given twenty silver coins by the county magistrate. Incidentally, the currency came in six types: mon coins, copper coins, half-silver coins, silver coins, half-gold coins, and gold coins, each equivalent to ten yen, one hundred yen, two thousand five hundred yen, five thousand yen, twenty thousand yen, and forty thousand yen respectively.

Since one silver coin was equivalent to five thousand yen, twenty silver coins came to about one hundred thousand yen. For a child like me, it was a huge sum.

“There are a lot of pickpockets, so be careful.”

One of the guards warned me. After that, I left the barracks and looked for a wagon going to the Merchant Capital, Boushin. There was a stagecoach, so I decided to use that.

“How much to Boushin?”

I asked the stagecoach driver.

“Just one person?”

“I’m going to enter service at the Chian Trading Company in Boushin.”

“Oh ho, the Chian Trading Company, huh? So you’re going to serve at a big shop. Ah, right, the fare. One silver coin.”

“Then please let me ride.”

I rode the stagecoach to Boushin. This time, nothing happened, and I arrived safely in Boushin. I asked that driver where the Chian Trading Company was, and headed there.

The Chian Trading Company was a large establishment. When I explained the situation to one of the people at the shop, I was taken to the Chian family residence behind it.

“Master, I have brought the brat whom Lu, the placement broker, promised.”

The master, Chian Shaou, was a large, fat man.

“Is Lu not with him?”

“I have heard he was killed by bandits, sir.”

“So he met with such a disaster and still survived. Seems he’s lucky. Make him a servant boy assigned to Yulong.”

Yulong was apparently the Chian family’s second son. I was put in charge of looking after Yulong and ended up living in a large room used by the servants.

I got up early in the morning, prepared the water for Yulong to wash his face, cleaned his room, and handled various odd jobs. Yulong was a twelve-year-old boy with a slender build and the appearance of a young noble. Because of that, he was very popular with the daughters of merchants.

Compared to him, I was ordinary. My height was average for a nine-year-old, and my face was fairly well put together. But I was probably more like a supporting character than the protagonist of a drama. That was not to say I was ugly. It was just that Yulong looked like he would grow into an incredibly handsome man in the future.

“Kou, go get a change of clothes from my room.”

“Understood.”

Yulong, having received instruction from his martial arts teacher, seemed to be planning to bathe because he was drenched in sweat. He tossed the key to his room at me. That did not necessarily mean he trusted me that much.

Anything important was kept inside a locked storage chest, so simply entering the room was not enough to steal anything valuable. I went to Yulong’s room, picked up a change of clothes, and headed to the bathing area.

I handed Yulong the key and the clothes.

“I’m going to take a bath and then have a nap, so go pull weeds in the garden or something.”

“Understood.”

Thinking, Weeding again? I headed toward the garden. Yulong was a brat who worked people hard and never gave them a break. Oh, right, Yulong was older than me. Since I had memories from my previous life, I kept thinking of Yulong as a younger child.

Yulong was aiming to become a Taoist practitioner. In order to do that, he had to enter a sect, a gathering of Taoist practitioners. The Taoist practitioners of the sect trained according to teachings similar to Taoism. Incidentally, only practice related to immortal arts used the character chain not for “training” but for “refinement”.

That refinement consisted of the basic knowledge of the immortal path, cultivation of qi, and martial arts. Among those, the cultivation of qi was said to be the most important. The first stage toward becoming an Immortal was called the “Qi Refining Stage.” The Qi Refining Stage was the stage of cultivating qi, and the levels of qi were divided into fifteen tiers.

It was said that in order to pass the sect’s entrance examination, one had to have reached the Third Tier of the Qi Refining Stage. Yulong was still at the Second Tier and seemed to be training desperately.

While doing my work as a servant boy, I also started getting up early in the morning to practice Meisen Swordsmanship. In addition to that, I had begun practicing the forms of Shorinji Kempo that I had learned in my previous life.

What I felt from that was that my body did not move the way I pictured it in my head. My body in my previous life could have moved that way, but Kou’s current body would not. As expected, I needed to repeat it again and again and engrave the movements into my body.

After continuing that kind of life for about three months, the cold winter came, and then the year turned. One day around that time, Yulong called me, and I went to his room.

“Did you need something?”

“You can read and write, right? Help me look something up.”

“What am I supposed to look up?”

It seemed Yulong had been given homework by the teacher who taught the basics of immortal arts. The assignment was to translate a passage written in special characters used by Taoist practitioners, and apparently he wanted me to help with that translation.

When I saw the sheet of paper with the assignment written on it, I was shocked. The writing there was the same Siddham-like script that had appeared as mysterious characters in the secret manual of Meisen Swordsmanship.

“Yulong-sama, these characters are?”

“A commoner like you probably wouldn’t know, but this is Immortal Secret Script. Use this dictionary to look them up.”

He handed me a thick dictionary. It was about four centimeters thick, and inside it was packed solid with Immortal Secret Script and what looked like explanations for each entry.

The moment I saw it, I became excited, thinking that if I used this to look up the Immortal Secret Script in the secret manual, it might serve in place of the oral teachings.

“What are you making that strange face for? That dictionary costs a hundred gold coins, you know. Don’t you dare dirty it.”

“Understood.”

I looked up each individual Immortal Secret character written on the homework sheet, copied them onto a different sheet of paper, and handed it to Yulong. The task took until evening, and by the time it was finished, I was exhausted.

But I had also gained something enormous. Using my instant memory ability, I had memorized the entire dictionary. After eating, I returned to my room and used the dictionary I had memorized to decipher the secret manual. Then I finally understood the qi cultivation method called Meimei Gong and the Shrinking Earth Method of Meisen Swordsmanship.

Starting the next morning, I began practicing Meimei Gong and proper Meisen Swordsmanship. The disappointing part was that in practicing Meisen Swordsmanship, I was using a wooden stick about sixty centimeters long. I really wanted to practice with a real sword.