8-4 The Birth Of “Beast-Ear Kindergarten”

I tried taking in the orphaned kids little by little, but one problem was that there were some kids who ended up in a corner, hugging their knees.

There were so many lively kids that I did not notice at first, but now there were about four of them, so they stood out.

There were kids who seemed indifferent even to the church in Elmia, but when they left, they looked like they had opened up a little.

Surely, time would solve this sort of thing.

For now, thinking that a bit more energy might lift their mood, I decided to expand the facilities and make it feel more like a kindergarten.

On the online forum I had jokingly called myself the director, but maybe I could do it properly.

It was ridiculous, considering I had become a world-top-rank adventurer in this other world, but I abruptly stopped my plan to go on an adventure journey.

In the first place, I did not need to go out of my way to “adventure” when there was a dungeon right here.

On top of that, I did not really have a specific reason or goal to go adventuring, and I was an ultra-aged old guy who would be a complete grandpa in a few years anyway.

Mari did not particularly say, “Let’s go on an adventure journey like we promised,” either.

Besides, Mari’s precious home was at the bottom of this dungeon, and right now she seemed to be enjoying taking care of the kids too.

If there was something for them to do, some of them might change.

For now, I built one more building next door identical to the safe house.

Well, it was just copying the building and doing the carpentry work for installation with magic.

Then I turned that one into classroom facilities.

Originally, this was a building in Adros that had been built as a workshop, and it had deteriorated and been abandoned.

But it had originally been built extremely solid.

They said objects had memories.

Even a pebble lying around might once have had an amazing story worthy of a hero.

I felt like I had heard someone claim there was memory at the atomic level.

If that was true, then maybe things like elementary particles or ultra-micro particles formed a memory system.

Atoms traveled over long, long spans of time, accumulating layers upon layers of memories, rewriting records like a hard drive overwrote data.

Restoration was basically an ability to reproduce the memory an object held.

Using mana as raw material, it reconstructed the object according to the memory it possessed.

Maybe this kind of ability was similar to how Takeshi constructed Mari.

I could not create something incredible like a magic homunculus, though.

That kid was less a doll and more something that should indeed be called a homunculus.

Mari was completely different from a mere automaton-like doll—she was a perfect artificial magical life-form.

With living things, the restoration skill regenerated them little by little, so it did not affect life activity.

I thought even humans changed the material that made up their bodies through cell replacement, but I was restored perfectly.

Maybe, for living things, it read memories held in the brain and nerves, or records at the genetic level, by scanning with mana.

This unique skill of mine was based on fragments of Earth’s scientific knowledge.

It was probably because I was the type of person who was logical and obsessed with things like that.

It compromised with the laws of this world and took shape as a skill.

And those were only within the range of what was possible in this world.

At the very least, it seemed easy to use the restoration skill to return an old, deteriorated building to the condition it had when it was built.

Maybe that was because I, at least, had no real limit on my mana, so I could go all out on things like that.

The workshop was made up of several large rooms.

It seemed the apprentices who worked here had slept together in some of the rooms.

There was also a private room for the master craftsman.

There were six smaller rooms of about twenty tatami mats, and three large rooms of fifty tatami mats.

There was a big dining hall and a kitchen, and water was produced with magic tools.

The ceiling was about four meters high.

What on earth had they been making here?

Since it was a fairly large building, it must have been something on a decent scale.

After restoration, I could not see any traces of what it used to be.

It was a single-story structure, with pillars made mostly of near-round logs, cross-braced, then boarded over, and finally coated with plaster walls.

Inside the workshop, the walls were wooden and had a nice atmosphere.

Maybe the master craftsman loved the texture of wood like an Englishman.

It even had a proper attic.

It felt like a big beast-eared mouse could come skittering around up there.

One of the large workshops served as the safe house free space for kids coming from outside.

It had toys and picture books, and the space deeper inside had become the place for the kids who originally lived here.

Between them, the wall had a huge opening four meters wide and three meters high.

They could casually go play with the kids in the back, and it worked the other way around too.

It was also fine if a child from the back took their hand and led them in.

Adults did not force anything at all.

The very back room was the study room.

It had study tables where everyone could sit lined up on the floor, and each kid had their own locker.

There was no particular kindergarten-style curriculum.

If they wanted to study, they could come here.

They did not necessarily have to live here.

Next to these workshops was a corridor three meters wide, and across from it was the dining hall.

Kids who lived here and kids who came from outside could all eat together here.

Of the six twenty-tatami rooms, one was made into a staff night-duty room.

For live-in staff, I assigned bungalow housing.

If everyone got woken up at midnight every day by kids, their bodies would not hold up.

The remaining five were children’s bedrooms.

Right now it was four kids per twenty-tatami room, so the rooms were still pretty empty.

In the end, they split up into friend groups anyway.

Luckily, everyone already had their original companions, so there were no loners.

Ha!

There was one.

That was none other than me.

I was the only one sleeping alone.

The newly built kindergarten section I expanded was a copy of the same building as the safe house, but its layout was completely different.

Of the three big fifty-tatami rooms, the first classroom was the free-curriculum zone.

Unlike the safe house, this was not a “do whatever you want” place—it was about studying what you wanted within the curriculum.

It also had textbooks and teaching materials used in this world.

The second classroom handled hands-on skills like crafts, art, and sewing.

Each lesson content was separated by unit, so there was no problem of joining halfway through the year and being unable to keep up.

Well, it was things like clay work, drawing, and making clothes for dolls.

It was a kindergarten, after all.

The third classroom was an indoor gym.

Basically, it was a play-wrestling and group-play zone.

The smaller rooms besides those were planned for lectures and desk study.

The fourth classroom was for picture-book read-aloud time, simple letter writing, and basic addition and subtraction.

It might still be too early for the little ones.

The fifth classroom was the music room, with a silent barrier.

This one was mostly for singing lessons.

We could also do simple instrument practice.

It was like elementary school music class.

The sixth classroom was a tool practice room.

It was a classroom to teach how to use simple tools and implements.

Seven through nine were seminar rooms, and I thought it would be fun to invite various instructors for workshops.

Adventurers, food-stall uncles, weapon and armor shop owners, waiters and waitresses, knights, magistrates, coachmen, and so on.

And maybe I would bring someone like Bell-kun as a dungeon specialist.

Some of them would probably aim to become adventurers too.

After all, Adros was a town right at the dungeon’s doorstep.

As for inviting a king as an instructor—that was probably off the table.

A wild-card option would be His Highness Prince Emilio.

He was close in age, and with that personality, it might actually work surprisingly well.

In a “friends hanging out” kind of way.

Outside, assuming a fluffy sports festival, I made the playground wide.

I set up a sandbox, swings, a seesaw, and an athletic course with buried tires.

I even had matching smocks made at a shop in town.

I picked an extremely cute one online.

On the outside wall, I transferred cute drawings of beast-eared kids I had hunted down online onto boards inside my item box.

I even added flower patterns and the like.

Then I posted those next to the main gate on the outer wall.

Thanks to that, it ended up feeling nicely kindergarten-like.

The signboard had “Beast-Ear Kindergarten” written vertically in Japanese.

And thus, under the director’s overwhelmingly obsessive dedication, Beast-Ear Kindergarten was explosively born into this other world.