1-8 At The Village Inn

I walked to look for the village inn.

It was a village with nothing much going on, so it wasn’t even worth relying on the map.

Besides, there was basically only one road that counted as a road, so even someone as directionally hopeless as me would find it extremely hard to get lost.

There it was, there it was.

A proper-looking, weathered wooden sign hung by wire.

Calling it an inn was almost too generous—it was a rundown building—but, well, that was life out here.

These days, even old hotels and inns in Japan couldn’t squeeze out repair money, so a lot of them had gotten pretty bad.

Even in a wealthy prefecture like Aichi Prefecture, apparently there were seaside hot-spring hotels where—seen from the ocean side—the foundations were half collapsing.

Their management situations were dire enough to make it understandable, but it was all visible to guests out for a morning stroll, so people wrote it up in reviews.

And that wasn’t limited to hotels, either.

“Hello. I’m a traveling merchant—can I stay the night?”

“Yeah, it’ll be five copper coins for one night.”

“Please.”

“The rooms are upstairs. Use whichever one you like.”

A middle-aged landlady came out, I paid five copper coins, and went up to a room on the second floor.

Mmm, it was a cramped room.

Nothing but a crude bed and bedding.

There wasn’t even a desk for writing.

Compared to this, a single room at a Japanese business hotel would feel like a suite.

But just being able to sleep safely under a roof made me thrilled.

And above all, it was dirt cheap.

Bandits still made it hard to feel safe, but at least monsters like Gryon wouldn’t show up here.

After that, I decided to do a quick “village exploration,” for fun.

It ended almost instantly.

It really was a village with nothing in it.

So this was what people meant by “the frontier.”

A lord’s manor?

There was one slightly nicer building, and there was a horse that neighed cutely.

I made sure to pat its muzzle.

It was friendly—didn’t bite even a first-time traveler.

You could practically picture the character of its owner, the person who must govern this village.

Traveling by horse might be nice, too.

Personally, I felt a bit resistant to traveling by horse, though.

I’d never ridden one.

Other than that, there was a blacksmith, something like a leatherworker’s shop, and then a small village church.

That was really it.

So the tavern and the shop really were the village’s major hotspots.

I still wished I could’ve entered that town.

Money was still precious.

Food would be my own copied supplies.

Hmph—I forgot to check what the toilet situation was.

That was the thing I cared about the most, too.

At the very least, it definitely wasn’t a fancy Japanese washlet.

I prayed it was better than my bucket toilet.

I had good Japanese toilet paper, so that part was fine.

If there was a toilet at all, that was already an improvement.

What had it been like in old Europe?

It probably varied by region.

To be honest, to understand toilet conditions across the vast European lands of old empires, I’d probably have to dig into some rare specialist book that only a handful of researchers cared about.

If anything, the research lab of a Japanese toilet manufacturer might know the most.

I’d seen a website like that once.

Even earlier, in the Roman era, when the empire prospered across huge distances, toilets were apparently impressive thanks to aqueducts and flush systems; and Europe even had jobs like “saltpeter men” who collected nitrates under toilets for gunpowder—so households must have had something equivalent to a toilet.

But details changed by era and region, so the specifics were unclear.

I wanted to acquire clothing from this world, too, but if possible I wanted to copy it somewhere.

So far I’d only managed a tiny bit of trade, so cash was still precious and buying stock properly would be difficult.

Gold plates couldn’t be converted here.

Worse, they might get me targeted.

Ah—but today, I should eat in the dining hall after all.

More than anything, I wanted information about this world and this area.

First, in my room, I checked my equipment in case I got dragged into a defense battle.

First were the swords.

My main weapon was a long sword with a ninety-centimeter blade.

Then there was a short sword with a forty-centimeter blade, and a reinforced shovel.

For me, the shovel felt the most usable—if I swung it with brute force using my enhanced body, it would probably work out.

Next was the spear.

I had a large spear with a huge sixty-centimeter blade, and a shorter throwing spear with a forty-centimeter blade.

Spears really suited modern humans, who were naturally good at throwing.

A human holding a spear was that classic museum display pose—usually paired with a mammoth.

They even said that long ago, women participated in hunting on the front lines, too.

Then there was the weapon that amateurs always got told to use—the axe.

I’d doubled its size, so it should pack a decent punch.

But axes concentrated weight at the head and were very hard to handle.

It was a “one hit, one kill” sort of tool, which made it feel difficult for a cowardly amateur to use in real combat.

For amateurs, a shovel might be better.

With my growing enhancements, I could probably handle a big axe now—but before, even holding it would’ve been a struggle.

It wasn’t made for a Japanese build.

Even well-trained, big-built members of the Self-Defense Forces supposedly struggled with the recoil of 7.62mm rifles and had to reduce the powder charge by around a quarter.

It wasn’t like the old single-shot rifle era.

Even the U.S. military shrank rifle caliber for those sorts of reasons.

They also wanted to carry more ammunition, but still.

If I fired full-auto, I couldn’t even shoot properly—my gun would violently swim upward toward the sky.

Even if I was a descendant of Mikawa men—foot-soldier farmers—who once fought while swinging around a massive horse-slaying machete that felt like it weighed three axes… I was still only a descendant!

Modern people were soft.

Old samurai probably used mounted swords meant to be swung from horseback, but when you saw swords and armor displayed in museums, they looked several times bigger than ordinary swords.

How many kilos did those things weigh?

To master them, they must have repeated stress fractures.

Old samurai were incredible.

The swords you normally saw now were designed for portability—light infantry weapons.

And what people now called “Japanese swords” were supposedly ceremonial blades that became common in the Edo period.

Even those would be too heavy for me to handle properly without enhancements.

But with my current enhanced power, how would it be?

Even so, I couldn’t handle even a small hatchet well—it was unbalanced.

That was basically a throwing-only weapon for me.

And even then, if your throw didn’t land right, it would just bounce off.

Knives were the same.

My knives ranged from sixteen-centimeter throwing knives to an outdoor knife that was also doubled in size.

After that, all I had were a meat cleaver and a hatchet-machete.

For me, the most comfortable was the hatchet-machete—a Japanese-made blade that fit Japanese hands well.

Even that depended on the opponent, though.

Against small enemies like goblins that liked to get into close range, swinging it around might not be a bad choice.

Using it against a wild boar was suicidal.

At best, you’d get your thigh artery shredded by charging tusks.

For boars, the right approach was to trap them in a dedicated iron box trap and finish them with a “boar spear.”

That was just a stainless-steel rod sharpened with a grinder, but still.

With that surefire method, you could definitely beat a boar.

Obviously.

A trapped boar would starve to death if you left it, but then cleanup would probably be…

And if you were going to kill a boar anyway, you wanted the meat.

Boars showed up a lot near my father’s family home.

I should’ve just gotten a hunting license and hunted boar myself.

On relatives’ land, you could easily hunt them.

And you could even butcher them locally.

Apparently if you didn’t wash properly at first, odors from the outside grime would transfer into the meat.

When I was a kid, I liked stories about “armor boars.”

It was a tale about an old, yokai-like, cunning boar that packed mud all over its body and bounced bullets like an armadillo.

Those things wrecked rice fields, which was a problem.

They also dig up bamboo shoots and tear up mountainsides.

A seventy-year-old man in Nagano once grappled a bear that had entered his yard and beat the hell out of it with a hatchet-machete until it ran off—apparently a true story.

That kind of blade, if you mastered it, really did have that much combat potential.

I also had iron plates made by dismantling the car, prepared for dropping.

There was a heavy 1.5-meter by 2-meter guillotine-like piece, and a comparatively pointed one that was 10 centimeters wide by 1 meter long.

I’d finished off a Gryon with that.

Back home, when you were driving, sometimes you ended up behind trucks hauling exposed sharp scrap like that.

It made your heart race.

If you took that head-on, the scrap had so much mass that it would smash through your windshield and you’d be shredded or impaled—horrific.

On typhoon days with insane wind speed, even plastic bottles became artillery shells that shattered windows.

Well then—maybe I’d make monsters and bandits feel that same thrill.

The remaining heavy parts from dismantling the car were the frame, engine, automatic transmission, differential, and wheels.

If those got dropped on your head, that would be a disaster.

If something like that fell from a great height and landed cleanly, even a dragon might end up with a nice bump.

For firebombs, I had two types of whiskey bottles and one type of shochu bottle.

Gasoline was in a dedicated inventory—produced in large quantities as fuel.

The rocks for dropping were a collection I’d worked hard to gather along the way.

I had multiple sizes: two meters in diameter, one and a half meters, and thirty centimeters.

Also stones for throwing.

Mostly ten-centimeter and five-centimeter sizes—things that looked easy to grip.

I didn’t think I could use a sling.

I was clumsy, so I’d have to just throw using brute force with my enhanced power.

Which was likely to be spectacularly inaccurate, admittedly.

There were also weapons where stones were tied to both ends of a rope and you threw it to tangle an animal’s legs.

When I was a kid, I felt like those always played a huge role in fiction, so it was a shame I couldn’t use such an exciting weapon.

For large swords meant for dropping, I had massive ones with blade lengths of nine meters and four and a half meters, and “manageable” sizes ranging from 1.8 meters down to ninety centimeters.

Then there were shields—or rather, just obstacles.

I’d removed and reinforced a car door, and I’d have to hold it by the handle.

And as for a helmet… it was basically a reinforced pressure cooker.

I’d drilled holes, attached a chin strap, and tied it in a bow—like something out of a manga.

It was ridiculously heavy, too.

Man… it was kind of depressing.

I could probably still fight with it, but there had to be better armor somewhere.

Couldn’t I make some kind of explosive weapon?

So, I separated water from the battery’s dilute sulfuric acid and generated concentrated sulfuric acid.

Handling acids was dangerous, so I did everything inside an inventory.

In the settings, I’d disabled state-locking for that inventory file.

If it looked dangerous, I’d toss the whole file into the item box trash.

Acids were seriously dangerous if they spilled.

Using sources like car exhaust, stove combustion gases, and the ammonia in urine, I refined nitric oxide and then nitrogen dioxide, and from there created nitric acid.

Honestly, this ability was convenient.

The fact that I could make dangerous substances this easily…

Better not tempt fate.

The acid itself was also a major hazard.

Next I produced mixed acid by combining it with sulfuric acid.

While looking things up online, I tried making various things with the item box’s decomposition and synthesis functions.

Since the results carried explosion risk, I didn’t take them out of the inventory.

I also separated glycerin from vehicle-related fluids.

Dangerous substances like nitrocellulose, nitroglycerin, and ammonium nitrate—made in a space that wasn’t the real world, as if I were synthesizing them inside a PC.

The dedicated inventory used to manufacture them was inside the magic PC, so it felt safe, at least.

Using diatomaceous earth I’d discovered through appraisal on the way here as a material, I tried making dynamite from nitroglycerin.

They were all dangerous materials I didn’t want to handle directly.

Since many of these were unstable, I moved what I made into a separate time-stopped inventory.

I wanted something more stable, but for now it didn’t seem like I could make anything too complex quickly.

I packed explosives into plastic containers and drilled holes at the top.

I packed nitrocellulose into thin tubing from the car’s wiring harness using the synthesis function, turning it into a fuse.

Then I screwed the fuse into the explosive container and sealed it with hot-melt adhesive used for car headlights.

It was scary to use because I couldn’t predict the time between ignition and detonation.

I wanted to test it.

I really wished I had black powder for fuses.

With my simple nitroglycerin, it would probably be impact-sensitive—dropping it from a height might be enough to make it explode.

Someday I’d test it by dropping it from the item box.

I also stuffed it with bolts, screws, thin metal parts, and so on, creating a fragmentation payload.

Basically a fragmentation grenade that sprayed shrapnel.

I struggled with how to arrange the metal so it would scatter properly.

Against people, this would be more than enough.

For now, this was all I could make.

Normally, you couldn’t even do this—but my item box was specialized heavily toward production and development.

Maybe it was because I’d spent my life buried deep in manufacturing.

I should also make large gasoline containers.

A standard cooler box was 30 liters; copied at double size it became 240 liters.

Triple size was 810 liters, quadruple was 1,920 liters, five times was 3,750 liters, ten times was 30 kiloliters, and twenty times was 240 kiloliters.

That last one was the capacity of two dozen tanker trucks… what on earth was I even planning to use that for?

The power was so excessive it became hard to use.

That was enough to burn down a town across several square kilometers.

If I used the item box to drop it from high up like a bomb, the impact would splash gasoline over a wide area, sparks would ignite it, and it would become a giant firework on the ground.

A massive explosion from 240,000 liters of gasoline.

I didn’t even want to imagine what would happen next.

Wouldn’t that town from earlier get wiped out in one shot?

---

It was already evening.

For a modest drinking party to close out the day, the tavern was fairly lively.

In a village like this, there wasn’t anywhere else to have fun.

Inside, old tables and chairs were lined up.

About eighty percent of the seats were filled with people who looked like villagers.

This was a minimal economy where copper coins flew around.

I watched for a moment and found a table where two old men were loudly chatting, then sat in the seat beside them.

“Good evening. If you don’t mind, may I join you? I’m traveling, and I’d love to hear about various things.”

I greeted them politely and asked.

“Yeah, sure,” came the friendly reply.

Idle old men loved to talk, so they were perfect for moments like this.

I quickly moved into place.

“Miss, I’ll have the same drink as these gentlemen. And please give these gentlemen a refill, too.”

“Sure thing!”

I immediately treated the old men to drinks.

To be honest, the cheerful reply came from a woman who looked like she’d graduated from being called “miss” about twenty years ago.

“You’ve got good sense, young man!”

“Haha—this is a young man’s modest respect and courtesy toward his elders.”

I asked the staff what dishes they recommended and ordered those too.

A wine-like drink arrived first, so I toasted with them.

Then they eagerly told me all kinds of stories.

When I mentioned that I’d only done small-scale trading and had never seen big money, they said they had left the village when they were younger, and they told me about currency, too.

“Above silver coins are large silver coins, gold coins, large gold coins, and platinum coins. Apparently there’s something above that, but even we don’t know.”

So there were quite a few types of money.

One old man took a big gulp of wine and grew even more talkative.

“Once, I saw a large gold coin handled by a merchant, but I’ve never seen anything above that. Ordinary villagers rarely even lay eyes on a gold coin.”

“How do you tell time?”

“You don’t know much for a merchant. A day is twenty-four hours and is divided into twelve watches. In towns, they ring bells every watch from six to eighteen. Other than that, people go by sunrise and sunset. Lamp oil is expensive, so the village only uses it in places like this. In this village, the only homes that use oil lamps are probably the magistrate’s and the village chief’s.”

Good—so a watch would be useful.

Looking at the map’s shape, the continental layout seemed different from Earth’s, but it was probably still a planet similar to Earth.

Was this some kind of parallel world?

Gravity felt perfectly normal.

A year was probably around 365 days, too.

Maybe this was a neighboring world—one running alongside ours.

If so, there might still be a chance to return to Japan.

If instead this was some planet at the far edge of the universe in the same reality where Earth existed, that might actually be worse.

“How many people live in this village?”

“This is a small village—about four hundred people. We heard about bandits today, but if we take a full raid, it’ll be rough. This is the frontier, so life is hard. If we take damage, we won’t recover. In the past, a whole village around here disappeared. Sometimes villages and towns fail to survive after monster attacks, too.”

“Monsters…”

I found myself remembering yesterday’s monster.

“What kinds of monsters are common around here?”

“What kinds show up? Well, it’s the usual stuff around here. Goblins, orcs, wolves, bears, boars. Sometimes giant spiders infest the area, too.”

“What…? That sounds dangerous.”

I felt my face twist on its own.

I couldn’t forget the unpleasant way Gryon felt, like it drilled straight into your mind.

“Well, that’s what adventurers are for. If it’s alone, even village men can drive off a goblin, but an orc is another story. That takes the whole village. Either way, if there are too many, you can’t handle any of them. Wolves are dangerous because they form packs. If a bear-type monster shows up, that’s an immediate extermination request. It’s not just a bear—villagers would never beat it. This is the frontier, so there are a lot of monsters.”

I see.

Not knowing any better, I’d walked a long distance.

So monsters showed up normally.

Most of the attack methods I had were long-range physical weapons, and strong physical attacks were flashy and hard to use discreetly—that was the problem.

“So then, what exactly is an adventurer?”

“Someone who registers at the Adventurers’ Guild in town. Some of the low-rank ones are desperate and down on their luck, so be careful.”

So an Adventurers’ Guild really existed.

What a strange world.

It was like a web novel.

Getting worked up, the old man swirled his wine cup and shouted in a booming voice.

“Can’t you register in a village?”

“No. A guild card also functions as identification, so they won’t issue one to suspicious people who can’t even enter a town. The guild screens you, too. Suspicious types get rejected fast.”

“That’s disappointing. Is there no other way to get identification?”

“If you get hired by a big trading company, or if the village chief or local lord trusts you deeply, you might be able to get papers issued. But basically, that sort of thing is only for villagers.”

This was tougher than I’d expected.

What was I supposed to do?

“To become a villager?”

“You need approval from the village chief and the lord. You want to be a villager? Well, do your best, young man!”

No, that was… questionable. That was basically a lifetime villager route.

My father’s side had been villagers for generations, though.

Recently, they got annexed by Toyota City—an authority-rich place expanding its territory like a strongman state—and they safely became city residents.

“This country is…?”

“It’s big. The capital is far, but it’s huge! It has all kinds of things. The royal palace, mansions of royal blood and nobles, and the estates of great merchants. And grand theaters, luxury shops, fine restaurants, even noble schools. All sorts of workshops, art crafts, dazzling furnishings, jewelers and high-end clothing shops. All kinds of food, and events in the plazas. And weapons and armor—amazing stuff. There are even items made of mythril and orichalcum. Though those magical metals are too precious to even see, most of the time.”

Magical metals!

I definitely wanted to see those!

Actually, I wanted them.

I might be able to copy them with my ability, couldn’t I?

And they sounded like they’d sell for a fortune.

“Wow. That sounds wonderful.”

I pictured those scenes and goods in my mind, entranced.

“Though they won’t let you into the capital easily. The capital gate always has a long line. Nobles, of course, and merchants with capital trade rights, and adventurers of a certain rank get a free pass.”

Right.

Of course.

“Oh, and there’s a legend that this country was founded by a rare visitor. They say the royal family and ducal houses are descendants. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. A rare visitor, they say, is someone who came from another world, somewhere not here. They say such people can do strange things, but that kind of talk is probably nonsense.”

Seriously… so that was what I was, then.

Maybe that was why everything was turning into web-novel nonsense.

When it looked like the old men were about to finish their drinks, I called to the “miss” again and treated them to another round, so their stories continued.

“They say the country has rules to protect rare visitors, but who knows how it works in reality. If nobles catch you, it’ll be trouble. But since you can’t enter the capital anyway, those rare visitors probably don’t end up protected by the country. In the end, they’re just people who exist in legends and rumors. Even the first king was like a protagonist from stories and legends.”

What the hell.

Good thing I’d been cautious.

Still—how could this old man be so knowledgeable?!

He was way beyond “small village villager” level.

Maybe that was just what happened if you’d lived outside the village when you were young.

“What about the nobles?”

“This village’s lord is a knight baron. He lives in the town of Elmia. Here in the village, it’s the magistrate who’s stationed. The lord governs four nearby villages and his own town. Well, it’s a tiny end-of-the-world town on the frontier, so he has it tough. In bigger towns that aren’t frontier, the town is governed by a baron or a viscount. In the farthest frontier villages around here, the lords aren’t even baronets. Our lord isn’t a bad man. Other knightly houses are much the same. But some push too hard trying to earn achievements, so be careful.”

Nobles, huh.

That smelled like trouble, so I’d be careful.

This country was quite large.

Since I could measure it on the map, a quick estimate put its land area at roughly 2.4 million square kilometers.

More than six times Japan’s size.

Even saying “nobles” would cover all kinds of people, I bet.

That was obvious, but still.

“I’d like to hear more about that.”

I took out a memo pad and wrote down what the old men told me.

“Right. Above that is the baron who oversees this whole region. He’s a major lord who rules five towns beneath him. If this weren’t a frontier region, he’d be equivalent to a viscount. He also rules a fairly large town himself. Well, either way, it’s still frontier land. You don’t hear many bad rumors about the baron, but the knight barons under him are all about the same. It depends on the lord—their character, their thinking… it varies. When the title changes hands, that changes too. Above them is the count who governs the southern frontier district. That’s the so-called ‘frontier count,’ and people like that often have power on par with a marquis.”

“At that level, even we villagers don’t really know much. Above that is the marquis in the capital who’s their liege, and above that is His Majesty the King. Basically, nobles in this country shouldn’t be the kind who do truly unreasonable things. His Majesty wouldn’t allow such cruelty. Well, the low-ranking nobles in the capital might pull all sorts of nonsense, and there are plenty who throw their weight around. But this country is still one of the better ones. Go to other countries, and some are outrageous. The people in the neighboring country across the river—poor things. Demihumans are persecuted there, and many are enslaved.”

Thank goodness I hadn’t ended up in that neighboring country.

Here, if I played it right, it might even be possible to get state protection!

But demihuman slaves, huh.

That caught my interest.

Animal ears… or elves!