5 — Chapter 4

According to Kengo, Nodon was apparently in his mid-twenties, younger than us, but he looked well over forty no matter how you saw it.

Even photos of young people from the Showa era could look shockingly old, so maybe people from harsh and savage times simply had shorter lives and looked older.

Nodon’s company faced one of the livelier streets in town, and the moment I stepped outside, there was a whole row of street vendors lined up to catch the foot traffic. The smell of grilled meat made my throat gulp, but I endured it and walked past.

It was not because I would get beaten if Nodon found out I had bought food on the street, but because whenever I delivered the magic stone trade records to the lord’s mansion where Iiria was, I was usually given a light meal.

Out of a daily wage of twenty copper coins, spending one or two copper coins on a small snack was actually a pretty big deal. In my previous life I had not really thought much about saving money, but here I had to think about all kinds of things.

After all, unemployment insurance did not exist, and there was no health insurance either.

And when I thought about resigning myself to low-paid labor under Nodon forever, I naturally felt a little uneasy about the future.

Also, as an immediate and pressing problem, I wanted my own room like Kengo had.

Unlike my previous world, where mechanization had advanced and mass production was taken for granted, all goods were in short supply here, and housing was no exception.

Owning a home was an extraordinary thing, and for most people it was normal to board at their workplace and sleep under the eaves or in a storeroom. Even the fact that I was allowed to stay in the company warehouse counted as fortunate.

Because of that, there was not even really a concept of homelessness, and sleeping on the street was perfectly ordinary.

Kengo, on the other hand, had rented a shabby room at an inn, but even so, it was still a private room with a lock on the door.

Apparently, since his position as mining supervisor was a quasi-public job, it paid fairly well.

But on a daily wage of twenty copper coins, that was far beyond my reach.

And it was not as though I could expect Nodon to give me a raise.

Even people who had worked there for a long time were apparently only at the level of thirty or forty copper coins.

And it was not even that Nodon was especially stingy; the situation was simply that everywhere, just having work at all was something to be grateful for.

People had made a fuss about widening inequality even in the previous world, but it was nothing compared to this.

And even in the previous world, only a hundred years ago, society had still been divided into the great majority of poor people who owned nothing and a tiny handful of the wealthy.

Another world was not a utopia either.

It had magic that the previous world did not, and beastfolk existed, but life’s harshness was much the same.

And not that it was because of that exactly, but the thing that truly hurt in my current life was not being yelled at by Nodon, nor the salary that was never likely to rise, nor being forced to sleep in a rat-infested warehouse with no privacy.

Once life became stable, the mind gained room to breathe.

And once the mind gained room to breathe, the realistic desires I had forgotten began to rear their heads.

“…I want to play games…”

Games, my one and only hobby.

But the thirst I felt now was not about some big new title I had been looking forward to before coming here; it was simply because there was almost nothing here that could be called entertainment at all.

At this point, I could probably enjoy even the worst trash game.

Entertainment here meant nothing but rough gambling by grubby men, and it did not feel at all like a place to enjoy intellectual games.

Other than that, it was alcohol or women, in other words, a barbaric world.

When I complained about that to Kengo, he stroked his scruffy beard and said this.

“I’m happy with this life because I can still do strength training.”

“…”

The disbelief I felt had probably shown on my face.

Noticing that, Kengo cleared his throat and said it again.

“I didn’t explain that well. What I mean is, didn’t you think the same thing at that moment, Yorinobu?”

“That moment?”

“You know, that moment when you realized you were going to die. You thought you should’ve done this, or should’ve done that, right?”

“…”

“And for me, that was strength training.”

Apparently, Kengo had been hit by a car on his way home from a project wrap-up party while drunkenly practicing posing in the street.

I thought, does something like that really happen, but then again, considering the two-block-haircut gorillas from the foreign consulting firm I had dealt with through a client at my previous job, it also felt entirely plausible that they would do something like that.

“So I don’t really have many complaints, and if anything, I’m almost grateful for that accident. It made me realize what I really wanted to do. Didn’t you have something like that too, Yorinobu?”

“…”

At that time, I did not answer Kengo.

I just gave vague responses like, well, or yeah.

A big part of it was embarrassment.

There had actually been a reason why I was so dazed that I failed to notice the red light.

The whole time, I had been escaping reality by fantasizing about slamming down my resignation and quitting.

And once I was free, there had been something I wanted to do.

“I wanted to make games…”

In a corner of the bustling marketplace, men were absorbed in a simple dice game, gambling away that day’s earnings.

It had no strategy or anything of the sort, just pure luck in an even-or-odd wager.

I heard that the noble class had entertainment like chess, but of course that was not what I had wanted to make.

It was to be a large-scale management simulation game, with a visual novel attached.

I had once tried it back in college and failed.

It was that common kind of thing, where a bunch of otaku who were full of hot air gathered together and got wildly excited at the planning stage, only for everything to fall apart once the actual work began.

At the time, I had been the one trying to hold it all together, so the hardship had become traumatic. After that, and with how busy I was as a working adult, that small dream had simply been left as it was.

But when work became too painful, I had dreamed, like it was anesthesia, of living a life where I made games.

If you looked online, it was full of stories about people who struck it big with indie games while still students, or people who quit their jobs and threw themselves into making games.

Stimulated by those dreamlike stories, my settings and worldbuilding only kept swelling larger and larger.

I had steadily built up only the preparations, telling myself that once I quit my job, I would start making it.

Right before I was hit by that car, I had strongly thought, if this is what it was going to come to, I should have quit that company much sooner… and of course, there was no way I could forget that.

And in this world, there was no game engine, no computer, not even electricity.

I might perhaps be able to make a board game, but even that would be hard.

Since I worked at a merchant company, I had no trouble checking the prices of things. And I had learned that even trying to make something like a board game would cost a tremendous amount of money.

To begin with, there was no suitable material like cardboard, and to make illustrations, I would have to commission miniature painters—craftsmen employed by nobles—and even paint was expensive enough to make me keel over.

On a daily wage of twenty copper coins, just barely enough to survive, making a board game was completely impossible.

Even saving money would be little more than a drop in the bucket.

Which meant that in this world too, I would once again be unable to fulfill my dream, and would instead spend my days in endless low-wage labor.

“Haa…”

I let out a sigh at my own patheticness.

In my previous world, there had been highly capable game engines available for free, and even countless lecture videos.

If I had wanted to make something, I could have made as much as I liked.

But realizing that now was useless; I had no way of returning to the previous world, and those who do not work do not eat.

Lost in thought, I was glared at by a beastfolk hauling a heavy-looking cart, and hurriedly stepped aside to let him pass.

Everyone was working in order to live.

I had to work too.

If I had been overpowering everyone in another world, maybe I would have felt very differently, but here too, I was just an NPC.

For now, I decided to finish the work at hand and headed for the lord’s mansion.