Let’s Just Give It A Try First!

Meanwhile, the front line had turned into a fierce back-and-forth struggle.

The exploits of the five additional Heroes who had been sent as reinforcements stood out so much that they were hard to miss, and they were looking at the new medicine assigned to them, thinking how curious and fascinating it was.

“This batch of supplies we got this time feels huge.”

Kim Sangjin, who was applying an ointment labeled ‘Ingrad Apothecary’ to his wounded area, said that as he looked at his friends, fellow Heroes and party members, and the other friends were reacting in much the same way.

“A top-grade potion restores two thousand, but this ointment, even though it heals slowly, seems to refill our HP up to four thousand. The numbers on the info screen are all different on average, but that’s probably because of the quality, right?”

“For emergency recovery, a top-grade potion is better, but in the middle of combat, keeping this ointment jar open and just smearing it on from time to time seems like a pretty good method too. It’s a hassle every time we have to punch a hole in it so it hangs nicely, though.”

“By the way, Jeong Jina, you seem to be changing bit by bit as you level up.”

The Hero called Jeong Jina looked herself over, gave a little shrug of her shoulders, and then spoke to another friend.

“Is it because I put my stat points into HP? I feel like I’ve put on a bit of weight lately. Han Jiyeong, you too, right?”

Of the five Heroes talking now, three were women. One of them had a mage class that had no reason to invest in HP, while the other two had close-combat classes, so a sense of fellow feeling quickly began to form.

“Yeah, when you put points into HP… how should I put it? It feels like your development gets better. Look at this.”

Then, as if to show off, Han Jiyeong grabbed her chest with both hands as she spoke, and Kim Sangjin and U Hyeonwoo blushed and turned their heads away. It was not so much that the two of them were shy to a fault; it was more that their friends’ behavior was too mischievous.

But Han Jiyeong, who seemed to have taken a liking to their reactions, kept teasing them, and the other two women started copying her.

“Am I small because I didn’t put any points into HP?”

“Are you kidding me? You’re actually pretty big.”

“Hey, did you just swear at me?”

“You’re the one saying weird stuff. Look, it’s not small at all!”

As they kept kneading one another’s chests and fooling around, Kim Sangjin and U Hyeonwoo, watching their friends, became more and more agitated—and that was when it happened.

“Kkhuhuhuhu, you brats are having such a grand time all huddled together. If you strip buck naked and mate in front of us right now, I might consider sparing your lives… the women only, that is.”

A member of the Demonic Tribe appeared, and while the three women only made dumbfounded faces at his words, Kim Sangjin and U Hyeonwoo jumped up with an “all right then” expression, grabbing sword and shield.

“Kh, judging by how well-developed you are… once you get excited, you look like you’d drip and drip all over, such tasty-looking bodies. Even if you don’t flaunt it like that, I’ll kill these two guys off and dote on you instead.”

Thanks to his unexpected appearance they had, for a moment, felt almost grateful, but as what he was saying turned out to be little more than filthy dirty talk that made them blush with embarrassment, Kim Sangjin and U Hyeonwoo decided they couldn’t listen any longer and charged forward. Behind them came Jeong Jina, Park Jimin, and Han Jiyeong, each making use of her own ability—forming fireballs, wrapping a sword in light, or sending sparks crackling over a gigantic hammer—as they unleashed their power as Heroes.

And at their waists, upper-grade medicine containers beautifully embroidered with the words ‘Ingrad Apothecary’ swung and clinked, showing off their presence to the fullest.

The Heroes were currently leveling up smoothly.

“Ha-a-a-am, did I dump too much work on them?”

When I spoke, Demina answered that taking it easy was nice, wasn’t it, and she had a point—taking it easy was nice. But being too free was a problem as well.

Partly because I had spent so long being incredibly busy, but also because being this idle was unbearably boring, I decided to use the opportunity to finally tackle something I had been putting off. I immediately left the lord’s castle and headed toward the forest in the back where the Sain Tribe lived.

On a day like that, Demina looked at me in puzzlement, so I explained to her.

“I promised Wijel before that I’d build him a house. But when the affairs of the domain got really busy, I kept putting it off for later, and it’s ended up being delayed all the way until now, you know?”

“So you’re going to build a house now? Our tribe doesn’t particularly need houses, though.”

“It’s less a “house” in the ordinary sense. The Sain Tribe is royalty, so it’s more like… something to support royal dignity? You could say it’s a kind of trademark symbol. Anyway, I was planning to make something like that for you.”

Demina didn’t understand what I meant. To be fair, even if I dragged in words from another world, I knew they wouldn’t all be interpreted exactly the way I intended.

The basic meaning got across, but conveying the nuance I wanted still fell short.

Still, thanks to my Linguistics aptitude, at least the conversations themselves went smoothly, and that alone was something to be grateful for.

“You’ll understand once you see it.”

Wijel had asked for roughly ten floors, and the problem was that designing something like that required a rather complicated process.

So I planned to keep it simple by imagining a pyramid shape, setting up the framework, and then filling it in, raising the building that way.

And I planned to leave the inside mostly hollow, packing it densely like a bunker that could be used as a shelter if anything happened in the domain.

‘The practicality is going to be trash, but I still need to make it look cool from the outside…’

After mulling over a few ideas, I arrived at the place where the Sain Tribe lived and saw Wijel there, talking about something while surrounded by Sain children.

“What is Wijel doing?”

“He’s passing down history to the children.”

“History, huh. Well, education is important, that’s true.”

The level of education in this world was not low in itself. However, because knowledge was effectively something that existed for the haves, for those who already had things, the vast majority of commoners had no chance at all to receive schooling.

I had learned that the proportion of people who could write letters did not even reach ten percent, and this alone showed how great a thing it was considered to be able to read and write.

‘Should I try making at least elementary-level education compulsory someday?’

Still, I couldn’t just carelessly voice that thought right now. The nobles of this era wanted the people of their domains to stay stupid. Because they believed knowledge was something only a very small number of chosen individuals were allowed to possess, even if I could, in theory, do as I liked within my own domain, it would give neighboring lords an excuse to oppose me.

‘I don’t think our domain would lose in a contest of strength, but there’s the risk even the Imperial Household might step in to oppose it… There’s no harm in being careful. Maybe it’s still too early…’

I decided to fold that thought up and tuck it away in one corner of my mind until I had gained more power, resolving to take it out again someday when the time was right.

After that, I waited until Wijel finished telling his story, and while I listened, I found that what he was passing on to the children dealt with a surprisingly interesting topic.

It had the feeling of an old folktale like “The Fairy and the Woodcutter,” mainly made up of stories about interacting with humans.

“Why are you teaching them stories like that?”

“In the past, I would have told them tales that emphasized how dangerous humans were, to make the children cautious. But things are changing now, aren’t they? So I’m gradually changing the stories I tell them as well.”

“You’re working hard.”

“It’s all thanks to you, Lord, for leading the change.”

“Stop gilding my face so embarrassingly and come on, looks like your story is wrapping up.”

Once Wijel noticed us, he hurriedly finished his tale, and we were able to walk up to him. With several of the children watching us with interest, I started talking with him.

“What brings you here today?”

“I’m here to finally build that structure I promised you before. I figured it was about time I did it.”

“I heard you’ve had a sudden increase in work lately. Are you sure you’re not busy?”

I shrugged my shoulders and answered.

“As you can see, I’m free. The two people I hired are so capable that I’m living a pretty leisurely life these days. To the point I almost feel bad about it.”

“Kshishishi, in that case, let us go. I’ve been craning my neck waiting, since the spot has been prepared already.”

If I had known that, I would have come much earlier—when I said that, Wijel replied that he was only joking and moved off ahead. We walked for a while, cutting across the forest, and before long the trees ended and a downward slope appeared, leading down a hill. From there, I could see a fairly wide open clearing at the bottom of the slope.

“Did you really not prepare this in advance?”

“Not at all. That place was prepared long ago by the previous lord here, who apparently meant to build a ranch or something. Various building materials are piled up there, hidden by the trees.”

I already knew that many lords who had been assigned here had tried various things. Still, it was unexpected that someone had intended to build a ranch in a place like this. Even so, if you set up a ranch when you couldn’t do anything about the monsters, you would end up just attracting monsters. Maybe that was why they had chosen the area below the hill?

‘Well, I guess it doesn’t matter now…’

Honestly, after the Beastkin settled in nearby, it had become very hard to even see a monster. The Beastkin no longer ventured into the Forest of the Demon Dragon, but within the Ingrad Domain, it was no exaggeration to say that almost all the monsters had been wiped out.

Thanks to that, the number of merchants who gambled and dashed along under the Sky Bridge had increased quite a bit, but a few quick-witted monsters still remained, and damage from them continued to occur from time to time.

I had no obligation to take care of even that much, so I ignored it. Even so, because the toll for the Sky Bridge was high and it took too long to go back and forth, there were plenty of people calling for it to be expanded.

‘But that’s the kind of thing people say when they only see half the picture. I’ve seen plenty of famous restaurants that expanded recklessly because of their reputation and then went bust!’
It was a completely different issue, but when I thought about the manpower that would be required to expand the bridge, I dropped the idea. That was the right choice.

When I walked down the slope and stood in the center of the clearing, I saw that the ground had been carefully packed down, and the circular area had been neatly cleared of trees and roots. It looked like quite a lot of effort had gone into it.

“It looks like someone really put work into this, but in the end, they couldn’t use it… Does anyone know what kind of monsters used to show up around here?”

A large number of Sain who had tagged along out of curiosity started making a noisy fuss, reacting with things like, “I don’t know, do you?” So I quickly gave up on getting an answer, first pushed the onlookers back a bit, and then imagined the framework of the building I was going to create.

Because it was going to be pyramid-shaped, I pictured a combination of squares and triangles and tried to make the image from my memories rise up. For the moment, bare stone pillars thrust up into the air, and Wijel and the Sain watched me with puzzled looks.

“What are you trying to do…?”

“I’m building the structure I mentioned last time, but it’s so big that if I try to make it all at once, I’ll collapse. I don’t even want to imagine what would happen after that.”

Wijel laughed, “Kshishishi.” I remembered how much trouble I had gone through when I collapsed back then. Even now, just thinking back on that time made me sigh. The overprotectiveness had been a bit much.

So I started by constructing the neat, square building at the lowest level. As a row of buildings shot up in a straight line, the Sain watched in wonder, exclaiming, “Oooh.” The amusing thing was that the ordeal I had gone through with magic-power addiction back then had actually led to a dramatic leap in my growth.

Now that my body had fully recovered, even if I made thirty magic-recovery inns in one go with no magic-recovery potions, my magic power no longer ran dry. Not only had my natural recovery increased considerably, but my handling of magic power had become so free that I could reclaim a great deal of what I spent, making my efficiency skyrocket.

When I asked Hare about it, she praised me, saying I had magic-control ability on the level of a ‘great mage’—an Archmage*—but I had no intention of actually using that for combat.

‘If an enemy ever attacks someday, could I expand the ramparts on the fly as needed?’
When I thought about it, it felt like a broken, overpowered ability.

On top of that, because I had been using mana so often, people were now praising me, saying even my mana manipulation was at an advanced level. It really drove home how extraordinary my talents were.

After I finished raising all the buildings on the first floor, I could only scratch my head.

“Sorry, Wijel.”

“Why do you apologize?”

“In this configuration, I don’t think I can go past the seventh floor.”

“Kshishishi, that’s fine. If there are fewer floors, that just means fewer rooms, and the ones trying to earn enough merit to get into this place will only work that much harder.”

“Merit?”

“It’s nothing.”

With that, Wijel shut his mouth at my question. When I looked at Demina, she also turned her head and averted her gaze, which made it obvious there was something going on…

But my instincts told me that if I asked, it would only be a bother, so I kept my mouth shut as well and focused on building the pyramid.