Hope And Kind

At the lord’s question the two village chiefs only opened and shut their mouths, having no idea what answer they were supposed to give. However hard they racked their brains, villages with nothing to look at were not about to yield anything worth selling. For as far back as their memories went they had been poor, and they had been hungry, and it was wonder enough that they had lived this long without dying. Now here they were, being asked for something they could sell.

True, the Black Forest stood there like a wall, but the cold air came down off the snowfield without ever letting up, and the ground was far too cold for farming. Nor was there a mine anywhere with anything worth money buried in it, coal or iron ore.

“Think of whatever your villages have the most of.”

Both faces turned graver still, and Dong-hui’s expectations rose right along with them.

“Erm… beggars?”

The chief of Enol was the first to mutter it, half to himself.

“Our village has no shortage of widows either.”

Not to be outdone, the chief of Morta added their own.

“Oh? There are plenty in ours as well.”

Even that counted as something they had in common, and the two of them looked at each other and grinned. Dong-hui was so dumbfounded she could not even get angry.

“Not that sort of thing…”

She was about to tell them to think of something a little more productive.

— Ding!

A blue status window sprang up with a flash between Dong-hui and the village chiefs.

Good heavens!

For the first time in a long while, a Basic Quest had come up that would expand her activated areas.

But is it really 2% short?
Not 52%?

Dong-hui let out a long sigh at the sight of the two of them, delighted with themselves for having turned up yet another hopeless thing they had in common.

Anyway, what shall it be?
What shall I go with?

Her heart thumped away at the sudden windfall. Fluttering with excitement, she looked from one chief to the other and worked hard at calling up names that might suit them.

She studied the chief of Morta first. He was small and thin and half bald, with a face that was always full of worry.

If I’m giving one anyway, better make it a name that could change things for the better, hadn’t I?

What she wanted spread out before the village was not the bleak reality of beggars and widows but a future full of hope, and she murmured the name quietly.

“Hope!”¹

Ugh!

Still, it had gone through in one go this time, with none of the bouncing back she had run into before. Lousy pronunciation or not, Dong-hui was thrilled. To keep herself from grinning like a fool she forced the corners of her mouth back down as they tried to rise and rolled her lips in between her teeth.

Now that it was settled, the name struck her as rather a good one. There was no denying a certain beer-hall ring to it, but the meaning behind it was fine.

She had murmured it quietly, and yet the chief of Morta must have thought he was being called, because he broke off in the middle of talking with the chief of Enol and jerked his head up.

“Yes, my lady.”

It had never once occurred to Hope that the lord might know so much as his name, and it showed in his face. He looked a little moved.

Two birds with one stone, and everybody happy!

The favorability she had picked up along the way put Dong-hui in a generous mood, and she decided to give him a hint or two.

“How would it be to try developing foods that can be made from Dural? Dural bread, something of that sort. Ah! And there were a great many needle trees along the road to Morta — needle tree sap gets put on wounds too, I hear.”

Hope had already eaten food made from Dural, so that much he understood perfectly well. The needle tree, though, was another matter.

“Yes. But the smell is so foul that it stings the eyes when you put it on.”
“Then you had best look for a way to be rid of the smell as well. Chief Hope, hold a meeting the moment you get back to the village. And tell them that whoever solves the tasks I have set will receive a large prize.”
“A… prize?”

Chief Hope’s eyes went round, and Dong-hui nodded.

“I shall look at what comes of it and then decide whether the prize goes to one person or to ten. If that many good results come of it, then that many more will take a prize, will they not?”
“Yes! We will do our very best to be certain of good results.”

Hope had gone red in the face, like someone who had been drinking beer by the bucketful, and looked overjoyed at the thought of going back to the village to carry the good news to his people.

Dong-hui turned now to the chief of Enol, who was watching her with a face full of expectation. He was taller than Hope and heavier in the bone, and though he was no match for Handsome, he was a good-looking man.

A flower of a middle-aged man, you might say?

He seemed more at ease than he had been the first time she saw him, and his color was a great deal better as well. His short jet-black curls lay flat against his scalp, and between the squared jaw and the slight hook of his nose he looked extremely stubborn whenever his mouth was shut. He carried the whole village’s trust on his own shoulders, and when Dong-hui had visited Enol he had treated her with great kindness.

“Kind?”

Simple as the notion was, she liked the sound of it, and it suited the chief of Enol. And favorability had gone up on top of that, so Kind must certainly like his own name too.

Still, it’s better than Builder or Handsome.
And what sort of name is Patrasche? He isn’t a dog.
Why not Snow White and Cinderella while you were at it.

What is that exclamation mark about?
Don’t tell me there’s actually somebody with a name like that?

Nothing would have pleased her more than poring over the window that very instant, but she could hardly let the two of them watch her stare vacantly off at nothing. Like someone saving a good slice of cake for later, Dong-hui closed it for the time being.

She had the sense that the window had changed the subject in rather a hurry, but she did not pay it much mind. What did it matter if there was a Cinderella, or a Kongjwi and Patjwi² for that matter.

Hope and Kind.

A small pang of regret came over her, that perhaps she ought to have gone with Cass³ instead of Kind. But the window would only have nagged at her about plagiarism again, or about a lack of sincerity, so she shook her head quickly.

Kind was exactly right.

“Yes, my lady.”

Kind must have heard Chloe’s voice too; he answered at once.

“What does the village of Enol have most of? Beggars and widows do not count. That is far too sad. It is nothing to boast of.”

A flicker of consternation passed across Kind’s face; she had expected him to come out with something at once, as Morta had. He soon returned to his usual careful expression, though, thought for a moment and answered hesitantly, with the air of a man worrying whether a thing like this was all right to say.

“The village of Enol has a great deal of mud. That is why we have used so much of it as the main material for building our houses.”
“Mud?”

Dong-hui thought vaguely of yellow ocher clay rooms⁴ and pottery and the like, but she had no knowledge or experience of any of it whatsoever.

“And?”

Her questions kept coming. Kind thought it over again, and then his eyes flew open as though something had come to him.

“Mushrooms! There are mud mushrooms.”

She had never heard the name before.

And mushrooms grow in mud, do they?

“Mud mushrooms?”
“Yes. They grow only in the mud, and they are chewy, with a very fine smell. They have a nutty taste to them as well.”
“Is that so? Then I suppose a good many people have made their meals of mud mushrooms?”

She asked it because grain was scarce enough that it might well be the case. But Kind shook his head.

“The mud mushrooms are only plentiful if you go into the middle of the mud flats, and one wrong step and a man can sink and drown, so nobody goes in lightly. Instead we sometimes pick and eat the mushrooms that come up near the edge of the flats. Only.”
“Only there are not many of them?”
“Yes. That is so.”
“Do you happen to have any mud mushrooms at home? I should like to taste them.”
“You would eat them yourself, my lady?”

These were not just any mushrooms; they grew in filthy mud. However good they might taste, mud mushrooms were food for the lowborn and for commoners, and no fit food for a noble.

“Mm. I like mushrooms.”

The texture was good and they were chewy besides, so she was certainly curious. Most of all, she wanted to know whether they might have any value as a commodity. As for getting into the middle of a mud flat, there would be any number of ways to work that out.

The moment the chiefs had gone, their work from the lord in hand, Dong-hui opened the status window. The activated area she had earned by naming the two of them had been eating at her the whole while; she had all but driven the chiefs out with question after question because she could not hold it in any longer.

“Status window. Where are the activated areas I can expand to?”

At this rate, wasn’t this sickly-blue status window a stalker?

Every one of the activated areas the window had put forward was somewhere Dong-hui had once worked a part-time job⁵. Which meant that the areas she could expand to by completing a Basic Quest were very likely to be places she had worked in.

She called to mind the countless shops she had worked at over the years. There were far too many to list one by one, but she had done such a variety of jobs that she plainly had no shortage of options.

Dong-hui went carefully down the four new activated areas on the list. She did not deliberate long.

Just as I was getting sick of convenience store food, and here’s exactly the right place!

Gladly, she chose number three.

“Number three! The supermarket!”

The supermarket she had worked at was a big one, filling all three floors of its building. It might not be the equal of a jeweler’s, but a place like that was plainly going to be an enormous help.

There’d be nothing it didn’t have!