Verification, Schrödinger’s Cat Level 4

“Hey, Misha.”

“Hmm~?”

Misha gave a half-hearted reply without even turning around while playing with Nyankoromochi, but—

“Schrödinger’s Cat seems to have leveled up.”

“Seriously!?”

She stood up with tremendous force and looked over here.

“What kind of content!?”

“It says, ‘Makes the existence of items inside the backpack ambiguous.’”

“Backpack?”

Misha looked at her own back. I looked at my back too.

There was an item container familiar to any adventurer. This was commonly called a “backpack.”

Misha opened her mouth,

“Hmm… Thinking from level 1, which hides a cat, ‘Makes the existence of one cat in an enclosed space ambiguous’—”

and continued like this.

“Can you take items inside the backpack out and make them disappear?”

After muttering that, Misha groaned, Hmmm!?

“Wait, that means…”

“What’s wrong?”

“The items inside the backpack disappear, right? In that case, doesn’t that mean you can put as many items as you want inside?”

I looked back at my backpack again.

…In other words, only I could put things in without limit!?

“Ooooooooooh…”

“Ooooooooooh…”

After Misha and I looked at each other and said the same thing—

““Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooh!””

We could not help but shout.

Misha said excitedly.

“Experiment! Let’s experiment! Nishishishi!”

The verification session for Schrödinger’s Cat level 4 began.

We took off our backpacks, crouched down on the grass, and faced each other. A short distance away, Nyankoromochi was sunbathing as if bored.

“Should we try using it normally first?”

“Yeah.”

Leaving the role of host and facilitator to the team’s brain, Misha, I would try things as I was told.

I placed my hand on my backpack and—

“Schrödinger’s Cat.”

I activated the skill.

At that moment—

“Whoa!”

A screen suddenly floated up beneath my consciousness.

What was this!?

There was too much information—I copied the image onto the paper I received from Misha.

Misha stared intently at the paper after it was returned to her.

“…Ios, so what happened inside the backpack?”

When I checked inside the backpack—

“It’s empty.”

There was nothing there.

But I had a guess as to where it had disappeared to.

“Hey, the items written on that paper—”

“Yeah… These are your belongings, Ios.”

Misha stared at the paper as she answered.

“…This title field says ‘Item Box’—yeah, let’s call it an item box. Does that mean they’re inside it?”

Item box, huh…

What was that, really?

“Hey, Ios. Can you take things out from it? Try taking out the alchemy stone.”

“Got it.”

…How did I do that?

For the time being, I closed the backpack and tried selecting “Alchemy Stone” on the screen beneath my consciousness from earlier.

When I opened the backpack, sure enough—

“There it is.”

A single stone was rolling around in the empty space.

Misha took it and looked it over closely.

“…So how did the screen change?”

I checked the screen beneath my consciousness.

“The alchemy stone disappeared from the item box. Also, the value at the top changed from 6 to 5.”

“I see… Then the number on the left is the current number of items—and the number on the right is probably the maximum number it can hold.”

“So that means it can hide only 32 items?”

“To be precise, probably 32 types.”

Misha corrected my words.

“Because there are two portions of portable food, right? If we’re talking number, there are 7 items. So that 6 represents the number of types.”

Ah, that was true.

Misha continued.

“Judging from the portable food display, that means they can be stacked. Conversely, how many can go into one stack? We need to investigate that too. We could buy a lot of magic stones and check…”

Misha muttered to herself. Amazing… Even if I did not think, the answer was approaching on its own…!

While muttering, Misha stood up unsteadily, then abruptly began taking off the armor she was wearing.

“W-W-Wait! Misha!? What are you suddenly doing!?”

“Huh? Ah… I was wondering how armor would be treated.”

Misha held out the gauntlet she had removed with a clank.

“Equipment is a pain to carry around, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“I think that would be really convenient for carrying equipment. Especially since you’ll be changing jobs, Ios, so you’ll probably end up with all sorts of equipment.”

…True. If carrying things became easy, it would be convenient to be able to switch equipment at any time.

I put the gauntlet into the backpack and activated the skill.

“Hmm, something called ‘High-Performance Plate Mail (Part): 1’ was added.”

“Huh.”

While saying that, Misha handed me the parts of the plate mail she took off one after another. As I tossed them into the backpack as soon as I received them, only the final number counted up, like “High-Performance Plate Mail (Part): 4.”

“Here, this is the last one.”

When I tossed in the last part I was handed—

“Ah!”

The display changed to “High-Performance Plate Mail: 1.”

I told Misha about that change.

“Nyaruhodo.”

Misha nodded again and again.

“It’s good that we found out equipment goes in there, isn’t it?”

That was exactly right.

This would make my job-change life progress smoothly. It was still fine for now, but I had secretly been worrying about what I would do once my equipment increased…

Well, now we had more or less understood the skill’s characteristics. This should be enough.

As expected of Misha, she was very helpful.

And so, we decided to gather materials and go back.

We collected plenty of materials, but since we tossed them into the item box, both my backpack and Misha’s backpack remained flat.

It was light and easy…

“Man, this is really nice! Easy! Easy!”

Misha said in a very good mood as she walked lightly.

“…But you know, there’s also this kind of opinion. That there’s a sense of satisfaction in walking while feeling the weight of all the materials you’ve gathered up—”

Cutting off my words, Misha said this with a fed-up face.

“There isn’t, right? Something like that.”

It was flatly denied.

“Heavy things are heavy! Hard things are hard! If you can make it easier, you do it! That’s how humanity developed! Ideas like ‘Look at me, I’m suffewing so hawd, how wondewfuw’ should die in the previous generation! Got it!?”

It was denied mercilessly.

“Yes… I truly think exactly that…”

It was not exactly my opinion, and I had merely brought it up as a general argument, so I did not particularly mind.

It was certainly true that easy was good.

The weight of our baggage inevitably made our lap speed drop in the latter half, but now we did not have to worry about that.

Light was better! The best!

Thanks to this item box, it seemed our adventure would become convenient yet again.

Just how far would Schrödinger’s Cat grow?

Just thinking about that made my heart unable to stop pounding with excitement.