What if Ragner asked me about this?
Should I answer that I lived in such a backwater that I couldn’t even see a purification stone?
Or should I just be honest? He already knew the secret about the dungeon and me, so adding one more secret shouldn’t matter.
No—this time, he might really think I’m insane and drag me to the temple.
Then something suddenly occurred to me.
He had never once asked me about my origins or my past.
“Um….”
There might be more incidents like this in the future. So just as I was thinking it might be better to reveal it in advance—
“Found you!”
The restaurant door suddenly burst open, and Teon and the dog came rushing in.
“Brother! How could you go without me!? I know how to eat tasty things too!”
In an instant, he ran to our table and plopped down beside me. Then he started chattering, looking at my plate.
“Oh, sister left the beans too! Our Chacha hates beans too!”
“What…?”
“You ate all the meat? Our Chacha likes meat too!”
“Woof!”
Was he saying my eating habits were exactly the same as that dog’s…? And to begin with, I….
“I don’t hate beans. They’re so good for your body! I saved my favorite thing for last.”
“Liar. Our Chacha also leaves only beans piled up in her bowl.”
“Unbelievable.”
I pointedly scooped up the beans I had left and tossed them into my mouth in one bite.
The mild beans and slightly spicy seasoning blended deliciously. It was just a simple bean dish, yet the flavor was remarkable!
The older woman’s cooking skills were truly excellent. That must have been why she could run her business in the same spot for so long.
“See?”
“It’s true?”
“And suddenly saying I’m similar to your dog is a bit….”
This was confirmation…!
A scene suddenly flashed through my mind, and my body froze.
Could it be that the reason Ragner had been staring at me so intently throughout my meal… was because my eating habits looked exactly like his dog’s!?
Just how much did he love that dog…?
I grabbed my empty plate and shot up from my seat.
Even though I had resolved to endure it well enough, having been tormented by dog nicknames my whole life, I couldn’t help feeling a little hurt.
“Thank you for the advice. I’ll get back to work.”
“I could tell you more.”
“No, that’s enough.”
And so I returned the plate to the kitchen, received permission to leave early since it was my first day, and stepped out of the restaurant.
Normally I would have had to wait at the restaurant for Ruadis, but because my part-time shift ended earlier than expected, I had some time left.
‘Should I go buy the items Ragner mentioned? He said purification stones could be bought at the general store, and the compass… I could just ask if they carry them too, couldn’t I?’
I remembered that on the first day I visited the village, there had been a rough map on the square’s bulletin board marking the locations of various shops.
“Villagers who need odd jobs done often leave notes on the bulletin board.”
It wouldn’t hurt to check what kind of errands were available while I was at it.
I quickened my steps toward the square.
‘It would be good to spend some time with fellow humans and clear your head, even briefly….’
As I walked among the crowds, I understood Ragner’s words to some extent. Sorry, Brownie.
Compared to living with terrifying monsters, ordinary life was definitely better.
I used to walk streets like this every day, commuting to and from work.
Of course, the scenery was completely different, but after staying only in the gloomy dungeon, walking under bright sunlight gradually brought a little ease to my heart.
Before long, I arrived at the square.
A large bulletin board standing in front of the village hall came into view. It was quite messy from the traces of paper being torn off and attached many times.
“The map is here. The general store is right next to the square.”
On the right side of the board was the map I had been looking for, and on the left were several notes left by villagers requesting errands.
Come to think of it, the older woman had said notes would be there ‘often’… It seemed they were suffering from a labor shortage.
“Hmm… So this is the kind of errand people request. It really feels like a quest.”
Requests like gathering a specific herb from the forest, catching rats infesting a basement, or moving luggage.
They were small jobs, but quite decent for a side hustle.
“It really is like a beginner’s village….”
The herb-gathering errands especially felt like beginner quests you pick up one by one on the way out to hunt in the forest, for experience points or pocket money.
At times like this, it really felt like I had entered a game and was playing it myself.
But I had already heard that being an adventurer was a very dangerous profession, so there was no room for romance.
“Safety first, life is precious!”
I couldn’t even look at monsters with the naked eye—what would I do as an adventurer?
“But this note is a little unusual.”
The other notes looked like they had been roughly torn from a notebook, but one was different starting from the quality of the paper.
It was crisp, pure white paper with a pretty pattern embossed on the outside, and at the bottom was a stamp in the shape of a large fruit hanging from a branch.
“It looks like memo paper custom-made by a company.”
The content of the note was a request for cleaning work.
“No particular qualifications required, and at this level, even I could do it, probably? Though I’d have to see the scale….”
The errand fee was a whopping 3,000 eon. Two hours’ worth of restaurant part-time pay!
The location was an empty lot north of the village.
“What are they asking me to clean at an empty lot?”
Checking the location of the empty lot on the map, it was in the opposite direction from the road to the dungeon, a bit farther from the square.
“Mmm….”
If possible, I wanted to earn a lot of money.
With 3,000 eon, I could ask the wind fairies to post a notice three times, and it was six weeks’ worth of employee wages.
But there wasn’t quite enough time to go to both the general store and the empty lot. If I took too long, Ruadis would be waiting.
In the end, I decided to explore the village a little more and go find the place that had posted the cleaning job.
As I walked straight along the road leading north, houses became sparse, and a graveyard appeared.
Just as I was thinking it was unusual to have a graveyard inside the village, I found a place that seemed to be the empty lot.
Why “seemed”? Because it was no longer an empty lot.
“What? They’re building a structure? So that’s why they were looking for cleaning help.”
It wasn’t finished yet, but the frame was already up, and they were stacking white stone block by block to raise the walls. Once completed, it looked like it would be quite an impressive building.
But a new building in a rural village where every building was old and worn?
Seeing a wall being built as if to enclose the entire graveyard, I thought the new building might be a facility for managing the graveyard.
But did they usually build such facilities so impressively? Or was it not a graveyard keeper’s building?
That was when I was peeking around the area.
I suddenly seemed to make eye contact with one of the workers carrying loads inside.
‘Wow, why is he wearing pure white clothes while working? And at a construction site, no less. They’ll get dirty in no time.’
The distance was fairly great, so only the pure white clothes stood out.
Because my attention was stolen by that unbalanced attire, I only noticed much later that he was smiling at me with his eyes.
In that moment, even though I had done nothing wrong, I was so flustered that I unconsciously gave a silent bow.
‘Huh…? It looks like he’s trying to come this way…?’
Perhaps he took my greeting as a signal that I wanted to talk, because I saw him set down his load and start to turn toward me.
I had come after seeing the errand note, but I hadn’t intended to work right away, so I was troubled.
If he had been expecting a worker and got a mere onlooker, wouldn’t he be let down? Besides, I wasn’t even a resident here, so I had no particular topic for small talk.
I waved my hand hard to signal refusal and hurriedly turned away.
My only thought was to get away before I was caught.
“Um, excuse me….”
I clearly heard a voice calling me from behind, but I pretended not to hear and ignored it.
“I’ll come back next time when I have room for an errand!”
I shouted the inner voice that would never reach him.
In any case, hoping that a construction site would provide steady work until completion, I returned to the restaurant.
Just then, Ruadis had also finished her work at the training ground and was walking toward the restaurant, so I avoided being late.
‘If I had been caught by that person and exchanged a few words, I would’ve been late.’
On the way home to the dungeon with Ruadis, I asked about the building under construction I had seen earlier.
“Oh my, now that you mention it, I had forgotten. You’d better be careful around that place. It seems Ragner didn’t warn you either.”
“Pardon?”
“The building under construction is Leta’s temple.”
