Winter of Year One, Two Villagers (04)

Concentration had always been the problem whenever I practiced archery or magic — my focus had hard limits.

You could call it a matter of willpower, I suppose, but what was I supposed to do when my focus drained so fast that my brain simply stopped keeping up?

So what if I forcibly activated Manual Combat Mode and practiced inside it? I wouldn't be able to push myself at the blistering pace of a real battle like the one I'd just survived, but I could train steadily, squeezing practice into every spare minute of the day.

First, we carried the bear meat back and threw a party.

Bear pelts normally fetch a handsome price, but this one had been riddled with arrows and buried under spikes of ice until it hung in shreds; all I could do was cut it into scraps and use them piecemeal. If I had the power to kill a beast in a single blow, I could have kept the whole pelt intact... Nothing to be done about it now, though.

The meat was the same story. Everything bruised, pulped, or frozen stiff by my own frost magic had to be discarded — roughly half the haul, gone. Even so, plenty survived to feed the two of us; we built a bonfire, grilled barbecue over it, and stuffed ourselves silly.

Now I could make something better than plain roasts and meat stew, or bread that was just dough slapped onto a fire. Granted, it called for slightly better ingredients.

"Let's skip logging today. I want to check something out."

"......?"

Instead of sending her off to chop wood as usual, I'd asked her to come along — and Elena set down her axe and fell in behind me.

We searched the forest along the trail the bear had left. I didn't have anything so fancy as an actual tracking skill, though, so all we could really do was wander around looking for a cave a bear might hole up in.

"Chief. Over here."

Elena had found what looked like a scrap of cloth and called me over — and I, in turn, took a careful step back from whatever she'd dug up.

"Want to check it for me?"

"It's bone. Looks like human bone..."

Then, with a careless clatter, she pulled it free: a rotting shoe, and the human fragment still tucked inside it.

Ugh...

Good thing I hadn't looked. Catching sight of corpses and the like always made my head throb.

Elena started moving again, following the trail, while I walked after her with my eyes pointed at the sky as much as I could manage. Supposedly, once you master frost magic, there's a secret art for keeping your cool even in situations like this...

That was a problem for later — and one that would require purchasing and learning the special technique, at that.

"It's a cave."

"......"

Somehow I was certain that stepping inside would reveal something horrific, and I hesitated.

"Shall I go take a look?"

"Uh... yeah."

Sights like these didn't seem to touch her at all; she simply went in to scout the cave, while I stood outside feeling queasy anyway. This was exactly why Apathetic was such an overpowered trait.

Sure, I'd get numb to corpses too, given enough exposure — but that's something you only attempt once things can keep running even if my mind falls apart. In a village kept alive by just the two of us, if I spent days bedridden with a broken psyche, we'd be wiped out on the spot. So I kept carefully looking away, for safety's sake.

"Done."

Having finished her sweep of the cave, she brought out a handful of items and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠carried them over to me.

A longsword caked head to hilt in rust — the top thirty percent of the blade, no less, was snapped clean off.

"We'll sell this off as scrap later, or put it to use around the village somehow."

There was a spear as well, its shaft broken, good for nothing but a dagger unless we found it a new handle. "This one, though, might actually be useful."

And the genuinely worthwhile finds were several bundles of well-preserved cloth, along with a single rolled-up scroll.

So much for the promised trove of loot — this was all there was. Not that I could ask for more as a reward for fending off an early-game threat.

Still, for two people living off wood, even imperfect steel weapons and cloth we'd never have managed to obtain ourselves made for quite the windfall.

Come to think of it, I'd need to make clothes at some point too.

My construction stat covered carpentry, but how did tailoring work again? Was it linked to the Farming stat? If so, I'd practice on the tattered bear pelt a little before trying to make anything real.

"Life's about to get busy."

I had found my loophole, all right — but there wasn't a spare moment to spend it purely on magic research. I left Elena to organize the warehouse, had the cloth stowed away and the weapons put into storage for the time being, then took the scroll I'd found earlier and returned to my room.

Oh, please be a scroll with a secret art of magic written on it.

Heart pounding, I unrolled it.

"Hm?"

Inside the leather casing, a map depicting the surrounding terrain had been pasted.

"A quest?"

It appeared to be a map of this vicinity; comparing it against the landscape nearby, I was able to work out a few things. It must have been drawn long ago — several large cities and a handful of villages were marked on it, and the terrain of ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠this area had been rendered rather clumsily.

And there was an X on the map, with writing above it... a marker for something buried, perhaps?

"Hmm..."

But in a stroke of cruel irony, the map's owner had bled all over it, and the smear had rendered the writing unreadable. From what little survived, it seemed to be the property of some Adventurers' League, with a stern warning that removing it from the premises was strictly forbidden — its owner was long dead, and that League had probably collapsed ages ago. Fat lot of good that did.

I draped the map over my workbench and studied the terrain, hunting for features that would stand out on a map like this — rivers and other landforms that don't change easily — and sketched the location out in my head from those anchors.

"It's right here."

The rock hill that formed one whole wall of my room. That was the very spot.

I carried the map outside and surveyed the landscape one more time. The only difference was the felled trees; everything else matched. The moment I judged that this truly was the place, I went straight for a pickaxe.

"Going by the map, this should be it..."

The marked spot was the patch at the foot of the rock hill where the air stayed strangely cool — the very place we'd been using as a makeshift refrigerator. Some of the bear meat still hung there, frozen solid. Fine, in deep winter everything froze on its own — but it was spring now, the temperature had climbed considerably, and the meat was still frozen? I hadn't even touched it with frost magic.

I reached into the crevice of the split wall and felt a cold draft seeping out, just like a refrigerator — except this was beyond "a little unmelted ice left in there." It looked as though something magical had been sealed inside.

There really is something in there.

I hefted the pickaxe I'd fetched from the warehouse and brought it down on the cracked seam.

CLANG!

"Gah!"

Maybe my form was sloppy, but the impact shot up into my wrist hard enough to leave it aching. And after all that effort, the wall hadn't so much as split open — all I'd managed was to shear a few fragments off the rock hill, which now lay scattered on the ground.

"Why the hell is this thing so hard?"

It wasn't as though we'd never mined before. Construction and logging were simplified in this world, and mining was no different — in End of World, a single person with a pickaxe could dig out an entire cave. And just now I'd swung with everything I had, and it had knocked off a few chips?

What kind of nonsense is this?

I picked up one of the fallen fragments, and a chill like clutching a piece of ice bit deep into my palm. I let go, waited, then picked it up again — rather than having warmed to my body heat, it was seeping that skin-crawling cold all over once more. Only one ore in existence had properties like that.

"Glacial Stone?"

Glacial Stone was an ore packed to the brim with frost mana — the essential material for crafting any frost-attribute magic item. It could power anything from a humble refrigerator all the way up to an Ice ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Golem, or even keep an entire building carved from ice from melting.

I'd gone looking for the stuff while playing End of World from the outside, back when I wanted to build a refrigerator — but I had never once seen it in raw ore form, buried in the earth like this. And if this much cold was leaking out of it unrefined, just sitting there in the wall, then the size of the deposit...

It went without saying that it was an extraordinarily expensive and useful ore — but also a special one that couldn't be so much as attempted with a Mining stat below 6.

"Tsk."

No wonder the refrigerator performed so well.

Now that I knew Glacial Stone lay buried here, any magic training I did from then on would have to happen inside our refrigerator.

A month slipped by.

The snow vanished without a trace, and the season arrived with tender green shoots pushing up everywhere. Since my low Farming stat left me unable to tell an edible plant from a poisonous one, I foraged as conservatively as I could, digging up only verified fare like wild sorghum.

Each morning I got up and turned yesterday's carefully soaked dough into bread. The texture had come a long way from before — though even at its best, it was still about on par with an undercooked pancake made from baked flour. If a bird had wandered into one of my new traps the day before, there'd be fowl alongside it; if not, I simply mixed meat broth into the flour, and that was breakfast done. Then it was off into the refrigerator to train magic.

By hypnotizing myself — I am in a fight right now — I could ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠force my way into Manual Combat Mode and wring my concentration out to the very last drop. Once I'd researched magic to the point of exhaustion, Elena would come to fetch me; we'd eat the lunch I'd made that morning, and in the afternoon I'd either fletch arrows or head out hunting myself while Elena stayed in the village, tilling the soil and sowing sorghum seed. The weeds still seemed to be winning for now, but well... the Farming stat would rise eventually, and things would get better.

Perhaps because spring had come, the game had multiplied, and with my marksmanship sitting around 3.5, I could bring down just about any ordinary beast now. Eat, shoot all day, cast spells all day — it'd be stranger if I didn't improve.

Once my Magic stat reached 3 as well, a great deal would change. At Magic 3, I'd finally be able to cast spells with genuine combat power.

"Oh? Is this a medicinal herb?"

Whenever I was out hunting, I gathered every herb with healing properties I came across and set them out to dry — because living like this, if either of us fell ill, a stockpile of herbs was the only countermeasure we'd have.

I really need at least one more villager.

In the early game, joiner events normally fired to pad out your numbers — yet strangely, no refugee or wandering villager had ever shown up at ours. Even in day-to-day work, a two-shift rotation and a three-shift rotation are worlds apart in fatigue. Three shifts you can grind through somehow; two shifts feel like being wrung dry right up to the edge of death. With only two of us, if one collapsed and the other wore herself out nursing them and went down too, that was it — two deaths, total wipe. For safety's sake, a minimum headcount wasn't optional.

With even one spare villager on hand, however poor their stats, how much easier would I breathe knowing someone was there to handle simple chores and the cooking?

"Of course, take in every random stranger and all you buy is infighting — there are villages that have collapsed into ruin over nothing but internal power struggles."

Even so, we needed another one or two people before anything could really run. Scout the surroundings, gather supplies, leave the village empty to go trade... With just the two of us, when exactly were we supposed to do research, raise our stats, gather the materials, and build an intercontinental escape portal?

"If only a villager would just drop out of the sky somewhere..."

"What?"

I scanned our surroundings, but there wasn't a soul in sight. Normally they arrived as travelers asking to join, or you'd nurse a fallen stranger back to health and they'd sign on out of gratitude. Right now there was no one — not a single person — anywhere around.

"What the hell?"

Just as I was wondering whether it had spawned somewhere beyond my sight—

"AAAAAAAH!!"

Someone was falling from the sky.