The White Mage (1)
The morning after sex is always, without exception, a sticky mess.
“Fucking hell.”
The moment I opened my eyes, I grimaced at the dampness around my waist. I hadn’t expected the bed to get this soaked with love juices and semen. No wonder everyone goes to a motel when they fuck.
“You’re awake?”
Franc’s voice drifted down from above my head. I’d been focused on the wet sheets, but the soft sensation against my scalp and the overwhelming sight of pale breasts filling half my vision finally clued me in to my current situation.
“A lap pillow?”
“My mother used to do this for me a lot when I was little.”
Franc answered while gently stroking my hair. Since we’d both fallen asleep right after last night’s passionate romp, we were completely naked. I was lying bare-assed on her bare thighs.
“I always wondered what was so fun about watching someone sleep with their head on your lap. But now… I think I get it a little.”
“…Can you even see my face with those massive tits in the way?”
“Nope. Can’t see it at all. It’s honestly a shame. My mother was a pure-blooded dwarf, so she didn’t have breasts as big as mine. I never got to see her sleeping face like this.”
Do all dwarves have that hourglass figure? That was news to me.
“Having huge breasts must be pretty inconvenient.”
“It always has been. Never really helped me with anything. At least not until yesterday.”
Franc giggled softly. It took me a second to realize why she was laughing. My morning anaconda, already out hunting for prey in the valley between my legs, was twitching enthusiastically.
Oh, my beloved Juji. I’m so glad you didn’t get nerfed or hit with any expansion patch adjustments.
If it had suddenly gone back to its original size with a pathetic little kyuu~, that would’ve been a total disaster. Thank goodness.
“All guys are like this every morning.”
“Really? I didn’t know. So it wasn’t because of me.”
“The fact that it still hasn’t gone down is definitely thanks to you.”
At my words, Franc leaned down and whispered into my ear.
─Squish.
Because she’d leaned in to whisper, my mouth ended up slightly buried in her incredibly soft breasts. But I wasn’t suffocating, and I wasn’t annoyed. Breasts are always righteous. No arguments allowed.
Anyway, we eventually got up and got dressed. For the first time since arriving in this world, I found myself desperately missing wet wipes. Regular tissues existed, but there were no wet ones. And since the inn room had no shower, the whole situation felt incredibly gross.
“Franc, I was thinking of heading to the bathhouse. Want to come with me?”
“Hmm, wait a second? Actually, I have a commission today… I’ll have to check the time first.”
“A commission? What time is it due?”
“One in the afternoon.”
“One? Then we’d better hurry. We might’ve slept in.”
There was no clock in the room, which made moments like this inconvenient. If it was already noon, we’d have to sprint to the public bathhouse, wash up in a rush, and dash back out.
More importantly, sure, I could just wipe myself down quickly, but wasn’t Franc still full of my cum from last night? The thought of her having to secretly clean herself in a corner of the bathhouse made guilt surge through me.
─Step, step.
After a quick freshen-up, we stepped outside. While I went to check the clock tower, Franc was chatting with the innkeeper auntie.
“Franc. It’s still only eight o’clock.”
“Eight? I really slept in, then.”
Eight o’clock counts as sleeping in? Then I guess I was a proper night owl in my previous life. Remembering my average wake-up time of eleven or twelve, I couldn’t help but marvel at how differently our minds worked.
That’s when the innkeeper asked,
“So, did you two have fun last night?”
“Pardon?”
I instinctively looked away, but Franc didn’t seem to understand right away and asked again. At the innkeeper’s mischievous smile, Franc turned to look at me. Her eyes asked if I had any idea what this was about. I just stared back at her silently.
“──Ah.”
The moment Franc caught on, her face went deathly pale, then flushed bright red all the way to her neck. Of course she’d figure it out. What else would an older man and woman be doing, sharing an inn room and only crawling out the next morning? Not knowing would be the weird part. Yep.
Still, it was fucking embarrassing. I’d hoped we could just gloss over it.
“A-ah!! Aaaaaah──!!”
Franc let out a scream. I kind of wanted to scream too.
“T-that’s not—! It’s not what you think! There’s a misunderstanding! You’re misunderstanding the situation!!”
“Misunderstanding? What kind of misunderstanding?”
“W-well, you see? We didn’t do anything like that! We just slept together platonically!”
“In the same bed?”
“No!!!!! I!!!!! Slept on the floor!!!!!”
“Oh my, is that so? I must have misunderstood then. ─But Franc, didn’t you know?”
The innkeeper placed a hand on her cheek and spoke with feigned concern.
“Our inn has good soundproofing, but the floors are old. Sometimes the sound of the bed creaking travels really loudly to the floor below, and it can be quite tortur—.”
“We’regoingtothebathhouseandthenI’llbebacktoworkrightaway!!”
Whoosh!
Realizing she was checkmated, Franc bolted, tossing her embarrassment toward her future self like a hot potato. I looked back and forth between Franc, who had sprinted outside in an instant, and the innkeeper who was chuckling at the sight.
“…Should I thank you for last night?” I asked.
The innkeeper wiped tears of laughter from her eyes and lifted the corners of her mouth.
“No need. I was just rooting for that girl. It was Franc who chose you, after all. If you hadn’t looked like someone with a sense of responsibility, I would’ve stopped her.”
“That’s a relief.”
Based on my twenty-eight years of life experience, when someone says you “look kind,” it usually means “you look like the type that’s hard to compliment directly, so I’ll say this instead.” And “you look responsible” translates to “you look like a pushover who won’t be able to squirm your way out of this.”
According to the auntie, if I’d shown up looking like a bleached-blond tanned fuckboy going “Heyyy~”, this situation probably wouldn’t have happened. The fact that she’d subtly pushed things along between me and Franc last night meant that, in her eyes, I at least looked decent enough.
“When you meet a lot of people in this job, you get a feel for what kind of person someone is just from their first impression. And from what I see, you seem like a pretty good guy.”
The innkeeper said that with a warm smile. I personally thought physiognomy was nothing but pseudoscience, but in this other world, who knows? Since things like fortune-telling existed, maybe physiognomy had been established as a proper academic discipline, just like alchemy.
Anyway, it was true that this auntie had quietly played matchmaker for us, so I gave her a polite bow and said,
“My name is Norde.”
“I’m Beynya Mutarat. Please take good care of Franc.”
“Of course. Leave it to me.”
After finishing the greeting, I chased after Franc, who had run ahead. The inn ‘Children of Mutarat.’ It really was a well-named place.
The bathhouse culture in Britannia was heavily influenced by Romania. Or to be blunt, most of the good things in this country were straight-up copied from Romania. That was basically the current policy of the Britannia Kingdom—copy every promising foreign idea and develop it.
Exploit the workforce to raise quality! By following in the footsteps of advanced nations, the glorious future of the great power Britannia awaits!
You could say Britannia had inherited the will of copying as well.
‘Appropriate imitation is the foundation of growth,’ they say.
Still, I wasn’t really in a position to criticize Britannia’s copying habits. After all, Korea had gone through a period of growth by straight-up plagiarizing snacks, policies, and TV shows from other countries. The only universal truth across every world and every nation is that when the people in power are idiots, it’s the ones below who suffer.
‘These damn Britannia noble bastards should focus on currency reform before copying anyone else, shouldn’t they?’
I knew currency reform wasn’t easy. But if they were going to copy Romania, shouldn’t they start with that?
Thanks to that half-assed approach, Britannia had installed bathhouses all over the country but then introduced a separate ticket system for using them. If they charged one copper per bath, no one would go because the price would be so ridiculous it’d make you worry about your mother’s well-being.
Plus, Britannia’s political structure was roughly similar to Earth’s old feudal system, so there were lords who flat-out refused the king’s orders with a “I don’t recognize that!” In territories where many residents didn’t use the bathhouses, the maintenance costs just created pointless deficits.
Romania ran on a senate and citizens’ assembly. Even if Britannia copied it without adapting to their own circumstances, it probably wouldn’t function properly most of the time. If the king wanted to interfere in the nobles’ territorial policies, he’d have no choice but to wield absolute royal authority. That was a burden for the king as well.
It was about as awkward as a duty officer forcing a burned-out senior soldier with live ammo to do bayonet drills every week. His Majesty the Beloved King had apparently just shrugged and said, “Do it if you want, don’t if you don’t,” and moved on. A perfect example of a completely failed development policy. Truly a pitiful state of affairs.
Fortunately, Sargadis was one of the territories that had successfully adopted and was operating both the copied public library and public bathhouse from Romania. The lord here was apparently a very sensible person.
What was his name again? Jo… Joteru? Joteru von Henne?
Anyway, thanks to that guy, I could wash often. That was a relief. Even though this world had plumbing, it was strangely hard to find shower rooms in cheap inns. The logic seemed to be, “Why build showers when there are bathhouses?” It was the kind of thinking you’d expect from people who used the same well and water pipes for everything. It gave me a headache.
“Do you go to the bathhouse often, Norde?”
Franc asked as she walked beside me.
“Pretty much every day. What about you, Franc?”
“Me too. I went every day back in Nidavellir.”
Nidavellir was the nation of the dwarves. In real Norse mythology, it was supposedly an entirely separate world, but in this other world, it was just a foreign underground city. Honestly, I found the underground city concept more fascinating than the “another world” idea.
How the hell do they live underground? What about oxygen? Drinking water? Waste disposal? Don’t they all die from diseases because they never see sunlight?
It was a country that made me endlessly curious in many ways. Still, I didn’t particularly want to visit. Unless Franc asked me to go with her, that is.
“Ah, but you probably didn’t bring a bath ticket, right?”
Franc said, touching the basket she was carrying. Here, you had to bring your own towels and bathing supplies. Bath tickets were three for one copper. That worked out to about three thousand won per use, which was cheaper than Korea. Probably because if it were any more expensive, people simply wouldn’t use them.
I shrugged and replied,
“I brought my wallet, so I’ll just buy new ones. I’ll use them eventually anyway. They said one ticket can be exchanged for two towels.”
One-third of a copper for two decent cotton towels at three thousand won. Not bad.
“Really? Or… should we stop by your inn for a moment?”
“Our innkeeper would probably act just like Miss Beynya, you know?”
“……I’ll pay for your bath fee, Norde…”
Franc said gloomily. It was clearly a declaration that she absolutely did not want to go back there. Anyway, we headed to the bathhouse like that.
Ding-a-ling—
Britannia also had the custom of hanging bells on doors. Lost in memories of my hometown, I stepped into the bathhouse entrance. A young woman was handling reception behind a wide stone counter.
“Hello, welcome.”
“Yes, hello. Could I get one bath ticket, please?”
I said, taking out one copper. The receptionist smiled brightly, her eyes curving like bows.
“Of course. By the way, sir? Are you and the person next to you… lovers, by any chance?”
“Y-yes?!”
Franc jumped in surprise. I was inwardly startled by the sudden question as well. But I pulled the engine of this world’s machismo to full throttle and answered calmly.
“That’s right. We’re in love with each other.”
Franc had said that before falling asleep last night, and since I’d fallen for her too, it was one hundred percent true.
“Ah, uuu…”
Franc hung her head deeply, as if deeply regretting not bringing her hood. Even so, she tightly held my hand with one of hers.
“…Yes. We are lovers.”
When I glanced at her and our eyes met, Franc shyly leaned her body against my waist.
Wow, seriously, why is she so cute? My girlfriend is so adorable I think I might die.
“Hehe. You two make a very lovely couple.”
The receptionist said, looking at us with a warm smile.
“In that case, sir? Would you be interested in our couple-only bath?”