Reunion
“Teacher…”
Astria, her preparations for departure complete, embraced Sian and gazed up at him with eyes full of reluctance. But reluctant as she was, that wasn't reason enough to abandon the duty she had to fulfill. Watching her peer up at him with those bright, eager eyes, he couldn't help thinking that she somehow resembled Elina — and yet didn't.
At last he managed to pry her off, and once he'd seen her out of the village, Sian resolved to move quickly.
“Not this… and this, I don't need either.”
Back home, Sian began packing his things. Truth be told, there wasn't much to pack. He'd arrived in this village with next to nothing in the first place — he'd simply pressed a bit of money into the village chief's hands, gotten himself an empty house, and renovated it. That was the extent of it. Adventurers were supposed to drift from place to place like weeds, so traveling light had always been the rule.
Still…
“Maybe I'll take a few of these along…”
He looked over at the pile of goods stacked high in one corner of the house — the gifts the merchants had pressed on him. Among them were a few small but genuinely valuable jewels.
Just this much should be fine.
He couldn't have carried everything alone anyway. To take it all, he'd have had to hire a trading company. And carting it all off would only invite the merchants' fury once they noticed. He could protest all he liked — You misunderstood, I never asked for any of it, why are you mad? — but such excuses never worked on people who'd lost money. And walking off with a shrug like that would make him a genuine con artist, wouldn't it?
Well, I suppose my stomach really might get stabbed.
More than anything, he simply didn't want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.
It was while sorting through his things that he came across a certain notebook.
“What's this?”
Flipping it open, he found page after page covered in strange scrawls. Or rather — not strange letters exactly, but chicken-scratch handwriting of the worst order.
“Ah.”
Memories came flooding back the moment he saw it.
Long ago, after leaving the orphanage, Sian had worked as an adventurer until realizing he needed to learn how to read. You didn't learn letters at the orphanage? In a medieval fantasy world, literacy was a far more high-class skill than one might expect — something most orphanages simply didn't teach. Or perhaps couldn't teach was the better word.
When I asked them to teach me letters, they just told me to go carve one more piece of wood and become a carpenter.
So in the end he'd spent his hard-earned adventurer's pay on lessons, and it was during that time that a thought had struck him:
Wouldn't I make a fortune if I spread the literature of my past life, like one of those plagiarized-transmigration stories?
Back then, his mind had been an adult's even if his body wasn't, so he'd dismissed it as a genius idea and set about trying to recreate the masterpieces he'd read in his old world. But the difficulties were many.
One: paper and ink were obscenely expensive. Not enough to make survival impossible, but they were classified as luxury goods — far beyond what an adventurer could afford in bulk. Whether painting or writing, everything burned through paper. Unaffordable.
After that, the reasons were simpler.
Two: he had no talent for drawing.
Three: his handwriting was terrible, and he had no gift for writing either.
Four: he wasn't inarticulate exactly, but he couldn't exactly make things entertaining.
Five: too much time had passed; he no longer remembered the masterpieces in any detail.
The village children loved Sian's stories, but only because they were tales of adventures and travels they'd never seen themselves. At the level of actual literature, he doubted he could even hand over a business card.
“Can't believe this thing is still here.”
He couldn't even remember why he'd brought it this far. In any case, this notebook represented his own earnest attempt to make it big in this world. He'd paid a fair sum for it and jotted down rough summaries of the works he could recall…
“What did I even write here?”
His handwriting was so atrocious, and it had been a foreign language he hadn't touched in years besides, so now even he couldn't decipher it. It was to the point where he couldn't tell whether something was a drawing or a letter.
You could say he'd learned anew, in another world, the greatness of the Korean alphabet.
Sian recalled those old memories, then made his decision.
“I'll leave this behind too.”
His cringe-inducing past would stay here with the rest.
Stepping out the door and passing through the village, people greeted him along the way.
“Oh, Sian. Where are you off to?”
“Some business came up. I'll have to go outside the village for a bit.”
“Safe travels.”
The villagers seemed not to think he was leaving for good, even dressed in his adventurer's gear. Sian went out beyond the village borders from time to time, after all. His luggage was tidily packed rather than conspicuously heaped, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
That's a relief.
He'd worried about what to do if he got caught and held back. There were children who followed him around devotedly, but kids being kids, they'd sulk for a moment and then forget all about it in their search for a new game.
Truthfully, I could have told the villagers I was leaving…
He'd stopped himself because it felt like things might snowball. All that talk of a guardian deity, and then suddenly announcing he was leaving the village…
And so Sian left without the slightest hindrance, arriving at Lodis — the city nearest the village, and the place where he'd first met Astria.
“Hmm.”
Stroking his chin, Sian sank into thought. His dilemma was a simple one.
Where should I go?
He'd decided to move and set out, but he'd never actually settled on a destination. He'd merely narrowed down a few candidates last time. He thought it might be wiser to gather more information and fix on a clear destination first, but…
If they come looking for me again in the meantime… ugh, just thinking about it is exhausting.
They'd cling to him like a twenty-four-hour surveillance detail; leaving at all would become impossible. No matter how he turned it over — he hadn't actually done anything for them, yet they'd grown stronger all on their own and credited him for it.
Besides, granting every benefit of the doubt — no, granting a thousand, ten thousand of them — if it were just one or two of them, he could let it slide. But four. At this point it was frankly terrifying.
And then, amid that musing, a thought crept in.
…Could it be that there really is something about me?
He'd denied it once before, flatly — but with Astria saying the exact same thing, he couldn't help wondering again. Quietly stroking his chin, Sian muttered to himself.
“Maybe I should find out.”
What he could actually investigate was limited, but the first name that surfaced was an alchemist he'd met back in his adventuring days. It was when his main work was gathering herbs. The alchemist who used to squabble with him, insisting the herbs belonged to him.
Herb gathering was constant work, so I ran into him pretty often.
At first he'd cursed Sian for stealing his herbs, but later he'd even taught him how to gather them properly. And once in a while, when Sian was in a tight spot, he'd take private commissions. If he had to name the smartest person he knew, it would be that man.
“Well, it's just a question or two.”
It wasn't close by, but it wasn't so far as to be unreachable. The alchemist lived in a city called Cavelon — larger than Lodis, a place where commerce thrived. If he settled in some other village he'd have no reason to go, so dropping by now seemed like a reasonable choice.
With his destination decided, he considered departing right away, but…
“It's too late.”
The sun had already begun its slow decline. Traveling by night in a medieval fantasy world was a genuinely dangerous undertaking — about as wise as announcing to the monsters and bandits, I'm right here, come and get me.
Besides…
Why not take a carriage and travel in comfort?
It wasn't as if he lacked money, so there was no need to suffer on foot. He stopped by the stable to ask when the next carriage to Cavelon departed, and was told three days hence. Sian booked himself into a suitable inn for the three days.
It's been a while since I just rested like this.
At the village there'd always been something to do. It was his first meal out in ages, and he was eating heartily when voices drifted over from here and there.
“On my way here, I ran into some strange fellows…”
“There were people like that in the west?”
“Seems like temple folk have been searching for someone lately…”
“Oh, that person?”
Eavesdropping on rumors over a meal was something of a habit from his adventuring days, so he let the chatter pass in one ear and out the other. Then—
“KWAHAHAHA! As expected, an S-rank adventurer is on another level entirely!”
“No kidding, now I know what people mean when they say it's a different dimension.”
The voices of drunken adventurers boomed with particular clarity.
Drunkards weren't exactly scarce in a place like this, and plenty of them were just as loud — but with S-rank and near-S-rank figures making the news so often lately, he couldn't help but pay attention.
“Did you see it? The way she took them all down in a single strike?”
“There were more than ten of them!”
“Man, what a show!”
“All hail Lady Tiana!”
“…Hm?”
Sian froze, bewildered — who'd have expected a familiar name to come up there? But no one was going to answer his unspoken question, so he kept eating while lending his ear to their talk.
Listening closely to their story, it seemed Tiana was somewhere in this area. She'd taken an escort mission for a trading company and come this far.
Wasn't she off to get revenge?
Why was she back here? Could she have already finished her revenge and be on her way to the village? Having heard the whole story, Sian felt an inexplicable unease.
…Surely I won't run into her?
He shook off the anxiety. This inn wasn't attached to the adventurer's guild, and it wasn't nearly fine enough for an S-rank to stay in. He had no intention of going out again tonight — the plan was to sleep and board the carriage first thing in the morning. In that case, there was no chance of crossing paths with her. That's what he'd thought.
BANG!
Call it planting too many flags, call it what you will. The very moment the thought finished forming, the inn door swung open.
And in stepped a black-haired woman.
The rowdy inn fell silent in an instant, as if someone had dumped cold water over the whole room. Everyone inside knew exactly who she was.
She walked slowly inside, swept her gaze across the room in one smooth motion, and then—
“Teacher!”
The moment she spotted Sian, she came toward him with eyes shining bright. The woman closing in on him.
She was, of course, Sian's disciple (self-proclaimed).
Tiana.