Volume 2 Chapter 1.1

Chapter 1.1

「Found the river！」

One week after the infiltration of the forest. Hiroshi had identified the sound of water about 30 minutes ago before returning with good news of the river they had been searching for.

「How far away is it?」

「’Bout 20 minutes if ya go around all the obstructions. But we could probably cut straight through in 10 minutes.」

「Just a bit more, then.」

If it took 10 minutes to go straight there, then that meant it was about a kilometer away. This explained why they could not hear the murmuring of the stream.

「But wow, it took us a whole week to find the river～」

「Which river would have been faster to travel upstream?」

「The closest place was 200 kilometers on the other side, so I’m pretty sure you’d get lost before you arrived here.」

You could tell just by listening to Haruna and Makoto’s conversation how cumbersome it was to find a settlement within a gigantic forest like this.

「But don’t you think it’s weird that there are traces of people moving through this deep forest?」

「Teres told me that adventurer-like merchants come ’round once a month. Maybe it’s them?」

「But can you make this much progress in a single month?」

「Even the elves git out twice a month to buy various things. The merchants prolly come ’round then.」

Even with plenty of salt, water, and food supplies, sometimes it was just easier to travel along the road to nearby towns to buy things. Maybe harvests didn’t always go as planned. The elves generally bought things based on how quickly they could get them or how much they had, so they hadn’t quite reached regular trade with humans, more content with supplying themselves as much as possible.

「Anyhow, now that we know people were wandering around here and that there’s a river, it can’t be much longer. Let’s give it our all.」

Everyone nodded at Haruna, trudging onward with hardly any space. Incidentally, the greatest reason for taking a week to get to this point was because they had messed up their directions several times. Teres had said it would take as much as 4 days, so you can imagine how much of a blunder they made.

Usually, wasting as much time as this would sow discord within the group, but as none of them were actually good at recognizing this fact, no fights occurred. At most, they grumbled about wanting to eat fish or how they had grown tired of the forest. Despite searching for an indistinct road on foot, they were still as nonchalant as ever. It was doubtful that they’d run into any issues.

「……I hear a stream.」

「Just a lil bit more.」

Hiroshi responded to Tatsuya, and 3 minutes later they saw a river. It was fairly big, with a width of 10 meters.

「Whoa～」

「What a pretty river～」

「Welp, this is a good time for lunch.」

Everyone agreed with Hiroshi and got to spreading sheets and preparing food.

「Think we should git some river fish?」

「If you can, yeah. I don’t want birds, snakes, rabbits, tanukis, or bugs anymore.」

「Alright. After lunch then.」

No one was concerned about how much time they had lost. Sure, there wasn’t any time limit per say, but couldn’t they be a bit more anxious?

「Wonder what we’ll find.」

「Doesn’t seem like y’all want bugs used as bait, so I’ll try ‘n make a lure.」

「I don’t think we’ll ever get out of this pattern, will we……」

Hiroshi had a habit of making things from scratch no matter the situation. You could tell how passionate he was, reflected in his handicraft. In all honesty, maybe him and Mio should stay in this world.

「We could even swim. That sounds fun, but……」

「It’s still a bit cold. I advise you don’t.」

「Yeah.」

Everyone figured they might as well fish. After finishing a tanuki sandwich, the Japanese gathered around the river holding the fishing rods Hiroshi had made off the cuff.

「Some of these fish have colors that don’t seem very tropical……」

Makoto blurted out after fishing up a metallic blue fish. It was quite the catch, with a size of 80 centimeters, but its color made her question if it was edible and she couldn’t really celebrate.

By the way, the thread Hiroshi had used to make these poles with was spirit thread. Despite being a legendary material, there was tons of it, so he slovenly used it for things like this even though there were probably better uses for it.

「Shocking pink is still passable, but I sure as heck ain’t seen lavender fish.」

「Think it tastes good?」

「Won’t know till we eat it.」

Everyone had nonchalant discussions as they hauled in fairly good fish. Amongst the normal fish like rainbow trout, salmon, and char were strange colored fish like shocking pink or lavender, in addition to fish that didn’t even look like fish.

Then again, what with how they were using makeshift lures, maybe even the normal fish like salmon and char weren’t the same as they were in Japan.

「What now? I feel we did pretty well……」

「Yeah. We’re gonna keep movin’ up the river anyway. Wanna call it a day?」

「Yeah. So are all these edible?」

「……What is a sea anemone doing here……」

「It has tail fins, pectoral fins, and dorsal fins, so it’s probably a fish, but……」

They saw strange-looking fish a little more often than they would like and gradually stopped talking. Some of them looked intimidating by inflating to around the size of Haruna’s face.

「I say we dissect ’em before eatin’.」

「You think they’d have useful materials?」

「Won’t know till I open ’em. Just feels like somethin’s tellin’ me to check ’em out.」

Hiroshi said as he worked on them gracefully, cutting through them in a flowing motion. After he took out several sections, he buried the remainder.

「Anything that looked useful?」

「Actually yeah, there was a portion that could be used for soma.」

「Sensei, what do you mean soma？」

「It’s a type of alcohol for the gods and has some crazy effects.」

「……That sounds awesome……」

「Well, the other ingredients’re only found in the Sea of Existence, so it ain’t like it’s that simple.」

Makoto gave a strange look when she heard that. The Sea of Existence was made up of the liquid from the pupas in the cocoons from which they had taken a large quantity of spirit thread.

「Well for now let’s just collect all these parts ‘n lock ’em up in storage.」

Hiroshi said as he did just that. It was fantastic to think they had come across such a rare item, and they intended to keep things that way.

「It’s very like you to get lucky and win rare items like these, Haruna. Great job.」

「Not really sure if that counts as a compliment or not……」

Tatsuya burst out laughing at Haruna’s comment on Makoto’s praise. Haruna did in fact have overwhelming luck. Other than how she was flung into a world, everything had worked out to her benefit after the berserk bear had attacked, allowing her to meet up with so many people.

With that being said, she was also the kind of person to come up with literally nothing, so rather than saying she had luck of the draw, it was more precise to say that when she scored big, she scored big, and when she lost, she lost hard.

「I think we’re fine right now, but it’d be bad to have rain fallin’ down on us, so let’s move a bit furtger away along the river.」

Hiroshi proposed after finishing up with the fish, looking over at them.

「Does it seem rainy？」

「Can’t say for sure. But it hasn’t rained all week. It’d be wise to anticipate it.」

「……Alright then.」

The sky was currently a beautiful blue, but weather always is a fickle thing. Even for Japan, whose weather forecasting of the 21st century was fairly spot-on, unexpected things happened more than you would think. It was impossible to completely accurately predict the weather in this satellite-less world.

「Think you have the path along the river memorized well enough?」

「I pretty much do, plus there’s a distinct path, so no worries.」

He said, turning back a bit and indicating a hardened area of land that was difficult to differentiate from the rest of the land around it once you could no longer see the river. Needless to say, no matter how long they’d been at this, Majoto, Haruna, and Tatsuya did not clearly remember the way back to their camping ground from the previous day. The paths were much too similar.

「I think we just need to pass through here.」

「How can you or Mio even find these indistinct paths……」

「Cause otherwise we’d never level up our harvestin’.」

Hiroshi said to Tatsuya with a faraway expression. Even in the game, he had struggled with recognizing paths like these. It had truly been a daunting experience trying to even go get materials a step above the rest solely because of the roads.

「This is unrelated, but it looks like there are other humanoid settlements as well, y’all.」

「On what basis？」

「Too many traces of them to be just wanderin’ humans. We’re talkin’ quite the frequency here.」

「Oh really now?」

It was unlikely that elves would go all the way out here on a three day walk just to hunt. Maybe there was more than one elf settlement, but if that were the case then there would have to be more elves visiting these other towns. If there was actually another village nearby, it was unlikely that there would be just one person coming to-and-fro twice a month. In the first place, elves had a long lifespan and not as many members in their race, so they couldn’t make too many villages.

With that information in hand and the quantity of side paths, there was a high probability that there were other races who counted this area as part of their territory.