To Another World... with Land Mines! Volume 3, page 1
Prologue
“So yeah, we need to earn and save up a lot of money now!” Haruka exclaimed.
We had decided to rent a house in Laffan to use as our home base and had asked Diola-san to help us look for one, but there wasn’t anything that matched what we were looking for, sadly. It wasn’t her fault by any means, though, since it was a fact that she couldn’t show us something that didn’t exist. As a result, we had asked her to help us with the negotiations to purchase a plot of land instead so that we could pay for the construction of our own house. However, even though we had saved enough money to rent a house, we didn’t have enough money to pay for both land and a new house. All of this was what had led to Haruka’s declaration. Diola-san’s efforts would go to waste if we didn’t manage to save up enough money on our end. We would probably have to live a frugal life and continue to stay at an inn for a while to accomplish this.
“Well, with that said, the only thing we can really do to earn money is to take on more adventurer work. It’s not like we can take out a loan in this world.”
Yuki added, “What Haruka means is that it’s not a safe option. There’s a chance we might be scammed or even forced into slavery. Personal bankruptcy doesn’t exist here, so yeah.”
Oh, right, Yuki has the General Knowledge skill as well.
“Hmm? Didn’t you mention before that slavery is prohibited here, Haruka?” I asked.
“What Yuki means is conditions that are basically as bad as slavery. You know, situations like harsh penal servitude, for example. It seems like there are some measures in place to make sure you don’t die, but it’s definitely much harsher than anything back in Japan.”
Haruka told us that people who fell into that situation would be put under strict surveillance while being forced to work, and the money they earned would mostly go towards repaying their debt as well as towards management fees, so it was much more difficult to repay a debt in that way than it was working a normal job. Back in Japan, the amount of money you earned during penal servitude would be handed over to you once you had finished your sentence and were released from prison. The difference in this world was probably due to deductions for food expenses, prison maintenance fees, and the salaries of the people who worked at the prison. The kind of work you would be forced to do would probably be the shady type of work, and as for the work that women would be tasked with...
“Yeah, debt is absolutely bad,” I said.
“I don’t intend on allowing any of us to go into debt,” said Haruka. “It’s dangerous if you get scammed, so everyone needs to make sure to report and discuss with each other.”
“Mm, that’s the right way to go about it,” said Natsuki. “Calmly discuss things with someone else before making a decision. It’s best to have the mentality that every get-rich-quick scheme is a scam.”
“There are probably also special types of scams that target people who think they’re too smart to get scammed...” said Touya.
“Yep, and there might be scams unique to this world out there too, so we should all be on our guard,” said Yuki.
We all nodded. It would be hard for us to escape elaborate scams if any of us got ensnared in one, so we had to avoid them at all costs.
“On a sidenote, does Diola-san really like dried dindels?” Natsuki asked.
“Yeah. It seems she absolutely loves dindels, not just dried ones,” said Haruka.
The way Diola-san had taken a cut of our dindels seemed a bit like an abuse of her authority, but she had insisted it wasn’t a problem.
“Dindels are expensive seasonal fruits that aren’t readily available in the market, so they’re quite useful for negotiations,” I said.
“Oh, do dried dindels taste good?” Yuki asked.
“Oh right, neither of you have had dried dindels yet,” said Haruka. “Would you two like to try some?”
“Yeah!” Yuki exclaimed.
“Is it okay to have some?” Natsuki asked.
“Yeah. Give me a second.” Haruka took some dried dindels out of a bag and handed them to Yuki and Natsuki. “Okay, here you go.”
Both of them took some time to examine the fruits in front of them.
“Can we eat them right away like this?” Yuki asked.
“Yeah, you can bite right in,” said Haruka. “You can also slice them up first if you want.”
The main difference between regular dried fruits and dried dindels was their size. Most dried fruits would end up similar in size to an apricot or persimmon, and anything larger than that would normally be sliced up first before consumption. That probably meant that the large, plump dried dindels looked quite strange to Yuki and Natsuki, but it didn’t change the fact that they were delicious. The rest of us stared intently at them, silently urging them to try out the dried dindels.
At last the two of them tentatively bit into the dindels. Their faces lit up with looks of surprise, and they both voiced their thoughts.
“D-Delicious! It’s very sweet, but it still has a sour edge to it!” Yuki exclaimed. “Whoa, even the skin tastes good!”
“Mm!” Natsuki chimed in. “I’ve never had dried fruits that tasted this good before!”
Yep. Dindels become sweeter when dried, and you can even eat the skin, which you would normally throw away, so it kind of feels like you’re getting the best value out of dindels this way. However, fresh dindels have a stronger sour flavor than dried ones, and that’s something I enjoy, so it’s hard for me to say which I prefer.
“Okay, I understand why they’re a delicacy now,” said Natsuki. “By the way, how much does each one go for in the market?”
“Hmm. Well, dried dindels probably go for at least one thousand Rea each.”
“At least one gold coin per dindel?! That’s really expensive!” Yuki exclaimed.
“Oh yeah, we could probably pay for a plot of land if we sold our entire stock of dindels.”
Yuki objected right away. “I’m against that idea, Haruka! It’s better to have some valuable sweet food in stock!”
Natsuki gently shook her head. “The two of us weren’t the ones who made these dried dindels, so I feel a bit bad about saying this, but I kind of agree with Yuki...”
“If I had to pick a side, then I guess I’m of the same opinion,” said Haruka. “Nao, Touya, what about you two?”
“Well, I wouldn’t mind selling about half of our stock,” I said.
Yuki and Natsuki expressed their disappointment together when they heard my words. “Really...?”
I changed my opinion as soon as I saw how sad they looked. “Oh, actually, never mind, we should keep our stock of dindels.”
“Yeah, I agree with Nao,” said Touya. “They’re delicious, after all!”
Even if we had enough money to purchase the land, we would still have to earn more to pay for a house, so there wasn’t any reason to make Yuki and Natsuki sad when they had been suffering from bad food for so long. There was nothing wrong with taking our time to save up money.
“We can use dried fruits as rations when we have to go out on long trips, so I actually am in favor of saving them for practical reasons too,” said Haruka. “I plan on stocking up on other cheap dried fruits, though.”
The value of one dried dindel would be enough to purchase a couple of other dried fruits, so it would be somewhat extravagant to eat only dindels even though they were delicious. We had a lot of dried dindels stocked up, but we would run out before the next spring if each of us ate one or two per day.
“Can we actually earn four hundred gold coins in a short amount of time, though, Haruka?” Yuki asked.
“Well, it might sound like a lot of money, but the amount we spent on the chain mail for you and Natsuki was only one and a half times that amount, so it’s not that bad.”
“Uh, that just makes me scared to wear the chain mail...” said Yuki.
“It technically is clothing that’s worth the equivalent of at least one million yen, so yeah,” said Touya.
“When you put it like that, chain mail is actually quite expensive,” I said. The amount we had paid for Touya’s chain mail would have been enough to buy a car back in Japan.
Yuki tilted her head in thought. “Actually, now that I think about it, the value of heavy armor in the past back in Japan would’ve been somewhere between twenty and thirty million yen, so I guess it kind of makes sense.”
Touya looked quite surprised. “Wait, for real?! It was that expensive?!”
“Yeah. Life for samurai in the past seems to have been quite hard, since they had to gather up money to build large estates and also for their armor.”
“Yikes. The labor costs were high due to the fact that it was handmade instead of mass-produced, right? Our chain mail looks like it took a lot of work to make as well,” I said.
I always got a headache just thinking about how much delicate craftsmanship had gone into the fine wires that held my chain mail together. That thought would come to mind any time I wore it.
“It’s true that a lot of work went into our chain mail, but they’re also made of white iron, and that seems to be the main reason for their high cost,” said Touya.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s why chain mail is lightweight and rustproof.”
“We don’t know for sure yet if the chain mail is really rustproof, but it does feel pretty light considering that it’s made out of metal,” said Haruka.
&
nbsp; “If you hold up a lump of white iron and a lump of regular iron, you can easily tell which one is lighter. I thought the white iron was actually aluminum for a second due to its weight. It felt to me like about half of what the regular iron weighed. At the same time, white iron is also about two or three times stronger than regular iron.”
“Whoa, that sounds amazing,” I said. “I guess it makes sense that the chain mail was expensive.”
“Wait, did you guys buy this expensive armor without knowing about such things?” Yuki asked.
As she said that, Yuki reached for the chain mail that was lying near me and picked it up with one hand. The fact that she could pick it up like that was evidence of how light it was.
“We left all of that to Gantz-san, the owner of the weapon shop,” I said. “It’s better than amateurs like us giving specific orders, right?”
“I guess that’s one way to go about it, as long as you trust the person.”
“Also, the value of white iron is about ten times that of regular iron,” said Touya. “It’s also much more difficult to work with. The closest thing that comes to mind for me is stainless steel.”
“Oh, yeah, that sounds difficult. It would probably cost way over one million yen if it was made back in Japan.”
Based on what I knew, stainless steel wires were quite tough. Cheap wire cutters would have a difficult time snipping through even a single millimeter of wire. I wonder how much time it actually took to make this chain mail by hand considering that there aren’t any machines or tools like that in this world to help with the process...
“Well, it’ll take less than two months to save up four hundred gold coins if we hunt boars every day,” said Haruka.
“That’s amazing—or wait, is it?” Yuki paused and then mumbled to herself, “I don’t really know what to compare it with...”
You would have to take into account the time required to hunt boars as well as the risks involved, and the value of money in this world was different anyway, so it was hard to convert to an exact yen equivalent. The exchange rate we had in our minds was roughly one hundred yen per one Rea, so one gold coin would be the equivalent of ten thousand yen, but we were just basing that rate on the value of bread, since that was the primary food in this world. There would be some discrepancies if we instead based it on something like the value of fruits or lodging fees.
“It’s a monthly income roughly equivalent to about two million yen. If we divide it by five, then it’d be about four hundred thousand yen per person,” I said. “It’s more than enough for people our age, isn’t it?”
I wasn’t sure if it was worth the risk that came with hunting boars, but I was fairly sure that people who dropped out of middle school wouldn’t be able to earn four hundred thousand yen per month. Depending on the commodity, prices in this world could be more or less than prices back in Japan, so a simple comparison wasn’t really helpful, but it was nice to think about making that much money. However, Yuki and Natsuki’s next words made my joy short-lived.
“That’s a yearly salary of four million eight hundred thousand yen with bonuses already included, right? It’s not that much if we take into account the fact that we have to pay everything ourselves, including taxes, social insurance, and work-related expenses,” said Natsuki. “If we deducted all of that, then the final amount would end up somewhere around half of the total, at two million four hundred thousand yen.”
“Our lives are also at risk doing this kind of work, but there’s no such thing as insurance or hazard pay!” Yuki exclaimed.
Well, there goes my dream, I guess. I feel kind of sad about this.
Touya tried to refute what the girls had just said. “Well, it’s not like boars are the only way for us to earn money. We can also hunt at least two or more boars per day if things go well, so...”
Haruka brought up another issue, although she seemed to partially agree with Touya. “It’s true we can earn money from other work, like gathering herbs, but the problem here is that we don’t know how much longer we can keep hunting boars. Right now is the best time of the year for hunting boars, so we’ve encountered a lot of them that are fat, but they’ll get skinny during winter and be harder to come across, right?”
“There won’t be as much food available for the boars in winter, so that makes sense,” said Yuki.
“Mm, that would result in a drastic reduction in income for us,” said Natsuki.
“What about animals like deer?” I asked. “If their population is out of control like it was back in Japan, we can hunt them without any issues, right?”
The number of deer in Japan had grown to dangerous levels, and apparently it would be very bad for the environment if their population continued to grow. There was plenty of demand for meat in this world, so I was down to hunt deer if they existed in this world.
“The reason for the explosive growth in the deer population back in Japan was that humans hunted wolves to extinction,” said Haruka. “There are monsters in this world, so I doubt there are any overpopulation issues with regular animals.”
“On the other hand, monster populations can grow out of control!” Yuki exclaimed.
What that meant, apparently, was that monster populations would sometimes grow until they ran out of prey to feed on, and then an even worse phenomenon known as Stampede would occur and monsters would assault human settlements.
“So that means in this world, monsters are the natural predators of regular animals? That’s awful,” I said.
I would rather be faced with an excess population of boars or deer instead of monsters like goblins, since goblins weren’t exactly edible. Supposedly some monsters like orcs did have edible meat, but goblins definitely did not. You wouldn’t die from eating goblin meat, but I had no intentions of trying it out.
“If the boars decrease in number during the winter, then I guess we’ll have no choice but to gather magicites from goblins,” said Haruka. “However, even if we ignore the mental trauma from that process, it’s still not a very efficient way of earning money.”
We would only get 250 Rea for splitting open the head of a goblin and prying out its magicite. With that in mind...
“In a way, I guess dindels are like a bonus item for elves,” I said.
All we had to do as elves was reach out and pick the fruit to obtain the same value as one magicite from a goblin.
“I feel like people who aren’t elves would try to gather dindels too if they were such a good way to earn money, though,” said Touya.
“Nah, Touya, you might think it’s easy since you didn’t climb up that tree, but it would’ve probably been impossible for me if I was a human,” I said.
“Yeah, Nao’s right,” said Haruka. “In fact, accidents happen from time to time where adventurers who aren’t elves try to gather dindels themselves and fall from the trees.”
When we’d gone to gather dindels with Aera-san, she had easily hopped up the dindel tree, but it was still at least fifty meters tall. The winds that blew at the top were quite strong, and the branches weren’t exactly stable either. You would have to balance on those shifting branches while you put dindels in a bag, and then you would have to carry a heavy bag full of dindels as you climbed down. The way down was honestly more dangerous than the way up. I was used to it by now, but I’d needed rope at first. The path that you had to take to get to the dindel trees wasn’t exactly safe either. Adventurers would be able to take care of themselves, but tusk boars and goblins were a real threat for ordinary citizens.
“Hmm, so there is a good reason that dindels are expensive,” said Yuki.
“I mean, yeah,” I said. “That’s just how economics works.”
“What about the herbs you mentioned earlier, Haruka?” Natsuki asked. “How much profit can you earn gathering those?”
“Other adventurers wouldn’t be able to earn much from gathering herbs, but we have the Help Guide and the Appraisal skill, so we can earn a decent profit from it.”
“Is that so?”
“You would normally have to memorize the different types of herbs and know how to tell them apart and spot them in an open field, but that’s easy to do with those two skills.”
Diola-san had been quite surprised when we’d brought back the first batch of herbs we gathered.
“Appraisal is quite a useful skill considering there were so many additional land mine skills,” said Touya. “It’s not exactly a cheat skill, but it’s a nice bonus skill to have.”
