CH 7

After sorting the potions, I asked Kirika-chan to check if I did it correctly.

「Is this okay?」

「Yup, that’s right!」

Kirika-chan checked and told me I sorted them correctly. I got five potions and twelve bad potions. There was definitely a lot more bad ones.

「Why are the bad potions bad? Are they poisonous?」

「They’re not, but they don’t heal you.」

I see.

Suddenly, the words “Expiry Date” appeared in my head.

…Even so, I was the type of person to ignore expiry dates.

I took one of the bottles with pale yellow liquid inside, and pulled out the cork with a pop.

「Wait, Yuuri-san, what are you doing?!」

Bryce-kun stopped me before I brought the bottle to my mouth.

「It’s not poisonous, but it still tastes really bad. You’ll puke it out.」

It was bad enough to puke out?

Bryce-kun took the bottle from my hand and dropped it. The bottle landed on the ground, and its content spilled out. Once all of the liquid left the bottle, the bottle dispersed into fine yellow sand-like particles and disappeared.

Ah!

So you couldn’t use the bottles itself then… It’s great that we wouldn’t create any trash, but…

These bad potions were really a miss then. I thought it’d be nice if we could at least use the bottles for something too.

Hm? What’s this?

I smelled something familiar.

It was a good smell.

My stomach growled just thinking about it.

「Next, we should explain how the hut works.」

Bryce-kun smiled and took us to the hut.

The hut had ten bedrooms, a living room, and a dining room combined with the kitchen.

「This is Kirika’s room. Onee-chan, which room do you want to use? The one next to mine is free.」

「I’ll take that room then.」

「Um, let’s see. You do something called register by holding up your card close to the door there. Then it’ll become your room, Yuuri-oneechan. Nobody else can enter the room unless you give them permission to.」

Card?

「By card, do you mean the one I got for registering with the guild?」

Kirika-chan nodded. I took out my card and held it over a slight bump on the door, trying to do what she said was registering.

Wasn’t this system similar to a hotel card key?

「Potions are picked up once a month. Please keep the ones you got inside your room. Nobody else can enter your room, so it’s safe.」

Safe? I couldn’t imagine any of these children to steal though.

「This hut and everything inside of it were all prepared by Rofas-san! Before, everybody had to work on the potion field while camping outside.」

Kurtz-kun said, and began telling the story of Rofas-san, his eyes gleaming in admiration.

Wow, that’s impressive. Even though they called this place a hut, it wasn’t shabby at all. It was a properly built log-house. There were quite a lot of rooms too.

It was furnished well too. The living room had a table and many chairs.

「Yuuri-san, how much do you know about adventurers?」

I answered Bryce-kun’s question with 「Nothing at all.」

「Rich people go to an adventurer training school. People with no money work at places like a potion field to earn money and to learn how to be an adventurer. Our level goes up too.」

Ehh. There’s a school for learning how to become an adventurer?

I wondered if that meant these three had no money, and that was why they worked here.

「Poor children earn money at the potion field while raising their level. They can’t live as adventurers if they can’t handle sleeping outside or only eating a small amount of food. We would’ve been fine with camping outside.」

Uu, really? Sleeping outside…

I imagined having an actual camping tent, but realized that was probably not what they meant. If I wanted to continue living as an adventurer, I had to prepare myself to sleep under the stars at any time.

「But if we sleep outside, there’s a chance our hard-earned potions will get stolen. We might even get hurt. If we lived like that, we’d die before we even become adventurers. That’s why Rofas-san built this hut for future adventurers to live in.」

Ah, so that was why a hut was made!

The reason the card system was put in wasn’t to prevent the children from stealing each other’s potions, but to keep bad people out. Mhm, that way, the children could live without fear of being attacked. Rofas-san, you wanted to protect these children!

What a good person.

Rofas-san was a really good guy.

He was the type of guy who would prioritize other things over marriage. He’d probably go broke by using all his money for the children.

「Also, the beds are way comfier than the ones at a cheap inn. It makes it harder for me to leave.」

「Eh? Bryce-kun, you’re leaving?」

「Once my level hits 10, I can go to the beginner dungeon. That means I’ll graduate from here. I’m glad you came here, Yuuri-san. I was a little worried leaving these two here by themselves. Listen, Kurtz, Kirika. You need to properly teach Yuuri-san the dungeon rules, okay?」

Eh? No way! Bryce-kun was going to leave?