CH 11

“It feels nice when the weather’s this good, doesn’t it, Master Cain?”

The clopping of hooves was loud as they took a leisurely trip outside of town. Cain was riding a horse with one of the knights of the gate guard that he often went jogging with. 

Arnoldia was holding the reins, and Cain held onto the front part of the saddle called the horn. 

“It’s a little too hot, though. Can we make the horse run to give us a bit of a breeze?” asked Cain.

“If you fell from this horse, it would be hell to pay, Master Cain. We have plenty of time, so let’s take it easy,” said Arnoldia.

Today, the duke’s house’s carriage was already in use, so Cain was traveling by horseback. He would be starting his riding lessons soon, and so this trip to the temple by horseback was being used as an opportunity to get him accustomed to horses. 

Cain had lived to his thirties in his past existence, but he was a city boy and a hermit, so he had never ridden a horse in his life.

In the games that he played in his past existence, he had often ridden dragons and hippogriffs, but he realized that there weren’t too many games that involved riding a proper horse for transportation.

His eye line was raised up, and it felt very good to rock about on the horse’s back while its hooves clopped on the ground below. He was riding with a knight for now, but Cain thought that he wanted to learn how to ride by himself.

“You seem to do well on horseback, Cain-sama,” said Arnoldia, “Some people are afraid of being so high up, or just afraid of how big horses are in the first place.”

“I want to learn how to ride by myself, as soon as possible,” said Cain.

“If we can get to our destination and return with no problems today, I will tell your father that I recommend that you start riding lessons immediately,” said another knight from beside Arnoldia and Cain.

“Thank you, Sarasinia!”

Sarasinia was a knight in the duke’s personal guard, and he had come along with Arnoldia and Cain, riding on his own horse. He kept beside them, and his horse’s hooves clopped at the same leisurely pace.

If anything were to happen on the road, one of the knights would stop to deal with the situation, and the other would take Cain and flee. For that reason, Cain was traveling with the two knights.

Diana had stayed at home, today.

“There’s the temple coming into view,” said Arnoldia. Looking where he was pointing, Cain could see a familiar looking spire. It was the temple connected to the orphanage where Ilvalino lived.

Today, Cain had brought with him a letter from his father that requested Ilvalino’s presence for an interview. It was his mission to deliver this letter to the temple director and return home with a response. It was his first assignment. He did have guards with him, though.

The temple director was not at the temple. Cain was the one making an unannounced visit, so this wasn’t unexpected and didn’t pose a problem. He gave the letter from his father and a donation from his mother to the head priest, who was also the head of the orphanage. Cain then headed to the orphanage.

“Huh? There are only little kids around,” said Cain.

“Oh! Cain-sama.”

“Cain-sama’s here!”[Read this novel and other amazing translated novels from the original source at the “Novel Multiverse dot com” website @ novelmultiverse.com]

When Cain got to the orphanage yard, there were a few of the younger children, not yet four years old, playing. None of the boys that he had played Rock Marbles against were there.

“Hey, Asmil, Kayranka, and Timoniena. You’re all your usual adorable selves, aren’t you?”

“Hello, Cain-sama!”

“Hello!”

“Dilipaloo, Anmiranika, Sasu, and Kasuga, too! How have you all been?”

“Hello, Cain-sama!”

“Were you able to find any strong rocks, Cain-sama?”

“Where’s Diana-sama, today?”

“Diana stayed home today. She’ll come to play, next time, okay?” said Cain. He greeted every one of them by name.

When he was working in sales for a toy company in his past life, an experienced co-worker of his adamantly advised him to “never lump together nursery children with kindergarten children.” He had continued to live by that rule, now. By calling each child by their name and treating them as individuals, the child’s development of a sense of self and independence was encouraged, or something like that…

It was only something he had heard from his co-worker, and he had never followed up on researching this claim. There was no way he could follow up on it, now, either. However, whenever Cain called a child by their name, they smiled joyfully, and that was enough of a reason to keep doing it.

Cain had gained the ability to learn peoples’ names quickly from his career in making Let’s Play gaming videos for YouTube. If he couldn’t remember the countless characters’ names from a game and made a mistake in one of his videos, the comment section would always go crazy.

Since he was making these videos in his spare time as a salaryman, he couldn’t just redo an entire video every time he called a character by the wrong name.

He put his all into remembering names by calling the characters’ by their names over and over as soon as he heard them for the first time. He learned that this trick actually worked quite well.

On top of this trick, in this world, people had a much wider variety of hair and eye colors, and so it was easier to assign names to these unique looking people and remember them.

“Where are Ilvalino and Seranosta and Amedika?” 

Cain asked the whereabouts of the oldest members of the orphanage – the kids that were over four years old.

Apparently, they often went to the fields or a fishing spot to gather food. They would return in the evenings.

Mother had made a donation the last time they were here, but just because they caught a financial break once, didn’t mean that they could abandon their usual routine for obtaining food. Cain thought it was nice to know that their donation may have added at least one more food item to their usual meals, though.

In addition to another donation from Mother, Cain had also brought a few picture books for the children.

Cain and all the present children moved over to the dining hall, and he read them the books. He then put the books on the bookshelf.

“If you learn your letters, you’ll be able to read these, too. You should learn by having the older kids or the head priest read the books for you.”

Cain had brought a book that noble children used to learn their letters. It was a sort of ABC book, and he was passing it onto them from his personal picture book collection.

It’s a Japanese video game, but the letters used in this world aren’t Japanese. That’s a bit unfair, isn’t it?

Cain had learned a lot from this book, himself, and so in his eyes, it was a tried and proven fundamental book for learning how to read.

While he played various games using hand gestures with the children and some thumb wrestling, Ilvalino and his comrades returned.

“Hey, Ilvalino! You kind of smell, you know?” said Cain.

“You don’t have to point that out. We were spreading fertilizer in the fields,” said Ilvalino.

“Good job,” said Cain, smiling and shaking hands with Ilvalino.

The girls nearby were blushing and acting bashful. Ilvalino sighed.