Chapter 20

Chapter 20<~> Chapter 20

After leaving the weapon shop I turned and noticed the sign the guy at the counter was talking about. It had big blocky red letters that I unfortunately couldn't read.

“Beastkin and Demi-Humans are NOT WELCOME in my shop." Bella read out. "I'm actually a little surprised I didn’t notice it earlier, not that I'm used to being a beastkin," she added.

“Does that kind of thing happen a lot in this country?”

“Mmm, I haven’t done much traveling but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was pretty common. The Beastkin or I guess I should say beastfolk now, were known to be pretty bloodthirsty and ruthless fighters in the last war about five years ago. There are a lot of people that personally fought some of the beastfolk so tensions can be pretty high sometimes. beastfolk are still considered one of the civilized races though so after the treaty was signed individuals are free to come and go in most places. Some people don’t care about that and will still ban people from their shops. While it’s most common for it to be aimed at beastfolk there are also places that might ban elves or dwarves or something else instead. We should probably start paying more attention to the shops we enter just in case, we probably got lucky that time.”

“I agree, that could have gone a lot worse.”

“Oh by the way, now that I’m looking at this scepter more closely I think we got an amazing deal. This scepter is actually really high quality. The magic crystal attached to this scepter is so high quality that it l can already tell with my limited experience that it will make my nature magic more powerful and more efficient. It’ll let me do bigger spells with less magic,” she says beaming.

“Yeah we certainly got luck...y” Huh, we noticed a shop we weren’t supposed to go into, the guy who would get mad at us for it wasn’t there, the clerk happened to have gotten a nice item for us and sold it to us at a steal just to get rid of it. Could this be the benefit of my high luck stat or is it all just coincidence? Gah, stuff like that is impossible to know and it starts making you superstitious about things. Best not to think about it too hard.

I look up at the sky, It wasn’t quite sunset yet but it was starting to get to be pretty late afternoon. I didn’t get any armor yet but that could probably wait till later.

“Hey Bella, if you don’t mind, when we get back to the inn will you see if you can help me learn to read? I’m sick of not being able to and I’d like to read that ritual book we got from the guild. Oh! And let’s stop by that guild store, we totally forgot to pick up that magic chalk Mirianna mentioned.

“Sure,” she replied warmly. “It’ll be nice to help you out for a change.”

I reach out and grab her hand, lacing our fingers as we keep walking. I take a peak at her and her cute pointy ear tips start turning red again. How cute.

The quick trip to the guild store was pretty uneventful. The store was a pretty basic general store. There were things like lanterns, torches, rope, and the like. If it would have been in my old world it would have seemed like a strange cross of a hardware store and a sporting goods store. We bought a box of the magic chalk for 1 silver, a box of mundane chalk and a something akin to a blackboard for 30 copper, a leather-bound journal for 50 silver, ouch, and Bella picked up a tough looking backpack for 80 copper. The prices honestly seemed a little all over the place to me but I had no context for what was easy to get and what was rare. Paper sure seems expensive though, still this journal is really nice and I needed something to take notes in.

When I stepped in the door of our room I suddenly felt a wave of discomfort come over me. Our sheets were messy and the room still smelled of sex. At only a glance I could see the spot where I had been held down and violated. It wasn’t until I felt Bella’s hand on my back that I realized that I had slumped against the door frame.

“Maybe it would be best if we asked for a different room for tonight.”

“Y-yeah...”

It wasn’t quite dinner time but I had gone down to the open tavern part of the inn to wait for Bella to collect what was left of our things in the room and talk to the innkeeper. I hadn’t really spent time to process what had happened to me last night, I instead tried to distract myself with tasks and new things rather than confront how I felt about what happened. I sat there and stared at the grain of the wood.

Doesn’t Sightspeak feel pretty powerful for only getting a skill to level 10 though? And was what I was doing really enough to level something to 10 so quickly?

“Hey Bella, apparently in the last two hours I got Linguistics, got it to level 10 already and got a new ability called Sightspeak. Is that normal?”

“What? You got ten levels in linguistics already? I thought you might get a skill like that with what you were doing but that seems a little extreme. What exactly were you doing again?” She walks back over from the bed and pulls her chair next to me.

I show her what I was doing, just taking a sentence and using my cheat sheet to rewrite the sentence in English as practice.

“What’s this language?” She says pointing to my English translation.

“Uh, that’s English. It was the main language of the country I came from... At least I think so.”

“I’ve never heard of English before, maybe you got extra experience for translating the book into a rare language. That or the reverse would normally level up a skill like this faster.”

“Would it level up that fast if I was the only one who spoke or understood English though?”

“Probably not, but there are other World Travelers, so maybe one of them speaks this language too. If there are books written in this language here, even things like diaries than it would probably count.”

“Huh, alright then.”

“It’s fairly common to get new skills when hitting multiples of 10. What does Sightspeak do?”

I read the description to her verbatim and her eyebrows raised.

“Wow, combined with the World Traveler title that seems really good.”

“If it was going to be so easy to learn to read and write everything I would have liked it to have just come with the World Traveler title.”

“Well, most of the time skills are rewards for effort not logic. You got the skill because you put effort into learning, not because it made sense to pair it with your ability to speak all spoken languages. Not everyone cares much about learning to read, there are probably many world travelers who didn’t even bother.”

“If you say so...”