CH.486 New Year’s Celebration

CH.486 New Year’s Celebration

And so, the year came to an end. It is kind of funny. I have been in this world for over ten months, this world months, which are a bit shorter.

Doesn’t feel like it. I feel like I’ve been here for over two years, but what do I know? Probably a lot, but also nothing at the same time.

But let’s not get overly philosophical, we have a busy day ahead of us. ... kind of.

Realistically, we don’t really have to do anything, but it is the new year, well, it is currently still the 28th of the thirteenth month, so not yet the new year, but we will be getting there.

I guess I can talk a bit about how the new year is usually celebrated in this world. I know I’ve mentioned this before, but the Heroic calendar this world uses has thirteen months. Each month is exactly 28 days. Which when you do the math results in a year that is 364 days long. One less than on Earth.

Or it would be were it not for the Goddess’ day. Or as you may all think of it, the New Year’s day. So Yeah, that is the recap, let’s get to what we are actually doing on the last day of the year.

... the answer is, nothing super special. HomeBase had a celebration, because tomorrow, on Goddess’ day, we’d be going to different places to celebrate, so I decided to have the HomeBase celebration on the last day.Rread latest chapters at novelhall.com

Yeah, it wasn’t that special, but we had fun, ate good food, the dhampir students liked it when they saw me bleed a dragon and offered them dragon blood

I don’t usually offer dragon blood to the HomeBase dhampir students, mainly because it is difficult to let go of. That stuff is addictive. And naturally after they leave, they won’t get any more of it.

So instead they usually drink beast blood, from my Beast-type monsters, or HomeBase monsters. Lua then mixes a bit of dragon blood into it, about 1 to 100 ratio, to give it a better taste, while not being overwhelming. It is similar to how she used to mix human blood into her blood to make low quality blood taste a lot better.

But on special days, I do offer them pure dragon blood. And naturally this is one of them.

And because this is me, I naturally offered them a chance to also ride dragons.

I think the dhampirs that didn’t get the chance to ride dragons will be jealous when they hear that this group got the chance to, because I don’t do it for each group. But I think I’ll start doing it. It only costs me an afternoon, so maybe a graduation present to them.

The next day, on the Goddess’ day, my girls and I were planning on visiting a few places.

First is the Capital, so we can hear the King address the people. He does so in a few different places across the city, so we listened to the speech in the nobles district.

The speech was honestly nothing special, and I was actually almost disappointed that I wasted my time on this. But luckily it was just almost, because Cailie actually enjoyed the speech. She said it reminded her of the speeches her clan leader would give, you know, during the time before Amilie took over.

Alice was also happy to hear the speech, as it was her first time, but she did get bored eventually.

And as always, having people ride dragons for the first time, okay it wasn’t the first time for some of them, as I’ve done this before, but still. It is great to see. Can’t say that I argue. I remember my first dragon ride, and it was amazing. Or would have been if some random Kevin didn’t bother me afterwards.

While I was watching over my dragons, I ended up talking to some adventurers. Mainly the Saber Fang and the Diamond Sword parties.

That eventually led to Tye challenging me to a summoner duel, like the one we had way back. ... you know, that time when I almost died to his spirit tiger. ... yeah. Memories.

But hey, I now actually have the regular Summoning Magic skill, well Advanced Summoning Magic to be accurate, so I can take part in the duel without having to rely on my cards.

And once we began our duel, it became apparent why Tye wanted to challenge me. He had a new summoning contract, and he summoned a dragon. An earth dragon to be specific.

Judging by its size, which is a fairly accurate way of telling a dragon’s strength, his dragon is still quite young, and not all that strong. Then again, the summonable dragons aren’t exactly the same as the true dragons are. But still, that earth dragon should be at least A-rank, if not low S-rank.

I naturally summoned Himeśaila to oppose his dragon, because I wanted to show that I can summon dragons not only with my cards, but the regular way as well. Yes I could have summoned Nir, but that might have been overkill.

I then set up a barrier around our two monsters, because I learned from last time.

... and I won’t go too much into detail about the fight, because Himeśaila dominated the earth dragon. Not only could the earth dragon not fly, its attacks, while powerful, were quite slow, so Himeśaila could easily dodge them, while pelting the earth dragon with attacks.

I then asked Tye about his experience taming the earth dragon, and he told me how his Baby Dragon helped him in that endeavor. I was happy to hear that the little dragon I gave him was able to help him like that.

I then asked Jack, the leader of Diamond Sword, for a practice match in swordsmanship. He uses a greatsword, so he will be perfect for it. When he asked why, I explained that I had been asked to take part in an exhibition match before the adventuring tournament, and I wanted to check how good I am against someone who knows adventuring ranks better than I know.

We were pretty evenly matched in terms of skill, I think Jack was maybe a bit better, but I could overpower him, as I simply had higher stats than he does.

Admittedly, overpowering and even almost skill matching a B-rank adventurer in sword combat might have been a mistake, because the Diamond Sword members, who know how sucky I used to be with a sword, questioned how I got so good with a sword in under a year. ... which I didn’t really have an answer to, other than claiming I had good teachers.

My stats being higher than Jack’s didn’t raise as many suspicions, as they had definitely heard about me taking on SS-rank monsters, and I do get full exp from monsters my monsters kill, so my level could be quite high, even with them not knowing about Level Up!

As the day was coming closer to the end, Janina asked me to bring myself and my fiancées to the Coast, so I left Ria in charge of HomeBase personnel, we jumped into a ship and flew over to the coast.

There we enjoyed the evening and the first sunset of the year with the dragons.

As we looked towards the ocean, we could just barely see Prabhu Jala giving some mer-folk their fifteenth birthday dragon ride.

Yeah. I think times like these are what make being in this world worth it. Sure I could probably find a way to return home, but do I really want to? Probably not. I’m happy here.