Try again? - Chapter 54

*thud*

” Finally… bed. Tired. ” while I was sinking in our bedsheets, words that could be hardly understood made their way out of my mouth.

’Ahh… My head hurts… Dealing with giant wasps, dealing with a giant wasp nest, dealing with freaking giant wasp Queen, dealing with Silvia, dealing with a perverted guard and now this…’

I just wanted a little bit of… of… I didn’t even know myself, maybe… a little bit of quiet and peace. Yes, that was it.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world was not sharing my opinion. It was like ’What? Wanna rest? Nope. Take this random thing and figure out where the hell did it pop up and why…’

*sigh*

’status’

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’Three digits, huh? Why am I not even surprised anymore?’

The answer to this question was laying in the new skill I just received.

[Spirit Enlargement (small): Small increase for the Spirit status.]

At least it was simple and easy to understand. Good job on that.

It was not like I wasn’t happy about the sudden boost. On the contrary, the skill was exactly what was needed for me to learn magic faster and easier.

I even had a guess from where it popped up. And the culprit was situated right on my finger. It was most probably one of the hidden effects I couldn’t see yet. The ring was boosting the spirit status. Gaining a skill related to the same status after wearing the ring for some time… It was pretty obvious that there was a connection between the two.

But if my theory was true, that meant that I just added another odd thing to the long list of irregularities about my person.

Shallow as it was, I had at least some knowledge about the skills and how they worked but when it was coming to the passive ones… Outside of the few I got from the start, the one regarding my link with the ring and now this, I didn’t know anything about them.

” Fio… Fio… are you there? I need… help. ” racking my head alone didn’t seem to be that effective so I decided to call for reinforcements. I said that but the truth was that I was so lazy and tired at the moment that I didn’t even want to turn my head around and check where she was.

” Mm. I’m here. What is it? ” she said and sit down next to me on the bed.

Now that she was right next to me, I made an effort and took my head out of the blanket to be able to make visual contact with her. However, that was all I was able to do. The rest of me was still sinking in the overwhelming warmth of the blanket.

” Tell me, Fio… How to… hmm… how to say it? I just got a passive skill just now… Do you know about them? ”

” A passive skill? ”

” Yeah… Spirit enlargement or something. It says that it increases your spirit stat… Well, my spirit status got a nice bonus from it so I’m quite sure that that’s what it is doing. But I don’t know much about them actually…”

And the silence descended upon us.

” Are these passive skills rare? ”

While I was waiting for an answer, she seemed to struggle thinking about what to say.

” I don’t know. There are several for elemental affinities. I didn’t hear about the one for the spirit status but the one for power is pretty common to have. But back then… back then, I wasn’t allowed to know much about these things… Maybe this one is more common for mages? ”

” Ugh… Yeah, I forgot about it. Sorry. ”

” Mmmm… Maybe it’s because Lizza is amazing? Or maybe it’s because Lizza is an elf? ”

”…”

Well… I very much doubted about her first assumption. Even though it made me a little happy… And regarding the second one… I couldn’t deny it for sure, but I was still inclined to believe the ring theory more… It was more plausible like that.

’Whatever… Another thing I’ll have to hide. At least for the moment. Thinking about it again, nothing coming from wearing a ridiculously high-grade ring could be something common. It is no wonder she doesn’t know anything about it.’

.

.

.

In the morning, or to be exact, with roughly two or three hours before the sunrise, I was already on my feet. My sleeping schedule was messed up from the time spent in the forest. It was also true that I got to bed earlier than I should last night…

’Whatever… I’ll just do something until the others wake up.’

I didn’t want to wake up Fiona either. She got to bed later than me since she insisted that she wanted to check all the herbs she collected. She wanted to prepare the wasp claws we need to show to the guild as proof too. The claws were all severed and stocked in my ring but she wanted to check them and put all of them in the rucksack for tomorrow.

Looking at the piles of different herbs and the rucksack in the corner of the room and then at her sleeping face, a smile bloomed on my face.

’She is doing her best…’

Compared to her, I felt like I complained way too much about way too many things these days. It was better to look at her example and do what I could instead of worrying while doing nothing to resolve the problem.

Thinking about that, something I wanted to test for quite some time came back to my mind so I removed the ring from my finger.

’status’

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’Aaaaand it dropped from 101 to 83.Yup… As I thought… I don’t remember how much my spirit status was boosted by the ring, but I’m sure that it was less than right now…’

This confirmed the fact that the ring didn’t possess a fixed bonus like all the enchantings I did until now on our weapons. It was more like: the stronger the owner, the bigger the bonus. As expected from a mythical-grade item…

Maybe my discovery didn’t amount to much but compared with knowing almost nothing, it was still a step forward.

” Good. Let’s do it. ” I muttered to myself and took out several of the books I found in the ruins.

Back then, I mostly skimmed through them searching for whatever I could learn about this world, about magic and enchanting. Some of them were too advanced for me at that time, not like I was much better now but since I hat time, it wasn’t a bad idea to take a look through them again.

At that time I didn’t even bother to look at the few ones about alchemy since it was useless without proper materials to work with.

’I should take a look at them…’

Well, I most likely wouldn’t be able to do much with them now either without proper equipment, formulas and so on. I was pretty sure that the herb names had been changed in the course of years too. Other than the baseline I didn’t expect to learn much from it but that was a start.

The time fled in an instant while I emerged in my research. Fiona had woke up and we walked downstairs shortly afterward for breakfast. The meal was not finished yet but we didn’t mind waiting for a little. They waited for the lazy me to wake up every morning until now after all.

After a little bit, the two children, Erin and Arron joined and we started to eat. I wasn’t really sure what it was but it was quite good. It looked like a kind of stew with pieces of meat and some vegetables.

After we finished the meal, Sara came to speak with me about the meat deal we did before we left the city. She managed to sell most of it. She explained to me what kind of meat and for how much and so on but then again, I wasn’t an expert when it was coming to this area so I just nodded at what she said and just accepted it as it was.

After she took her part from it, we received around 8 silver and 3 lesser ones. It was more than enough for us to pay another week worth of rent which I just did.

Well, that was the initial plan but when I asked her about it, I just got another interesting information. Apparently, the last week of each month had an additional two days making it a total of nine days.

I was stunned by the discovery but I kept my calm on the outside and chose to just pay for an additional five days since that many remained before this month was gone.

I had Fiona explaining to me how that was working after we left the house. I wanted to pay a visit to Albert too before our meeting with Silvia at the guild.

The reason was as simple as to why there was a nine-day week at the end of each month. After a long and shocked glare from Fiona, she finally explained to me that in this world there was a phenomenon called mana saturation.

It was happening for around two days, twelve times in a year at an interval of thirty days. Not coincidentally there were twelve months as well.

She didn’t know how or why that was happening but in a few words, the natural mana level in the atmosphere would be higher at that time.

They took this irregularity and created a calendar around it. The month was split in three weeks with seven days each and another one with the addition of two irregular days. It was also called ’the big week’ for obvious reasons.

” Lizza… ” as I was contemplating the new information while we were walking to Albert’s shop, a concerned voice got me back to reality.

Turning my head to look at her, she was looking at me with an expression that could be described as confusion, concern and maybe a little bit of pity.

” W-What? Didn’t I tell you that I didn’t know a lot of stuff back then… ”

” Mm. But this is a little too much… even for you… ”

’Oh… ho… ho… Wait a second. Even for me? She has a Lizza standard when it comes to lack of information or something? Even worse… I somehow managed to drop below my own standard… ”

” Lizza… ”

” W-What is it? Ehhh… What are you doing? ”

She didn’t say anything and just approached me while staring right into my eyes. After some time of staring and contemplating about something, she decided to ask me something.

” Lizza, how many hours has a day? ”

” Huh? That’s simple… A day has… ”

’Ohhh… Ohhh fuck… I actually don’t know…’

” Lizza… ”

” Well… ”

A drop of sweat started to form on my forehead as she was starting with a serious expression at me. After this much time in this world, I arrived at the conclusion that a day was certainly longer that one in my previous world, but…

’How the hell am I supposed to know how these guys split a day in hours here.’

Being longer or shorter did not help with much after all…

” Lizza… ”

” I-I’m thinking… Let me just a little bi… ”

” Lizza… You need to think about it? ”

” Wha… Pfoa… N-No, of course not… ”

” Then… How many hours? ” she asked me again while narrowing her eyes.

’Oh my Holy Tree… She’s merciless. Well, whatever…’

The number of days in a year and even in a month was close with what I know of with small differences so maybe…

” Umm… It has 24? ”

”…”

*sigh*

” That’s not the answer, isn’t it? ”

She just nodded at me.

FDSIO

I had a lot to do these days but here’s the chapter 🙂 Sry for the delay…

Ps- the next chapter in several hours… I need to edit it and fix some things… well, it still counts as a double release, right?