Chapter 7
“Unfortunately, it's time for us to part ways.”
Jorma said regretfully after we passed through Sargadis's main gate and got off the carriage.
It was understandable that he was reluctant to part after making more than seventy coppers in sales yesterday. It must have been heartbreaking to lose all those gullible old men he'd fleeced.
“I'm heading to another city now, but I hope we'll have a chance to meet again someday.”
“Likewise. I'll put the things I bought from you to good use.”
The potbellied old man said that while carrying more luggage than when he'd first arrived. He looked remarkably happy for someone who had spent his pocket money on everything from accessories to miscellaneous junk and food.
“Take care too, Mr. Nord. An adventurer's body is his capital.”
“Yeah. Don't run into bandits outside the city and get yourself killed, either.”
“Hahaha! Clearly, I'm in no position to say that as if it were someone else's problem.”
After briefly shaking hands with Jorma, we went our separate ways.
The old men scattered in different directions, while that bastard Semmus had vanished without even saying goodbye. True to the barbarian Mohawk bastard he was, he hadn't learned manners even by the end.
“Phew.”
I planned to head to the adventurer guild. I'd considered finding an inn first, but the guild might recommend a place, so I decided to go there directly.
“Excuse me. Could I ask you for directions?”
“Hm? Are you a traveler?”
Not wanting to wander around aimlessly, I stopped a kindly-looking middle-aged man passing by and asked for directions.
“No, I'm not a traveler. I came here planning to become an adventurer.”
“An adventurer? Then you're probably looking for the adventurer guild, right?”
“Yes. Your intuition is incredible. I'm glad I spoke to someone who looks so wise.”
“Ahem. I can read, at least.”
People in this other world were weak to flattery. Those who weren't literate were even more susceptible. After my modest compliment, he cleared his throat and answered in a voice that tried to sound impressive.
“Hmm. There are three adventurer guilds in Sargadis, if I recall correctly.”
“I'd heard that much.”
At first, I had wondered why there were so many otherworldly gangs, but when I thought about it, people who couldn't even agree on a language were unlikely to band together and enthusiastically operate under a single guild.
Adventurer guilds were all founded to pursue their own interests and profits. That was why different types of guilds existed in every country and every city.
Most guilds were part of a large organization that established branches throughout the country. They were roughly like franchises. It also reminded me a little of the hunter stories in web novels.
I'd already decided which guild to join before coming to Sargadis.
“Where is the Audumla Guild?”
“Audumla? Why go there when there are so many other guilds?”
“Huh? Is there some bad rumor about it?”
“A place like that,” he said. I'd chosen it because it best suited what I wanted, yet its reputation was pretty terrible. It felt like choosing a workplace and hearing bad things before I had even gone to the interview.
“Bad rumors follow adventurers everywhere. But the Audumla Guild is considered relatively inferior to the other two guilds.”
“Good grief.”
Adventurer guilds were directly connected to the safety and daily lives of citizens. I hadn't expected it to be regarded that poorly. It seemed like the very definition of a real, bona fide small business.
“I'd recommend another guild rather than sending you there. The Sekhmet Guild only accepts women, so that's out. How about the Gilpi Guild?”
He was a friendly man who recommended guilds both at home and abroad. But I shook my head.
“I'm sorry after you went to the trouble of explaining everything so kindly. But I've already made up my mind.”
“Hmm. If that's what you want, it's not my place to interfere.”
The old man reached his own conclusion and stopped asking questions. Instead, he raised a hand and pointed down the road in the opposite direction.
“The Audumla Guild should be that way…. Sorry. It isn't famous, so I'm not sure of its exact location.”
“Not at all. Thank you for telling me.”
I thanked the kind old man and headed in the direction he had indicated.
Would they make me go through an interview or something? I was about to do something in another world that I had never even done on Earth.
With my heart pounding nervously, I headed for the Audumla Guild.
***
The Audumla Guild was in a somewhat out-of-the-way location.
It wasn't in a back alley or anything, but it barely felt like a busy district. If even Sargadis, which was practically the countryside, was like this, there was no way the guild would be in a clean or glamorous area. The building looked like a relatively large neighborhood general store.
Ugh…. Should I go somewhere else even now?
I spent quite a while agonizing in front of the door, but it felt like a waste to turn back after coming this far. Wanting to at least see what the inside was like, I went in.
─Murmur, murmur.
There wasn't even a door, so I simply walked inside, and the interior was brighter and busier than I had expected. The lights weren't cheap lamps but bright magical lights, the bulletin board was large, and there was even an area that doubled as a tavern and restaurant.
Thankfully, neither the people inside nor the building itself looked dirty. It was fortunate that this world had better hygiene and other standards than its historical setting would suggest.
Careful not to make a spectacle of myself by looking around too obviously, I headed toward the counters. Several adventurers had just left, leaving one counter vacant, so I took the opportunity to move over there.
“Ah… welcome.”
…Could this person be a graduate student?
Her face looked so exhausted that I instantly had that thought. She seemed quite beautiful, but the way she looked as tired as if she had crawled out of a tomb was eerily similar to Dana after three consecutive all-nighters.
What was this? Had I returned to Carmine University after a five-day journey?
“What brings you here? Are you registering as an adventurer?”
“Huh? Oh, yes. That's right. How did you know?”
I was startled again by the half-dead-looking woman's question.
No, how did she know??? Was she making the racist assumption that a Ching-chong bastard couldn't possibly have enough money to place a request with an adventurer guild?
“Because you're wearing armor and carrying a weapon. You also have luggage on your back.”
“Oh.”
Come to think of it, that was true. I hadn't even unpacked my luggage. Feeling awkward, I deliberately cleared my throat.
“Ahem. Yes. I came today to register as an adventurer with the Audumla Guild.”
“Ah~ So that's why you came.”
Even though she had guessed correctly from the start, the receptionist pretended to be surprised. Unlike her first impression, she was quite expressive.
“Then may I have your name?”
“Nord. I haven't chosen a surname yet. Is that a problem?”
“No, that's perfectly fine. Could I see your identification?”
At her request, I took out the identification card I had placed in my coat beforehand.
It wasn't the emblem that also served as my university diploma, nor was it the document proving that I was a field scholar. It was an ordinary citizen's identification card.
It would remain valid as long as my degree did. You could say it was roughly equivalent to a long-term visa.
“It's been verified. This is a valid citizen's identification.”
The receptionist accepted the wooden card, then returned it to me a moment later.
“The Audumla Guild's main business is discovering and exploring ruins. You know that, correct?”
“Yes. I heard that although you also accept monster-hunting work, you place more emphasis on exploring ruins.”
That was precisely why I had chosen the Audumla Guild.
To continue working as a scholar, it was better for me to join a guild that focused on ruin exploration. If I failed to produce results for too long, my Master's degree would be at risk, too.
They wouldn't revoke my degree, but they might reject my application to remain a field scholar or slash my research funding to an absurd degree.
“Have you ever registered with another guild or another branch of the Audumla Guild?”
“No. This is my first time anywhere.”
“Understood. The membership fee is fifty coppers. You'll also have to pay an additional fee whenever you rank up.”
I nodded, since I had already looked up the membership fee. The receptionist slowly took some documents from a drawer and held them out toward me.
“If you agree, please sign here or stamp it with your seal.”
“Understood. Should I use this pen?”
“Yes. Ah, if you can't read or don't have a seal, dip your fingertip in ink and press it here.”
A fingerprint? They had fingerprints here, too.
After thinking it over, I deliberately signed my name in crude, barely legible handwriting.
“Hmm. How much Britannian do you know?”
The receptionist asked after looking at my handwriting. I guessed she was asking in advance because many people could only write their own names.
“I can read and write. There are some difficult words I don't know, though.”
It was an outright lie, of course.
There were no words I didn't know. I understood what everything meant just by looking at the letters.
But I couldn't tell her the truth. If I made a mistake, she might realize that I was an elite capable of working as a researcher at Carmine University and a man with a Master's degree.
That would be a problem. Because I'm a fucking brilliant master's graduate, everyone would be desperate to hire me.
‘This isn't overconfidence or narcissism. It's one hundred percent true.’
In this world, archaeology and linguistics were advanced fields with plenty of practical applications.
The moment they realized I was a Carmine graduate with a Master's degree who could write ancient languages, the guild's higher-ups would try to make me one of their own and put me to work translating instead of letting me operate as an adventurer.
‘From their perspective, that would indeed be the sensible choice.’
Rather than letting a clever person work as an adventurer until they died, it was better to have them interpret the uses of ancient documents and artifacts recovered from dungeons.
But that was the guild's concern. I had come to Sargadis to become an adventurer, not to work as a translation slave for a small business.
“Yes. Then please read this passage. If you can, I'll record that you have ‘basic reading and writing ability.’”
The receptionist pointed to a short, four-line passage inside the reception area. I read the text posted there exactly as written.
“…‘When the morning sun rose, we learned that the goblin tracks led south. The hunter in our party suggested building a campfire to warm our chilled bodies before moving on.’ …What is this?”
“It's a test used to check whether you can read. The content changes every week. This time, it's an excerpt from an adventurer's memoir.”
“I see.”
I wasn't sure whether a short passage like that really proved anything. It was certainly a very small-business approach.
Regardless, this was a world with an extremely high illiteracy rate. It was obvious what kind of treatment a multilingual elite who spoke seven languages like me would receive.
From the guild's perspective, it would be hugely profitable to have other adventurers copy down the ancient languages recorded in ruins and then make me translate them.
The administrators of adventurer guilds were the sort of people who hated even outsourcing translations to the archaeological field because they didn't want to share the profits and achievements. There was no way they would let a talent like me slip away.
I absolutely wanted no part of a future where, every time I came looking for work as an adventurer, they clung to me and asked why I wouldn't become one of their guild members.
‘I'd rather continue being a slave at a university than get dragged into a small business by the scruff of my neck.’
I'd already built up more than enough credentials. There was no reason for me to become a free translation tool at some backwater adventurer-guild branch.
Had any shitty small business ever treated its talented employees well? Even if I did the work of ten people by myself, they wouldn't pay me ten times the salary.
At best, the owner would buy me some meat with the money left over after playing golf and call it even. That much was obvious.
‘Besides, there would be no future in it.’
Even if I achieved something, it would become an accomplishment of the Sargadis branch of the Audumla Guild, not part of my personal career. My name wouldn't spread through academia, and I would get nothing out of it.
People became famous by doing PPR out front, like Steve Jobs, not by being the engineers who developed the iPhone behind the scenes.
For all those reasons, I had no intention of revealing my identity at the adventurer guild. That was also why I had deliberately pretended that I couldn't speak Britannian perfectly.
For the time being, power-hidden weakling mode was ON.
“Mr. Nord? Lastly, could you squeeze this stone as hard as you can?”
And that was the final step of registering as an adventurer.
I swallowed hard as I looked at the black stone the receptionist handed me. In a certain sense, this stone was more important than all the questions that had come before.
“You need to squeeze it as hard as you can, all right?”
The receptionist calmly repeated her instructions. I only half listened as I clenched the hand holding the stone with all my strength. I gave it everything I had while imagining that I was about to punch Yerna, that thieving elf bitch, in the face.
“Hng!”
How long had I been doing that? The receptionist, who had been watching silently, nodded.
“Yes. That's enough. You can relax your hand now.”
“─Phaaah.”
Clenching my fist with all my strength was no easy task, either. I slowly opened my exhausted hand and saw that the black stone in my palm had turned indigo.
“It's indigo.”
“Indeed.”
Oh, fuck, thank god. I let out a sigh of relief.
This stone, commonly known as a pressure stone, was a special type of rock whose surface changed color in rainbow order when subjected to strong pressure.
Many adventurer guilds used it to determine a person's approximate physical strength.
“Indigo? That's impressive. Most people turn violet the first time.”
The receptionist praised me as she took back the stone I had squeezed. But she kept going on about indigo, which made me feel a little uncomfortable, as if I were some kind of gay man.
In any case, the indigo here meant 藍色, the second-to-last color in the seven-color rainbow—not 男色, the hanja term for male homosexuality.
But it was only one color above violet, the lowest grade.
In other words, my average combat power was the second-lowest level. It really was fucking low.
Even so, I had felt relieved simply because the stone hadn't turned violet. That was proof that even I saw myself as a complete fucking idiot.
“Sob.”
I was terribly depressed. It had been proven that I was still woefully inadequate, both physically and mentally.
As the receptionist had said, this level was indeed higher than that of an ordinary person.
But I wasn't an ordinary person. I'd spent more than three years pumping iron under Professor Brammathon, and I had still turned indigo!
I hadn't known because we'd never handled an appraisal stone at the university. Still, I'd expected to reach at least blue.
“I heard that the average from indigo to blue is the Bronze class average. Is that right?”
I asked while opening and closing my whitened hand. Professor Brammathon's book had said as much.
“Yes. Adventurer plates contain a stone dyed the same color as the appraisal grade. Bronze-class adventurers average blue or below.”
“So the grade color itself doesn't matter for promotions?”
“That's right. Promotions are decided based on achievements and conduct. The grade color isn't directly tied to an adventurer's skill.”
The receptionist answered more kindly than I had expected.
If she had been one of those tier-obsessed people from this other world, she would have started snapping at me with an irritated expression by now. I tactfully kept my mouth shut so I wouldn't damage my image by asking pointless questions.
I emptied the coins from my wallet, counted them, and held them out to the receptionist.
“Here, fifty coppers.”
“The membership fee is confirmed. That completes your registration. This is a temporary plate. A plate bearing your name and grade color will be ready in about five days, so come back to collect it then.”
The receptionist gave me a thin iron plate and a cord. I could thread the cord through it and wear it as a bracelet or necklace.
As I stared at the unremarkable plate, the receptionist smiled brightly despite her tired expression.
“Welcome to the Audumla Guild, new adventurer.”
And so I was able to put my name on the adventurer guild's roster.