Ascendance of a Bookworm (LN) - Volume 1.3 - Chapter 5

Winter Begins 

The day after I returned home, Lutz and I went to Benno’s store together. Snow was sprinkling here and there, but if we didn’t go to Benno’s before the snow built up, I would lose my opportunity to report my recovery and thank him for his help. 

“Benno’s been super worried, Myne. He was convinced that the guildmaster was tricking you somehow or putting you in a bad spot.” 

“Oooh, maybe he heard me calling for his help?” 

When Freida’s family had me surrounded, I cried for Benno’s help on the inside. Maybe I sent out some weird brain waves that he picked up or something. 

Lutz frowned at my suggestion and glared at me. “You didn’t ask for my help?” 

Seeing Lutz’s pouty face made ticklish laughter build up inside of me. I ended up giggling, and his mouth bent into a sharper frown. 

“Why’re you laughing?!” 

“’Cause I mean, you already saved me.” 

Lutz blinked in surprise and looked completely stunned, which made me giggle more. 

“You told Freida I was going to get sick if I kept moving ’round, right? Thanks to that I got enough rest, avoided eating dinner with them, and basically everything went a lot better.” 

“Heh, is that right?” Lutz gave a pleased grin, squeezed my hand a bit, and took a step forward. It felt to me like the wind had calmed down a bit too, as less snow was hitting me on the face.

“Good morning.” 

“Ah, hello Myne. It’s good to see you healthy again.” 

Benno’s store was warm and full of energy. We let out sighs of relief as we went inside and Mark quickly walked up to us. Despite the snow, it felt like his store had just as many customers as always. Which was strange, since the hasty workshops had already closed for the winter. I looked around, murmuring those observations, and Mark smiled. 

“Our store profits the most during winter.” 

With blizzards came more days where you couldn’t work, so I had thought winter was a season where most people tightened their purse strings and lived as frugally as possible, but it seemed that wasn’t the case. 

“The nobles grow bored while snowed in, and their purses loosen to a surprising degree when presented with opportunities to kill time.” 

“Oh, I get it. Leisure products...” Video game consoles were slightly outside of my reach, but a bunch of card-based games I was used to like hanafuda, karuta, and Western playing cards ran through my head. It might be smart to make those when I had the chance. 

For now, though, my thoughts were interrupted by Lutz pulling on my sleeve. “Did you just think of something to sell?” 

“...Well, maybe if we had paper.” Thin pieces of wood could function as cards, but a proper set of cards would need to be cut fairly thin with similar dimensions. That wouldn’t be a problem if I could just hire a woodsmith to cut the cards, but I wanted to at least wait until my baptism before breaking the “I think things up, Lutz makes them” setup. 

...Could Lutz cut thin pieces of wood? And I hadn’t seen any paint in this world yet. It probably existed, given that people used dyes, but it was beyond me or anyone I knew to color playing cards properly. With some ink and wood it shouldn’t be impossible to make shogi or reversi, but playing cards were ideal since there were so many games you could play with a single set. 

I was apparently taken to Benno’s office while I was thinking to myself, and before I knew it, he was staring right into my face. 

“You back in the game, Myne?” 

“Bwuh?! Y-Yes. Sorry for worrying you,” I replied, blinking in surprise. Benno furrowed his brows suspiciously and didn’t stop staring at me. 

“Sir, Myne’s fine. She’s not sick, she was just thinking about something.” 

Benno was finally convinced by Lutz’s assurance, and he stood up straight. He sat us at the table near the fireplace and let out a heavy sigh. “It took a lot of prying for that old geezer to give up one of those magic tools he got for his grandaughter. To be honest, I had to gamble on him using it on you at all.” 

“Oh, it turns out that the guildmaster wanted to trick me into working for him. If I didn’t have the money to pay for it, he would have had me switch to his store to pay off the debt.” 

“Yeah, figures. That’s why I paid you all those golds earlier.” Benno grinned confidently. 

I nodded, then revealed how he had been tricked. “Right. But it looks like he told you they were worth one gold and two large silvers, when in reality they were worth two golds and eight large silvers.” 

“That freakin’ geezer!” 

“I was really relieved when my savings just barely managed to cover it. Both Freida and the guildmaster hadn’t expected that at all. They were really surprised when I managed to pay,” I added after Benno scratched his head with frustration and groaned. 

For a second he froze in surprise, then grinned to himself. “Oh yeah, I upped the price. Good. Their suffering is good enough for me. But don’t let your guard down around that family. They’ll eat a dimwit with no sense of danger like you alive.” 

I figured it was best that I report to Benno what this little dimwit with no sense of danger had done. However, I wanted to put off him yelling at me, so I kind of worded it in a long-winded way. “Um, Mr. Benno. I have a question. How developed is the sweets culture in this area?” 

“What’re you talking about?” Benno glared at me with his dark-red eyes and I explained, adding excuses as I went. 

“Where I live, people don’t really eat many sweet things. We have honey, fruits, and parues in the winter, but that’s about it. So, um. Mr. Benno. This may be a silly question for me to ask, but Freida had sugar in her home. Is that rare?” 

Despite the fact that my family didn’t have sugar, it was very possible that wealthy people generally did. Still, though, I wanted a hard answer from someone more informed than me, and if possible, I would like for him to tell me that the better part of the city had sugar even if we poor people couldn’t afford it. 

Of course, there was no chance that he would give me that answer that I wanted. 

“It’s still rare around these parts. It’s only just recently that we’ve started importing it from foreign countries, but it’s growing in popularity around the royal capital and among nobles... Wait. Did you do something again?!” 

I was building things up so deliberately that Benno almost immediately noticed what I was getting at. His brows shot up in anger. 

To sum up what he was saying: Sugar itself was starting to be popular among nobles, but not many sweets had been developed from it. One could say that sweets culture was still in its infancy. Pound cakes were simple and orthodox, but I had without a doubt gone too far. 

“Um, I made some (pound cake) for them, and they really loved it.” 

“Oh, right, that stuff. It tasted so good. It was moist and like melted in my mouth. I’ve never had anything as sweet and... Wait, Myne!” Lutz, who had eaten some of the pound cake himself, glared at me too. I instinctively knew I had done something I really shouldn’t have. 

“Why do you always gotta stick your neck out for carnivores like them?! Do you wanna get eaten alive?!” 

If simple pound cake was getting him this furious, I was glad I hadn’t made short cake for them. My decision had been motivated purely by my inexperience with the scales and wood oven, but still. All’s well that end’s well. 

“I promised to make sweets with Freida, and that was the only way I could think to thank her, so...” 

“THANK her?! You paid her, that’s enough!” Benno was basically saying the same thing Freida had. Merchants expected their price to be paid and nothing beyond that was necessary. 

“Awww. Freida said the same thing.” 

“AGAIN?! How are you gonna survive when your enemies have to teach you? Didn’t I tell you to pick your battles and be more careful about what will happen if you lose?! You thoughtless idiot!” 

...Noooo! I never learn. But still, isn’t it normal to want to thank the person that saved your life? 

“I mean, she did save my life, so...” 

“So basically, you’re forgetting that the geezer lied to screw you over.” 

“Ngh...” I had no argument against that. In the end, he was thinking purely in terms of how money had saved my life and nothing else. I didn’t feel the same, but if I had been forced to leave Benno’s store and join the guildmaster’s store due to debt, my feelings would probably be a lot more conflicted. 

“Sheesh. They’re only letting you get away here ’cause you have the Devouring and will probably die before you can do anything special. If they were serious about you, they’d have you on their side before you realized what happened. Don’t jump into the fire yourself.” 

I see. That seemed about accurate. I had indeed been thinking that for all their traps, they were a bit loose on the execution. In the end they were probably just playing around with me a little, figuring that I would either die of the Devouring or get snatched up by the nobility. 

“Ummm, when you say they’d have me on their side before I realized what happened, what exactly are you talking about?” 

“The simplest thing would be going straight to your parents and forcing the issue. They wouldn’t be able to turn him down after he saved your life. He could bribe you by promising to look after you following your baptism, and it wouldn’t be surprising if you ended up betrothed to one of Freida’s brothers before you knew what was happening. He’s just not doing that because his effort would be wasted if you died a year later.” 

“Um, what?! That’s terrifying!” I hugged myself and rubbed my goosebump-covered arms in fear as Benno watched with an exasperated expression on his face. 

“You just figured this out? Myne, you have to learn to recognize the dangers around you. But anyway... Did you just give them the finished sweet?” 

I didn’t understand the point of Benno’s question, so I tilted my head and explained how I made the cake with her. “No, I’m not nearly strong enough to make sweets myself, so I taught Freida’s home chef how to make it while helping. They had a lot of pure white flour and sugar, even a real wood-fueled oven. Isn’t that amazing?” 

“Yeah, sure, just amazing. So basically, they know the whole recipe now.” Benno was holding his head so hard it honestly worried me a little. I really hadn’t expected that a little cake I made as a form of thanks would end up causing so many ripples. 

“Ngh. Did I do something bad?” 

“Only an idiot would give away something worth a lot of money for free, so yeah, you did. We could have sold those to nobles.” 

To be honest, I just didn’t understand which products were for nobles and which were for commoners. But I did understand that my cake recipe was worth money. I would be more careful with recipes in the future. 

“Aww... Can’t we just have our own chefs make them to sell? They haven’t started selling them yet, so...” 

“Getting sugar is still difficult.” When I suggested that we could sell the cakes first, Benno gave a clear grimace. But no matter how much he grimaced, I had no way of knowing how difficult it was to import sugar. Purchasing products was part of Benno’s business. 

“Well, we just have to give up, then. If you have sugar and a chef that can work a wood oven well, I’ll teach you the (pound cake) recipe for free too.” 

“...That sounds like you’ve got more recipes,” said Benno, reading between the lines and giving me a hard look, but all my sweets recipes required sugar. There was no point telling them to someone with no sugar. 

With my newfound knowledge that sweets recipes were worth money, I puffed out my chest and smirked. “Those will cost you.” 

“Be that stubborn around them, not me.” 

He was right, so I replied “I’ll try...” weakly. I wasn’t used to putting a price on what I did out of goodwill, but I would have to adjust if I wanted to survive as a merchant. 

“Is that all you’ve got to report?” 

“No, although this is kind of a personal thing. I won’t be able to leave home much during the winter, so I probably won’t be coming to the store again until spring. That’s normal, don’t worry about me.” 

Really, Mark and Benno were more anxious about me collapsing than pretty much anyone else. The store could operate just fine without me, but I felt it necessary to warn them ahead of time that I wouldn’t be visiting before they got worried about me. 

“Yeah? What happened to helping Otto?” It seemed that Benno thought I went to the gate almost daily during the winter, but that was far from the truth. My family would never let me push myself like that. 

“I only go to the gate about ten times over the whole winter since I can only leave if it’s sunny, there’s no blizzard, I’m feeling fine, and my dad has morning or noon shift at work.” 

“...Are you even gonna be healthy enough to do work after your baptism?” 

“Honestly, I don’t know and it kind of scares me.” Benno looked pretty apprehensive, but really, I wanted to know that more than he did. Was there any job I would be capable of doing? 

“Looks like you better think hard about what you want to do. So, how are you gonna sell your winter handiwork? I’d like to have some on hand as the spring baptism gets closer.” 

My initial plan had been to sell them all once spring came, but that wouldn’t be giving him enough time before the spring baptism ceremony. The ones we had made in a rush for the winter baptism had already been sold and he barely had any left in stock. 

“I’ll keep an eye on the weather and bring them when the weather’s good, sir. But since we gather parues on sunny days, I’ll probably only come on cloudy days.” 

“Oh yeah, parues. That’s nostalgic. I loved my parue juice back in the day.” Benno gave a nostalgic smile. He must have gone parue-gathering in the past as well. 

I smiled a bit, imagining a young Benno splitting his spoils with Corinna. Lutz grinned himself, probably thinking about the parues he was going to eat. “I’m definitely gonna make some parue cakes again this year,” he said. 

“...Parue cakes? What’re those?” Benno narrowed his eyes. A cold sweat ran down my back as I thought about how I had spread the parue cake recipe for free. 

“Umm, Lutz? Maybe we should keep that recipe our little secret? We don’t want to lose our chance to get parues for ourselves.” 

Parue leftovers weren’t fit for human consumption. They were animal feed. Or at least, that’s what people believed, and it’s thanks to their misunderstanding that they traded them to Lutz for eggs. If they knew how much they were really worth, the parue leftovers would get a lot more expensive really fast. That would be a problem not just for us, but for everyone who relies on them to feed their animals in the winter. 

“Oh yeah. It’s a treat just for us, our little secret.” 

By the time we finished our discussion and left Benno’s store, snow had begun to build up along the sides of the roads. I let out a tiny sigh. Snow meant I couldn’t go outside. 

“Looks like it’s time for us to be shut-ins again.” Lutz looked at the built-up snow angrily and gave a tiny nod. His home life has been so rocky that even his mother was complaining about it to me. And it was beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lutz was feeling a lot worse about it than she was. Winter forced Lutz to stay inside, and I could imagine that it was a miserable time for him. 

“Hey, Lutz. Why don’t you get your study tools together and come to my place every couple of days?” The best I could do to help Lutz was offer him an occasional breather. If he came every day his family would just treat him worse, and he would need a reason for visiting me so often. We could pass it off as him showing me their progress on making sticks. 

Lutz’s expression lit up a bit at my suggestion. “Yeah, sounds good. Thanks.”

The number of snow days increased and fewer people were walking the roads. To fight back against the cold, most families stayed holed up at home and rarely went outside. Just like last year, Dad was a soldier who had to keep working at the gate year round, so he didn’t get these days off. He had work on snowy days and was rarely at home. 

Whenever Tuuli had spare time at home, she took the opportunity to work on hairpins. She took it more seriously than her basket-making from last year since each was worth so much more money. Mom was equally interested, but she had to prioritize making our clothes. First came my special outfit, since my baptism was this year. 

“Mom, can’t we just stitch up what Tuuli wore last year?” Tuuli had grown more over the past year. The special outfit she wore for her baptism last summer was doubtlessly tight on her now. As far as I could tell, it would save a lot of time to just fix up the outfit that she had barely ever worn. 

“Tuuli’s so much bigger than you that even just reworking it will be a hassle,” said Mom with a wry smile. 

Normally, a family wouldn’t have to make multiple dresses for special occasions. Handing down a single outfit from sibling to sibling was standard. But Tuuli and I were just too different in size. Tuuli looked about eight or nine when she was seven, and I looked about four or five. It was honestly impossible for us to wear the same clothes. I tried putting it on by the hearth, but it hung from my arms and the dress that should stop around my knees went all the way to my ankles. 

“Mmmm... But I think if we pulled up the bottom of the skirt, we could make it shorter and add some cute looking frills. Maybe we could add little flowers at the folds?” 

“Myne, that’s more than a little remaking. It’ll end up looking super fancy.” Tuuli giggled at my suggestion. 

When the size had to be completely changed like this, it was considered standard to undo all the thread, cut the cloth to its new size, and then redo all the sewing. I was weird for suggesting that we pinch the cloth up and add decoration to hide the seams. This was definitely a case where I should just keep my mouth shut and not try to push my luck. 

“Oh, okay. We don’t want the dress to look so fancy that it sticks out. I was thinking that if we just fold the cloth, we could undo the stitches to make it longer and keep using it when I get older, but...” 

Only people with money to spare used more cloth than they needed. Frilly clothes with pleats needed extra cloth, so generally only rich people wore them. The same applied to decorations on clothes, which required spare material we generally didn’t have. Which was exactly why Tuuli’s outfit had been made to fit her perfectly. 

I fell silent, thinking that despite the convenience here frills would stick out too much. But despite my hesitation, Mom seemed oddly enthusiastic about my idea. She grabbed onto my shoulders and smiled. 

“...I think that’s a great idea, sweetie. If it doesn’t work, we can just remake it like we normally would. Okay?” 

Ah... Well. Now nothing I say will change her mind. I hope I have time to help her with this on top of me making my own hairpin, tutoring Lutz, cooking... I sure am a lot busier than I was last winter. 

Naturally, there was no way I could escape Mom once she got excited about something. Despite relocating by the hearth, I was wearing nothing but Tuuli’s summer outfit and thus my weak, weak body caught a cold while we discussed how to fold and tuck it. Achoo!