Chapter 6 Episode 14: An Unexpected Evolution
“Brr...!”
The next morning, I was awakened by the biting air seeping into my bed. That morning was particularly cold, as if to signify winter had truly arrived.
With great force of will, I threw off my bedding and began dressing for the day... But the clothes that I had laid out the previous night were icy cold!
“So much for normal layers today...”
I decided to take a different outfit out of the Item Box—a faux down jacket, stuffed with the feathers of a fluff slime and made waterproof by sticky slimes. I couldn’t recreate a zipper, so it was a button-down, but I had used rubber from the latex slimes to cinch the wrists in order to keep the cold air out.
Satisfied with the comfort and warmth of my creation, I resolved to work hard yet again today.
■ ■ ■
The next week flew by. I spent each morning hunting mad salamanders, each afternoon looking after and researching slimes, and each evening cooking dinner and preparing for the next morning. Still, there were a lot of little things that happened.
To review...
On the first day, while I was preparing for the hunt, as I had done the previous day, I noticed something was off about the limour birds when I let them out of the Dimension Home. Upon inquiring, they communicated to me that they would work if they had to, but it was bitterly cold. Since wild limour birds were migratory, they would have flown to a more comfortable climate during the winter. I decided to have the limour birds stay in the Dimension Home, and to keep them out of the hunt going forward. Of course, I still set aside time for them to fly around in order to keep their stress levels down, but they didn’t stay out longer than half an hour. Fortunately, the Dimension Home was maintained at a comfortable temperature. I would prepare them to weather the winter, with their input, once we’d returned to Gimul.
I had also wondered if the clever chickens wanted to come out once in a while, but Kohaku assured me that there was no need. That was evidently a very nice way of describing the power dynamic among the clever chickens. I made a mental note to get the poor, overworked leader of the chickens something tasty.
That night, I began learning how to make white ale from grainspear grass; Kai and Kei’s mother showed me the prep work. While we worked on that, she told me how the ladies of the village took turns cooking lunch at the processing station, and that her turn was coming up in two days. She went on to spill the tea on how arduous it was to decide on which dishes to make, how there were men who complained that there wasn’t enough variety despite the ladies trying to balance budget, nutrition, and taste, and so on and so on.
While I never married in my previous life, there was the possibility that I would take a wife in this world... Note to self: if I ever get married, do not under any circumstances complain about my wife’s cooking.
The second day of the week was a day off from salamander hunting, since we got one day to rest for every three days of hunting. Nevertheless, I woke up around the same time in the morning, so I decided to jog along the shore for a light workout. I summoned the iron and metal slimes that were having trouble moving on the sand, and had them train with me. I ended up with three slimes that could now move noticeably faster than the rest.
I appraised these slimes, and found that they had learned a skill called Off-roading. They were still level 1, but the existence of this new skill alone gave me hope that, with training, the slimes could traverse the sandy beach like any other terrain.
While I was retelling this discovery to Nikki during our afternoon trash collecting, the village leader gave us an old seine from the village’s shared storage shed. Fishing nets were one of the ingredients that could enable new slime evolutions, so I couldn’t have enough of them. I gave the village leader my sincerest thanks. He seemed a bit taken aback before asking if I wouldn’t mind gathering extra firewood for the village, if I insisted on showing gratitude. Naturally, I accepted.
“Are you sure about this, Slime Guy?” Nikki asked after we left.
“What? It’s the least I could do, after he gave me such a big seine.”
“We have a festival every year at the end of the fishing season, where we burn all of the nets we can’t fix anymore on the bonfire. He tricked you into doing extra work for the village in exchange for garbage.”
“Well, that’s one way to think about it... But that net is valuable to me, and I assumed we’d be going into the forest to gather firewood anyway. If I’m lucky, I’ll find local slimes there... Maybe even a mud slime. I was planning to go out there at least once during my stay, so it all works out.”
“With an attitude like that, people are gonna walk all over you if you’re not careful...”
Even while Nikki quipped at me, he still promised to help me look for slimes, and even gathered firewood with me. What a good kid.
On the third day, there were fewer hands on deck for the salamander hunt in the morning. A majority of the adventurers had headed over to defend other villages. While each fighter had to handle more salamanders than before, we had no trouble fending off the salamanders, as everyone grew accustomed to the slimes’ involvement in the hunt.
That day, I started to realize that the process of gathering salamander carcasses could be useful in training my space magic as well as my physical stamina.
After lunch, I waited for Nikki to be dismissed from the processing station before venturing out to the woods. Upon discussion, we decided to gather all the firewood we needed first to concentrate on our search effort for new slimes.
When I easily lifted the first tree we cut down onto my shoulder, Nikki gave me a look of astonished respect. Apparently, he didn’t expect me to have that much physical strength, since I looked the same age as him, and I’d mostly been utilizing my slimes during the salamander hunts. After that, I couldn’t help but try to show off a little bit as we gathered more lumber.
The village leader was very happy with our contribution, and sent us home with a bucket full of a creature that looked like a cross between a squid and a crab. Nikki informed me that it was a fairly rare delicacy. We cooked and stuffed it with rice that night, and it tasted better than the rice-stuffed squid I remembered from Japan.
On the fourth day, I devised a couple of new space magic spells that would help me collect carcasses. One was Drop Off, a spell that transported things from near me to a faraway destination, inspired by the spell Pick Up with the opposite effect which the scholar/adventurer Leipin was using. The other was Wormhole, which connected two locations, along the same vein as Item Box or Dimension Home.
Now that I didn’t have to go back and forth with the salamander carcasses, I was going to save a lot of stamina and magical energy. Furthermore, I was testing setting the Drop Off destination as the Item Box in order to store anything I wanted to in one easy step.
I waited for Nikki after my lunch, this time as the cleaner slimes and I helped wash dishes at the processing station. Nikki had appeared with his mother and several ladies of the village earlier, all wanting us to take their trash, so I happily obliged. Some of them even discretely asked me to take care of built-up sewage; I assumed Nikki had already told them about the scavenger slimes’ diet. For these requests, I stationed a few scavenger slimes in their toilets, which I would collect on my way home. After taking their trash, we headed to the forest and ended up catching three new slimes.
On the fifth day, I was cornered by a much larger group of ladies than the previous day. In exchange for cleaning out their toilets, they would give me their trash and food scraps, which added up to a lot of slime feed!
On the sixth day, I had another day off from salamander hunting. When I returned from my morning jog, the portion of the plaza that I had borrowed already hosted a tall pile of trash. I asked the adults who were in the process of dumping their trash onto the pile, and was told that most people did major house-cleanings at the end of the year anyway, and I was making their lives easier by taking the trash off of their hands. One of them jokingly told me, “If you were just going to cherry-pick what you wanted and litter the rest into the woods or lake, I would have given you hell, but look at you go!” Despite the joking tone, everyone there gave me a piercing look. Still, I was happy to take care of all of the trash, and resolved to continue doing so.
In addition to the massive mound of slime feed, the village leader had delivered to me twenty slimes stored in pots. He explained that he felt bad that my only reward (other than my pay from the guild for hunting salamanders) was trash and scraps after helping out the village through salamander hunting, garbage disposal, and firewood gathering.
I was grateful for those trash and scraps, of course, but I recognized that the village leader may not have wanted to feel like he owed me anything, no matter how small. He insisted, so I gladly took the slimes. He had chosen slimes to thank me with, thanks to Nikki’s proud suggestion. Great kid. Once I thoroughly expressed my gratitude, the village leader left in relief.
On the seventh day, I felt like I was beginning to get the hang of using space magic during the hunt. I wasn’t jotting down any precise data, but I figured my success rate for transporting multiple objects at once was improving. After lunch, I was no longer an adventurer but a waste manager. We toured the houses of the elderly, who couldn’t have carried heavy trash to the plaza, running and fully utilizing my space magic spells in the process. This side hustle was starting to become useful training too.
That day, I had gained four new slimes I caught in the wild, in addition to eight slimes I was given as payment for my services.
Now, the fruits of my week’s labor (as well as the goodwill of the villagers) stood before me: two slimes that had already evolved into brand new species! One of them was a metal slime that had kept eating fishing nets. Its appearance remained mostly the same as it was when it was a metal slime, except that it had shrunk a little. Now I was eager to learn what its name and abilities were.
“Monster Appraisal.”
Wire Slime
Skills: Physical Hardening 3, Stretch 3, Physical Attack Resistance 2, Rapid Movement 3, Consume 3, Absorb 3, Split 2
“Wire, huh... Maybe it wanted the string that the nets were made of? Its skills are mostly unchanged from when it was a metal. The only new skill is Stretch... Already seemed like it was stretchy enough to me, though.”
I asked it to use the skill in question, and the wire slime began stretching a part of its anatomy like a tentacle... Then it kept going, stretching its appendage like it was weaving a string!
“One meter... Two meters... Can you keep going?”
It looked like it could stretch for a long, long distance. On top of that, it was waving its stringy limb every which way, showing that it could move its wire more freely than its bulkier tentacle.
I let it stretch out and out for a while, until it seemed like it was shrinking in size. Could it only weave a “wire” that maintained its mass? I would test its abilities further down the road, but I could already think of various uses for its ability.
“Now, let’s see about this one... Well, no surprises here. Never saw one this big before, though.”
The other evolved slime was the acid slime that had been eating eggs and seashells. I had been expecting calcium carbonate, but not this. Its milky white body let off a particular glimmer.
Pearl Slime
Skills: Protective Mucus Secretion 3, Cover Up 3, Crystallize 3, Consume 3, Absorb 3, Split 2
“It seriously went pearl on me...”
But how did I get pearl from acid? I had been feeding it shells, but they weren’t pearl shells... Then I remembered that there were various shells that can form a pearl layer in them. Plus the main component of a pearl was calcium carbonate, so it wasn’t too far-fetched. I had fed an acid slime seashells and eggs... Vinegar and eggs combined made mayonnaise, and I remember seeing something on TV about making pearls out of mayonnaise back in the day...
I was curious about the logic behind this evolution, of course, but there was another glaring problem. Pearl farming had not been established during medieval times, and with a catch rate of a handful of pearls for every ten thousand shells, the jewel was extremely valuable during that period of history... Or so I had read in a light novel once. I didn’t have a precise grasp of how valuable pearls were in this world, but I’d gleaned from my medicinal knowledge that they were a rare and expensive commodity; clearly, people knew they were a thing.
The pearl slime itself looked like a giant pearl, which would fetch it a great price on its own... But judging from the Protective Mucus Secretion, Cover Up, and Crystallize skills, there was a chance I could farm pearls from it. And if I could farm pearls... The pearl slime would be valuable enough for some shady characters to want to get their hands on them. I certainly wouldn’t want to divulge its existence to everyone within earshot...
“How do I break this to Nikki...”
He was looking forward to feeding the slimes every day, so he knew full well that we had been feeding the acid slime egg and seashells... What was I going to do?
“Ryoma? Are you still in bed?” Kai called, making me nearly jump in surprise.
“No, I’m up.”
“All right. Breakfast should be ready soon.”
“Thank you, I’ll be right down!”
This morning really whisked by. I decided to eat breakfast before I did any more thinking...
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