Chapter Twelve: The Fruit of Idleness
“Tweet! Tweet!”
When we got back from our day of leveling, Father and the others were already back at the carriage.
“You want me to name another?” Father asked.
I nodded. “Well, if you want to name her like you named the others, what about Navy-chan?”
Father shrugged. “Maybe. Were there any filolials that were a similar color in the first go-around? Maybe ‘Ai’ from the Japanese word for ‘indigo’?”
“There was. Which is why I wanted to ask you to come up with a new name, Father.”
“I’m not sure.” Father examined the new filolial. He extended his hand to pet her. She closed her eyes and chirped happily.
Navy blue. You certainly couldn’t call her black, although it was a shade of blue very close.
Father spoke up. “How about using the old Japanese word for ‘navy,’ then? ‘Kokihanada,’ and we can make it ‘Hanada’ for short.”
“Father, your knowledge never fails to amaze me,” I said. The depths of my admiration for Father had no bounds. His imagination soared far beyond mine!
“It was the name of a hidden dungeon in a game I used to play,” Father said. “That’s the only reason I knew it.”
“Then shall we call her ‘Hanada’?” I asked.
Father paused. “Saying it out loud, it doesn’t really sound like a girl’s name.”
Lazy Pig oinked a few times.
“Since she hatched after we defeated the bioplants, we should name her something to do with that? That’s not a bad idea.”
“Oink oink oink.”
“Right, name her after the place she hatched. That could be good.”
Upon Lazy Pig’s suggestion, we pulled out a map.
“Big Bro!” Keel suddenly exclaimed. “Big Bro! Since her color is like a deep, beautiful night sky, what about ‘Yozora’? That means ‘night sky’! Whaddaya think?”
“Not bad, not bad.” Father scratched his chin, thinking about it.
“Tweet?”
Father struggled over what to name the new filolial chick. Choosing a name is no easy task, I say.
“Oink oink,” continued Lazy Pig.
“What? This is all just a pain, so we should call her Shutsuran-no-homare, from the literal translation, ‘honor from indigo’?”
“Naofumi! I suppose filolials are kind of like horses, but that name is the worst!” Sakura said.
Oho? Lazy Pig came up with a name that was not half bad. After all, a lot of filolials have names like racehorses. So I wasn’t totally opposed to it or anything.
I supposed a name like Kuro, which meant black, wasn’t too different from that.
“Let’s keep thinking,” Father said. “Keel, you suggested the night sky before. I like that. How about we name her after the moon. Maybe Luna?”
“That’s a lovely name!” I declared.
“It’s beautiful,” Keel agreed.
“Oink oink.”
I think that had to be it. Without thinking any harder about it, I decided to name her Luna.
If it had been totally up to me, I would’ve just gone with Navy-chan. But since Father said so, it would have to be Luna.
“From now on I shall call her Luna!” I declared.
Luna chirped in agreement.
Father smiled and looked around. “You all look hungry. How about I cook up some of the chimera meat for dinner tonight?”
“Yes please!”
We all gathered around the dining table to enjoy Father’s delicious cooking and passed the rest of the day.
Lately, I had been teaching Father magic at night, but we took a break to investigate the bioplants. Well, Father did all the hard work, but I was there.
“Now that we’ve got some of the safe seeds, it’d be great if we had a place to experiment with them.”
“Oink oink,” Lazy Pig interrupted.
“We can use your family’s land? Really?”
“Oink oink.”
Lazy Pig offered her family’s land to us. That’s just what a pig would do—rush to the scent of an opportunity to rake in some cash. In the world I came from, they used pigs to sniff out truffles. It must be something like that. They must have a talent for it.
“Yes, I’m able to control everything pretty precisely,” Father said. “Why do you ask?”
Lazy Pig oinked some more, and Father nodded in agreement. I supposed they were still talking about bioplants.
“Oh, I got it. That’s a good plan. Just so you know, any final adjustments will be made on your family’s land.”
“So what did you decide to do?” I asked.
“Okay, so we were talking about changing the structure of the bioplant seeds, harvesting some food for ourselves, and selling the rest.”
Father went on to explain the full plan to me. Basically, when you restructure and improve bioplants, you reduce their malignant tendencies and increase their productivity. But it would take a while to wait until that happened. Regardless, once we got them under control, we would easily solve the problem of food and food shortages.
When people were hungry, they got lazy and could start stupid wars by accident, I say. It was a brilliant plan to sell the seeds. Happiness self-earned is far more marvelous than happiness given to you by someone else, I say!
“So we’ll take the seeds from our first harvest and go around selling them,” Father continued. “Once food becomes more abundant accordingly, we just need to make sure people manage the seeds properly so they don’t get out of control. And if all goes well, we’ll have solved the problem of hunger altogether.”
“Will we sell them at a high price?” I asked.
“Well, we do need the money. But if we sell for cheap, more importantly, we’ll continue to gain the people’s trust. No matter what the high priest says about us, the people will know the truth—that we’re good people. And if there’s an emergency anywhere, we can quickly go help.”
Lazy Pig oinked again.
“Based on what Elena is saying, this year is a bad harvest, thanks to all the waves of destruction. It sounds like food shortages are really an issue.”
So our plan was to go around selling the seeds and food to further win the trust of the people. Any famines were of great importance for us to solve. In the first go-around, as well as in the previous one, there had been a lot of hungry people out there.
“That’s why we need to sell the seeds—it’ll take too long for us to grow the food and sell it to people, at least right away. They should trust us enough to listen to us about how to manage the seeds properly. Still, you never know what people will do, and we have to be careful who we trust with them,” Father explained.
Now that he mentioned it, I remembered something. After I had given the bioplant seeds to the village and Father cleaned up my mistake, the once dense forest around the village had been turned by and large into farms. Father told me later that he had been improving and taming the bioplants. At the time, I knew he had done a good job, but I hadn’t realized just how dangerous the bioplants started off as.
But if we were going to give the seeds to the villagers right away, then they wouldn’t have to go through nearly as much refinement as in the first go-around. If they slacked off and didn’t care for them, the bioplants might grow out of control and ruin everything. Those extraordinary plants would pose a real test to anyone growing them. You had to take them seriously, I say. They could even end up threatening other villages.
But as long as they were managed properly, there shouldn’t be any problem.
Father seemed to be thinking about just the right way to spread the seeds around. We couldn’t just let everyone have them.
I did remember Father carefully managing the quality of the soil in the farms back in his village. He took charge of a bunch of monsters to keep the earth in good shape.
“We don’t want anyone screaming, ‘At first everything was fine, but then thanks to the Shield Hero, our village was destroyed!’ We really need to decide carefully who we give the seeds to.”
While he was talking, Father was making the modifications to the seeds.
“Each individual we sell to needs to take full responsibility,” Father said. “Since we’re preparing them so that they don’t just destroy the land where they’re planted, they’ll be fine unless the people don’t take care of them. We need to remind the people that they could literally be killed by the plants if they don’t.”
Listening to the conversation was starting to make me feel guilty. If I had known how dangerous they were, I would’ve never given the seeds to the villagers in the first go-around. But Father managed to clean up after me then, as well. The Church of the Three Heroes would be all too happy to blame it on us if something went wrong. But Father seemed to be keeping that in mind, so I decided to stop worrying about it.
“Done,” Father said, standing up. “These are safe enough to make food and sell. So we’ll use your land to test them out, Elena. Thanks.”
“Oink oink.”
“Yep. If all goes well, we’ll make plenty of money out of it.”
With that, our next plan continued moving apace.
After a while, we arrived at a town in Lazy Pig’s family’s territory.
But wait—this town—I knew it!
This meant that Lazy Pig was one of my companions in the first round. That’s right—Elena!
I had known that for some reason, Father always called Lazy Pig Elena, but only now did I realize that that was because Elena was the pig’s real name! I would have never guessed!
And this was the very town in which I entrusted a store to that traitor, I say! So Lazy Pig was the very same person as that vile traitor!
If anything went wrong, she was bound to betray us again. Was there some way that I could kill her off without Father noticing?
Or perhaps the smarter move would be to ensure that we didn’t get into the same circumstances that led her to betray us. She was reasonably powerful, after all.
In our peddling, the evacuation during the wave, bioplant cultivation, and more, she has continuously been helpful to Father. She has some talents that I am unable to offer to him. It would be unfortunate to simply kill her.
But perhaps she didn’t want to betray Father in particular. The events of the first go-around suggested that.
I remembered Father telling me that in the first go-around, he was accompanied by all sorts of unsavory characters, including monster trainers and thieves. So long as it benefitted everyone involved, he made the partnerships work.
I could take the same perspective with Elena. And if things took a turn for the worse, all I had to do was cut her down.
Perhaps there were some advantages to working alongside these kinds of people. Of course, so long as they were competent.
So I decided to continue to allow Elena to serve Father. If she betrayed us, I was prepared to execute her on the spot.
Her betrayal happened shortly after the battle against the Spirit Tortoise. I still trusted Lazy Pig at the time and had gone to meet up with her. I remembered Father had used Elena to catch me in a trap so he could talk to me, but I escaped with Portal Spear.
In the meantime, after arriving in Lazy Pig’s domain, we went into a store and Lazy Pig went straight to the back, discussing something or other with the owner. Afterward, we went to her family mansion and got permission to use some of their farmland. At least that’s what Father told me.
After Father planted the seeds, they quickly sprouted and grew. Soon enough, they sprouted big red fruit, completing stage one of our plan.
Laborers employed by Lazy Pig’s family harvested the fruit and loaded it into our carriage.
“Elena said that she can go around selling to the local merchants here,” Father told me. He turned back to Lazy Pig. “I think it’ll be fine, but we can’t be too careful.”
“Oink oink.” Lazy Pig issued a command to the workers, and we set out on our journey to sell food around Melromarc. And some medicine too.
The villages in southwest Melromarc in particular were stricken by poverty, so we sold tons of food there. In fact, rather than selling, Father ended up giving it away free of charge or for promises to be paid back later.
As a result, instead of money, we started to accumulate all sorts of random objects. That meant a heavier carriage, which Yuki and Kou very much enjoyed.
Along the way, Luna grew up quickly and turned into her filolial queen form before we knew it. Rather than her original pure-navy shading, she ended up having a white coat with navy mixed in. It was a combination reminiscent of only Filo-tan, I say, and she was about to reach her angel form too!
“Luna-chan, I can’t wait for you to become an angel, I say!”
And upon my request, Luna instantly transformed into her angel form.
“Motoyasu, we’re in the middle of a town!” Father protested.
Oho? What was the problem? For some reason Father was covering up Luna with a towel and directing her back into the carriage.
Once back in the carriage, Luna paused. “I’m . . . Luna.”
“Uh, okay, well, no need to pull the carriage right now,” Father said.
“Okay.”
She had the same youthful appearance as Yuki and Kou, I say, and was completely different from how Sakura had turned out.
I took a closer look. First, I noticed that her eyes were a deep navy-blue, like the color of the sea at night. The same eye color she had in her filolial form. Next, I observed her hair, which was a glistening silver, sparkling as it caught rays of sunshine. It was a combination of colors unlike anything I had ever seen.
Haircut styles also depended on the filolial. Father listened to Luna’s preference and gave her a haircut to her liking. Luna ran a hand through her hair and nodded.
“She’s definitely a little different from the other filolials,” Father commented.
“I don’t disagree.”
“It’s her hair, right? Her hair color doesn’t match her feathers or eyes.”
“Did we do anything different with her?” I inquired.
“I mean, we have been feeding her the chimera meat, but we’ve all been eating it.”
That shouldn’t change anything. However, I couldn’t help but recall that Filo-tan also had the same sort of difference in her filolial and angel forms. What could the cause be?
“Am I weird?” Luna asked.
“No, you’re not weird,” Father said. “You’re just different.”
Luna didn’t seem like the conversational type. She never used sentences of more than a few words. Sakura also tended to be pretty short-winded, but she always responded to exactly what you asked her, and she liked to sing. No matter what you said to Luna, her responses were short. I figured that was just her personality.
“Different . . .” Luna muttered.
“Oink oink,” Lazy Pig said.
“Are you copying Elena?” Father asked. “No need to do that.”
“I’m not,” Luna said.
So Luna was the cool, reserved type. She seemed to want to avoid attention. She had an atmosphere about her that almost reminded me of Fitoria-tan. Whenever we met monsters, Fitoria-tan always liked launching a single, powerful surprise attack.
“But still, why does she have a different hair color in her angel form?” Father asked. “I suppose Sakura’s eye color is different from the other filolials in a similar way though.”
Now that he mentioned it, Filo-tan really had a number of differences from other filolials too.
That night, Luna turned back into her filolial form and sat down. She patted her tummy and beckoned to Keel.
“Tweet . . . Keel, come sleep on me.”
“On your stomach? Wow, looks warm!”
Keel went up to Luna and lay against her stomach. Luna looked down at Keel with gentle eyes.
“Man, this is crazy soft! Feels great!”
“You can come to me too!” Kou said and opened his mouth hungrily.
“I’m not going to go inside!” Keel barked. “Leave me alone!” Keel bared her teeth and growled.
“Luna, do you like being petted?” Father asked.
Luna nodded. “Keel’s cute.” And she gave Keel a tight hug with her feathers.
Kou liked Keel just as much, but for a different reason, I say. Luna was more like a little girl who loved her puppy.
“I ain’t cute! I’m cool!” Keel growled.
“I . . . I wanna be like Keel,” Luna said. “I wanna be small and say tweet tweet.”
“Luna, you’re plenty cute the way you are,” Father said.
But Luna was just being sensitive. All filolials are positively adorable, I say!
“In your angel form, you’re just as cute as Keel is,” Father said.
“But I want to be . . . cuter,” Luna said. “I wanna say tweet tweet.”
Father sighed and turned to me. “They really all do have such different personalities. I feel like she’d get along with Lars.”
Father was right. That panda also loved cute things, even though she didn’t want to be dressed up. I think they would get along.
“I’m happy right here with Keel, tweet tweet,” Luna said.
Father nodded. “Okay then. That’s fine with me.”
And Keel and Luna continued to snuggle, I say. I could tell that Luna really loved Keel.
“Okay, your feathers feel amazing, but man, I’m starting to get hot,” Keel said, panting with her tongue out.
How could you possibly be too hot when wrapped in the loving feathers of a filolial?
“Luna, don’t cuddle Keel for too long,” Father said. “Sakura, same with you. You guys are so warm that we can’t fall asleep like that.”
“Okay,” Luna said. “Then I’ll cuddle Keel after he falls asleep.”
“After I fall asleep?” Keel barked. “Just what do you want to do to me?”
All of a sudden, Luna’s feathers sparkled and she started to shrink all the way down to a size that could fit into Keel’s hands. She was turning into her chick form.
“Tweet!”
Father nodded. “Well, at that size, you can certainly sleep together without getting too hot.”
“Tweet tweet!”
“I dunno what you’re saying, Luna!” Keel said, holding Luna in her paws.
“Keel, I don’t think she can speak in that form,” Sakura said.
“She can’t talk like this?”
“Oh, really?” Father asked.
“She can’t. Naofumi, you didn’t know?”
“I’ve never seen you or the other filolials go back into chick form,” Father said.
Sakura tilted her head and thought about it. “Yeah, I guess so.”
As quiet and calm as always, I say. And with that, we eventually went to sleep.
The filolials continued to pull our carriage full of bioplant fruit around Melromarc. We also stopped to sell medicine to the sick and elderly and heal them and continued to help the people of Melromarc in any way we could. We made several trips around Melromarc, but the food situation wasn’t getting better in the southwest villages, so we did several rounds of donations.
Since our levels were already fairly high, we didn’t need to go to Siltvelt to hunt monsters. And now that Father had actually learned the portal skill, I didn’t need to bring everyone there by myself anymore.
Father figured that the peddling was more important, so we gave it our undivided attention. And in his free time, Father studied magic and reading. He had already made it to first-class spells.
We did all that in the span of about a week after the wave of destruction.
We were in the middle of transporting the carriage between villages. Father was staring at his account book, groaning.
“Is something wrong, Father?”
He glanced up at me. “Oh, Motoyasu. Well, we’re managing to sell, but . . .” He trailed off.
Father showed something or other to me in his account book. The day’s sales, perhaps? We had done well yesterday, but only relative to the day before. It seemed like we were still meeting Father’s sales objectives though.
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“These are our total sales from both Elena and Keel. The problem is that one of them seems like they’re doing almost all of the work.”
“Well, it’s obviously not Lazy Pig,” I said.
Father rubbed his chin. “Actually, it’s the other way around. When Elena is doing the job, we sell much better.”
What in the world! How could Lazy Pig actually be contributing to our sales? She had none of the essential qualities of a good salesman! All she did was sleep and be lazy. Every time I saw her, she was in a horizontal position, I say!
“Is that even possible?” I asked.
“It may have to do with the fact that we’re in Melromarc,” Father said. “Keel is a demi-human, so people might be prejudiced against buying from him.”
Aha. People were afraid of the medicine and food when it was coming from a demi-human. Knowing Melromarc, it made sense.
“That is the only conceivable explanation,” I said.
“I think it’s the most likely explanation,” Father agreed. “But actually, Elena does a good job of perking up and smiling when she sells to customers. She makes them like her.”
Since pigs had deceived me so many times before, it wasn’t inconceivable. But still, I found it hard to believe.
“Oink . . .”
As always, Lazy Pig was fast asleep.
“She’s good at figuring out what to do when the customers are driving a hard bargain, and she knows just when to raise prices. Keel is good at attracting customers to buy, but Elena’s much better at the deal itself.”
Shocking. I figured that we would have to fire Lazy Pig immediately, but it turned out that she was good at her job. And that was all I needed from her—to continue to help Father.
“Well, lately Luna’s going out with Keel, and with Luna’s charm, they’ve been able to sell a little bit more.”
Right then, Luna was pulling the other cart with our supplies, and Keel was riding on her back. They seemed to be enjoying some idle chatting together. What a lovely scene!
“Naofumi, where are we going next?” Sakura asked.
“After we finish selling food in Elena’s territory, we’re going to east Melromarc,” Father said.
That was pretty much how our days went. Thanks to all the filolials, we were able to easily transport all of our goods. It took us a few days to sell out of everything, even though we had productive days. We also started selling in Lazy Pig’s territory. Everything was going smoothly.
Apparently, Lazy Pig was using the rumors about the saint of the bird god as a selling point, boosting our sales and starting whispers that she was a heavenly mother herself.
Father had just told me about some other peddler who we encountered along the way and had tried to get on the carriage, but Lazy Pig shut him down. Father had also gone out to politely turn him away.
“I just remembered something,” I told Father. Back in the first go-around, Father had sold something else in addition to food and medicine. Filo-tan said something about it to me, but I couldn’t recall the exact words.
“What is it?”
What did Filo-tan say back then?
“I remember that there was something else that you were selling,” I told Father.
“Hmm. What could it be?”
“Oink,” offered Lazy Pig.
“I could cook for people? I’m not a professional chef or anything.”
At the word ‘cook,’ Keel and the others quickly rushed over.
“Big Bro! Can you make crepes for us? Please!”
Father glanced over at Lazy Pig. Perhaps that had convinced him that cooking might not be such a bad idea.
I, Motoyasu Kitamura, had the utmost confidence that any cooking of Father’s would prove a bestseller in no time!
Father scratched his head. “Maybe, maybe that’s it. Motoyasu says I sold something else, and besides food, I’m just not sure what that would be.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
In the first go-around, much later when I started following Father, I had simply obeyed whatever commands he issued to me. I wasn’t aware of the bigger picture. I did remember one time when I went to visit Father in his room and saw some equipment in the corner. Maybe that was my clue?
“Elena, when we went peddling today, did anything else happen? Any ideas for what to sell?”
“Oink oink.” Elena was lying down in the hammock, eyes closed as she responded.
“That guy who tried to join us before was selling accessories? And is famous for it?”
“Oink oink.”
“So in the first go-around, maybe I learned how to make accessories from him?”
“Oink oink oink.”
“But he’s supposedly a cheapskate? Still, it sounds possible that he may have helped me sell accessories in the first go-around . . .” Father trailed off.
Hmm, hmm indeed. I did recall that Filo-tan had a treasured jewel hairpin. Could Father have made that himself?
I think Keel also had a bone-shaped accessory of some sort.
“So how would we go about making accessories? Obviously we’d need metal, for one.”
“Wouldn’t it be easiest to have some made for us in Siltvelt?” I suggested.
“But we wouldn’t be able to verify the authenticity or quality of those accessories,” Father said.
It was a difficult dilemma. I knew that I had to be patient for the next wave, but I was starting to get bored.
“Oink oink,” Lazy Pig suggested.
“You might be able to negotiate with your mom to get some accessories? That sounds good to me.”
“Then that settles it,” I declared.
“I still don’t know anything about it, so I’m not sure if we should expect to make a ton of money out of it or anything,” Father said. “For accessories, I feel like you’d have a better sense than me, Motoyasu.”
I laughed. “Father, if you so command it, I shall make the best accessories this world has ever seen!”
“Let’s do that,” Father said. “To be honest, Motoyasu, all I’ve seen you doing nowadays is playing with Yuki in the carriage.”
So Father had been paying attention to me, huh? I couldn’t have him think I was slacking off, I say. I’d do whatever it took to please Father!
“So you’ll make clothes and accessories for us to sell, then?” Father asked.
“Yes, I will!”
And that’s how I started making accessories. We did have thieves attack us from time to time, but Yuki and the filolials were always able to easily repel them. Father just had to chant Shooting Star Shield and we’d be safe instantly.
After that, I’d go and capture them. By the time I released the thieves, they always promised to amend their ways.
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