The Leisurely Established Advertising Agency in the Other World Handles Nobles Adventurers and Merchant Guilds with Ease
When reclassifying the food they had found, the lineup was as follows:
– Something resembling hard, thin bread
– Brown chunks that looked like dried meat
– A fruit similar to an apple
– What appeared to be dried nuts
– A cream-colored object with a cheese-like aroma
After staring at them for a while, Taichi picked up the apple-like fruit and first sniffed it.
“It looks like an apple, but the smell is a bit different.”
“What does it smell like?”
“Wanna take a whiff?”
After tossing her the apple-like thing, Ayano caught it and took a few sniffs.
“It smells more like a pear, though it seems a bit more sour than a pear.”
“Yeah, you’re right—it does smell like a pear. Let me see.”
After thoroughly confirming the smell, he took out a knife and a small pot from the camping gear, first cutting the fruit in half. Then, slicing it into pieces a few millimeters thick, he placed one on the inner side of his elbow. Next, he thinly sliced the bread-like and dried meat-like items, moistened them slightly with water, and similarly stuck them to his inner elbow before pausing for a moment.
“What are you doing?”
“A simple patch test. If there’s a reaction to this, it’s probably pretty dangerous stuff. Ideally, we’d do one at a time, but since these seem to be from our side, I’ll leave them on for about 15 minutes. In the meantime, why don’t you check out some books?”
“Alright, some of them have titles, so I’ll try sorting them.”
After setting a timer on his phone, Ayano started inspecting the books, checking their titles or flipping through pages if they were untitled. After sorting about ten books, the phone timer went off with a *beep beep*.
“Alright, let’s see.”
He peeled off the various slices stuck to his elbow, but there were no abnormalities on his skin.
“Good, we’ve cleared the first stage. Now, next…”
He cut the apple-like fruit into 1 cm cubes, tossed one into his mouth.
“Ah!” Ayano instinctively exclaimed.
“Hmm, it tastes like a slightly sour pear. Oh, hold on for the texture—I won’t chew it just yet. I’ll wait another 15 minutes like this. Afterward, I’ll chew it for 15 minutes, then finally swallow it and wait a few hours. But first, I’ll quickly repeat this process for all three types.”
“It’s obvious, but it’s quite tedious…”
“Yeah, well, it can’t be helped. Even though they seem edible, they’re still unknown. But if all goes well here, we should be able to eat most of this world’s food. Just being cautious for now.”
As he repeated the process—waiting 15 minutes after putting each item in his mouth, chewing for another 15, and spitting it out—Ayano continued sorting the books.
The results came back: the bread-like, dried meat-like, and apple-like items showed no abnormalities. According to Taichi’s food review, the bread-like item was a slightly softer version of hardtack, the dried meat was salty wild boar jerky, and the apple-like fruit tasted like a sour pear with an apple-like texture.
“Now we just need some time after eating, so let’s read some books. The sorting’s done too.”
Taichi spoke while eating half of the apple-like fruit and looking at the categorized books.
“Well, there aren’t too many of them. After skimming through, the rough classification breaks down into four categories.”
The documents they had found were divided into four groups by Ayano and laid out on the table.
“The first category is about this world as a whole. Though there aren’t many—just a few maps and several books collecting legends from various regions. The second category is stories. Surprisingly, this is the largest group, and there are quite a few picture books too.”
“Huh, stories and picture books? Not exactly cute hobbies, huh?”
“Of course not. From what I could tell, most are about heroes or sorcerers appearing from somewhere to save the world.”
“Ah, I see. So, they gathered anything that might relate to summoning. Quite thorough.”
“Probably. The third category is research books related to summoning. There weren’t many purely about summoning, so it seems they also collected things related to teleportation and such.”
“Man, talk about dedication.”
“And finally, the ones we can’t read. We don’t know the content, but they seem to mostly be related to magic.”
Taichi picked up a few of the unreadable books and flipped through the pages. As Ayano said, it was unclear what they said, but they contained things like what seemed to be magic circles, detailed annotations about the elements composing a single magic circle, and diagrams resembling family trees. They certainly seemed to be related to magic.
“I see. If the hypothesis that we can’t read them due to low environmental adaptation is correct, then these books must be pretty difficult to decipher. Maybe magic is considered advanced knowledge in this world too.”
“In Earth terms, high-level academic papers and theses often require foreign languages too.”
“We can’t read them now, but they might be valuable, so let’s take them with us when we leave. For now, can I leave the book investigation to you?”
“No problem.”
“Thanks. In the meantime, I’ll tidy up the remains…”
“?”
“Yaaawn… phew…”
“You look like you want to say something, but even I’m getting sleepy.”
“It’s already past 7 a.m. Earth time. No matter how young we look now, pulling an all-nighter is tough on an old guy like me. How about a quick nap? Luckily, it doesn’t seem like anyone can come in from outside.”
“True. Continuing like this would make us pass out anyway, and that wouldn’t be efficient.”
“Right. So, who sleeps where?”
“Where?”
“Do you sleep in the bed or my sleeping bag? We can’t exactly share.”
“Well… true.”
Ayano hesitated. Honestly, she didn’t want to sleep in the bed that the old man had likely used, but using Taichi’s sleeping bag felt awkward too. A blanket would’ve been fine, but the enclosed nature of the sleeping bag made her hesitate. Sleeping on the hard floor would only leave her sore and exhausted. She chuckled bitterly—her first dilemma in this world was something like this.
“Alright, can I borrow the sleeping bag? Sleeping in the bedding of an unknown old man is just… a bit much.”
“…”
“What?”
“Nothing. Go ahead and take the bed then.”
With that, Taichi headed toward the bed, his face inexplicably showing a slight smile, though Ayano didn’t notice.
“Alright then, goodnight. When we wake up, we’ll start moving for real.”