The Leisurely Established Advertising Agency in the Other World Handles Nobles, Adventurers, and Merchant Guilds with Ease
*There was a mistake it’s not Ayano it’s Fumino and it’ll be so in future chapter’s.*
After spending about three hours silently going through books and stacks of paper following the inspection of the belongings, the two of them seemed to have finished skimming through most of it.
Just then—
*Grrrrrr~*
A peaceful rumble sounded from Taichi’s stomach.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, embarrassed.
Fumino gave him a sidelong glance, but hearing the sound made her realize she was hungry too.
“Well, we’ve gone through most of it, and it’s about time we started feeling hungry anyway, so it works out. How about we grab something to eat and go over what we’ve found?”
Since they’d already concluded there were no issues with the water, Fumino joined Taichi in eating some of the food from this world while sharing what they’d each read.
They started with the geography of this world.
The maps they found here all appeared to be handwritten. Judging by the condition of the paper and the content, including the presumed scale, it was clear they varied widely in age and region.
Since it wasn’t clear how much territory they covered, grasping the full picture was difficult. What they could piece together was that there was at least one large continent with multiple countries, the relative positions of those countries on the continent, some rough terrain details, and the locations of major towns in a few of them.
There were also quite a few memo-like maps scattered with X marks, but they couldn’t figure out what most of them referred to.
“For now, it’s safe to say there’s at least one big continent, and it’s got a few countries,” Taichi said.
“If the names are anything to go by, there seem to be a lot of kingdoms,” Fumino added. “Plus some empires.”
“Feudalism or absolute monarchy, huh… Oh, constitutional monarchy’s not off the table either. Either way, this alone doesn’t tell us much.”
“True. But to avoid getting tangled up in weird trouble, it might be smart to assume there’s some kind of class system in place.”
“Yeah, I’d rather not piss off some noble and end up executed.”
“Then there’s the terrain. It’s got your standard oceans, mountain ranges, big rivers, and lakes, plus large forests, deserts, and islands.”
“All the usual stuff’s there. No clue about east-west-north-south, vegetation, or climate, though.”
“Right. And we don’t know how accurate the scale is, but the proportion of areas with towns—or people in general—seems pretty low.”
“Looks like mostly uncharted territory. Unless the towns are ridiculously huge… Here’s hoping wherever we end up is at least a town. Bonus points if it’s one on the map.”
“I’d really rather not end up in the middle of a mountain or a deep forest… They seem to restock food regularly, so even if it’s not a town, it’s probably somewhere with people.”
“Alright, that’s about it for geography. Anything more, we’ll figure out later when we’ve settled down.”
“Next up: summoning stuff.”
After wrapping up their discussion on geography, they moved on to pulling out research books, papers, and historical records about summoning magic and legends. Most of them looked old and worn, suggesting this wasn’t a heavily studied topic in recent times.
“Even the so-called research books barely touch on how to actually perform a summoning,” Fumino noted. “At most, they mention needing a magic circle or a sacrifice—stuff like that. And even then, it’s just speculation based on what’s in the legends. Speaking of which, there are a ton of legends and tales.”
“This one might be the oldest,” Taichi said, holding up a book. “It says a king founded a country called Lembeck a thousand years ago. Though we don’t know when this book was written, so it’s at least a thousand years old.”
“Now that you mention it, I keep seeing this ‘Kōshin Calendar’ pop up,” Fumino said. “Oh, wait, I just noticed—it uses ‘years’ as a unit. Is that normal?”
“The translation’s probably automatic, so we’re just interpreting it as ‘years’ because it’s the closest concept we know,” Taichi replied. “But what that unit actually means here? No idea. Do they have something equivalent to months and days? Maybe it’s just years and days, no months. Or maybe there’s a bigger unit above years, like ‘decade of something.’”
“Yeah, true. Now that I think about it, we don’t even know if they use base-10…”
“The old man’s finger bones were five per hand, ten total, just like us, so I’d bet on base-10 for numbers. Units, though? Earth’s got stuff like the yard-pound system, so who knows.”
“We can only hope it’s not something complicated.”
“Praying for everything’s getting old fast. Guess we just roll with it. So, how far does this Kōshin Calendar go?”
“Hold on, I jotted that down since it caught my eye… Here. The oldest is Kōshin Year 913—something about a demon king being born.”
“Demon king, huh? Figures there’d be one.”
“Then there’s Kōshin Year 1708. That’s the king who founded Lembeck. Apparently, he defeated the demon king and started the country.”
“About 800 years… That’s one long-lived demon king.”
“Next is 1955. Someone saved the world from a decade-long global famine.”
“Talk about big scale.”
“After that, every 100 to 200 years, there’s stuff like preventing disasters or revolutionizing magical tools—seems a few notable people popped up.”
“What’s the latest?”
“Around 2200. There’s a cluster of similar legends from that time, just a few years apart. A hero who defeated a demon king that returned to plunge the world into terror…”
“If Lembeck was 1000 years ago, and we assume it’s roughly Kōshin Year 2700 now, then there hasn’t been any major summoning in at least 500 years. With records that old, no wonder the old man had to spend his whole life researching it.”
It seemed certain that multiple people had been summoned in the past, but none of the legends mentioned anyone returning. It also wasn’t clear if they’d been summoned from Earth like Taichi and Fumino.
“All we’ve got are some names and their legendary feats,” Taichi said. “Lembeck’s first king was Helmut… Sounds like a common German name, and Lembeck’s got a German vibe too, but that’s not much to go on.”
“We don’t know what names are like for people here, and with the auto-translation, it’s hard to say how accurate it is. Names are proper nouns, so it might just be assigning sounds as-is.”
Looking for more clues, Taichi’s eyes stopped on one name among the summoners.
“Yuri, huh… What’d this one do?”
“Uh, let’s see. A woman who invented a bunch of unprecedented magical tools and revolutionized Erisior’s civilization. They call her the ‘Queen of Magical Tools.’ She founded the Tommy Company and built it into the world’s biggest trading firm in one generation, apparently. Pretty rare for a legend to have such a clear trail.”
“Tommy Company, Yuri… Yuri Tommy? Tommy Yuri? Tomii Yuuri…”
“Tomii Yuuri. Sounds Japanese…”
“Yeah. Finally, a little lead. Once we get out of here, should we check it out? World’s biggest trading firm—probably still around, and it’d make sense for it to have branches everywhere, not just in one country.”
“I’ll add it to our short-term goals.”
They kept cross-referencing, but all they found was that some place names in the legends matched ones on the maps. With no major breakthroughs, they called it quits on the research books.
“That’s about it for now,” Fumino said.
“Almost nothing concrete, or a lucky break with a few clues? Better than zero, at least,” Taichi muttered, stretching lightly as he stood. His neck cracked as he rolled it. “The rest is just stories and stuff we can’t read, right? Wanna take a break and check out the magic circle?”
“We’ve used up a lot of time already, and we need to figure out how to get out of here, so let’s take a look.”
With that, Fumino stood too, grabbing her notes and a book, and headed toward the room with the magic circle.