Chapter 79: Standard Templates Of Fantasy Stories Are Beneficial!
"Anyway, we're off then."
At last, Bennyboy and the members of Pale Moon of Dawn departed.
Oh, yes! Since I came up with the idea before their departure, I made sure that one of Char's feelers could be used for releasing warm water as a makeshift-shower. After all, I don't want any dirty humans to ride my Char.
Just in case, I added a cleaning function inside Char and insistently warned Bennyboy to regularly use it, but considering how easygoing Bennyboy is with everything, I'm really worried whether he'll properly follow my instructions.
When I passed a partition screen, a drainboard, and detergent to the adventurers, accompanied by a stern advice that they had to absolutely wash themselves, they nodded meekly.
*
Now then, I wonder how much we're going to make at the auction. It looks like Bennyboy isn't going to sell the wheat honey at the auction, but in the capital at a price cheaper than honey. He's set the price to 50 silver. Apparently he's going with bullish pricing at the beginning, aiming for customers who would buy it for its rarity value. Afterwards he's going to keep lowering the price.
I agreed to all of it since I left things in his hands.
What's left is...at present there are no problems with the restaurant as it seems to be a success.
The guildmaster and some of the moderately rich people approached me about the possibility of ordering single items out of the menu course and drinking a bit since the price for the full course was too high for them. After consulting with the master chef, we set up a counter and adjusted the system so that guests could eat just the main course, desserts, or drink liquor with hors d'oeuvre as a side dish. But, we didn't make the liquor free of charge.
We gave the counter a moody ambiance with the seats being kept dark while focusing the lighting on the bar. The guildmaster visited with his wife, and she was apparently very happy. Also, the guildmaster's wife was young and cute, I heard.
*
Sword and I planned to head out adventuring again after settling a few more things. Last time we ended up returning right before arriving at the capital, and we couldn't get our hands on seafood either.
Aren't there any leviathans or some such? I really wanna see some pirate ships. As for the capital, Sword is quite excited about clearing the dungeon over there, so I'm looking forward to it as well.
If we're on time, I'd love to watch the auction, but I didn't ask Bennyboy when it'd be held.
As for the mansion: Although the number of Ryokus has increased, so has the workload for everyone, and thus it has been gradually becoming more difficult to keep up. Thus we hired new people with the condition that they could be trusted.
We got six applicants as live-ins and ten applicants as commuters. The part-timers at the restaurant became live-ins on the term that they'd work as servants in the mansion outside the restaurant's opening hours.
Yep, that makes them perfectly normal servants at this point, doesn't it?
The local grannies, who would commute, gave as the biggest reason for applying that the Ryokus are cute, so I hired them on the spot without any further questions asked!
Even if it's funny, it seems normal for the people of this world to go out earning money after their children have become independent. Since they're locals, there's no doubt about their background either. In the first place, criminals are usually not locals.
Also, strangers are apparently beaten down if they infiltrate the mansion without knowing that it's the home of an S-Rank adventurer.
Now that I think about it, Ys seems to be a decent town. The only flaw would be the slightly strong monsters if you enter the mountains, but the same doesn't apply to the surrounding plains. There's a river and the soil is fertile, allowing for productive farming.
Given that some places also have rock salt deposits, there's no lack of salt either.
Because the area only hosts the two extremes of strong and weak enemies, it seems to be unpopular among adventurers, though...
By the way, the enemies I encountered when entering the mountains were the large wolf-lookalikes (back when I broke up with Sword), the cockatrices which had been hiding deep in the mountains out of fear when I searched for them all over the place to scout them, and a slime that I found near the river.
This slime was yet another unique species. I kinda wonder...isn't my encounter rate for unique species a tad too high or something!?
It was possible for me to communicate with the slime, but unlike the one in the illustrations of that super famous mangaka, this slime looked more like dough. Kinda like soft rubber. It combined blue and yellow as colors. Normally it apparently camouflaged itself to have a color similar to mud.
Or rather, if it continues to eat something while remaining in one spot, it adopts the color of what it was eating. But then, you have to ask what it ate to become blue and yellow...
The person...err, slime itself didn't seem to know either.
Apparently, it suddenly had an ego. And then it was discovered by me.
*
And then it suddenly dawned upon me!
Up until now, our sewage was amassed in a tank after flowing through the drainage. There the water was separated into air, magic elements, and filth which then got freeze-dried. As might be expected, the tank and drainage would become quite dirty when regularly exposed to filth. Taking that into consideration, we made sure to regularly wash off the filth clinging to the walls with a magical jet water stream, but naturally it'd be impossible to completely get rid of all filth despite all our efforts.
At some point, we requested G-Rank adventurers to clean the drainage and tank, but as those adventurers had sloppy work attitudes and thus didn't do their job properly, we stopped asking the guild for help, and instead cleaned it ourselves.
I wonder, can't I have the slime to do that cleaning for us?
When I asked it, "Won't you come to us? If you're not particular about your food, I'd like you to clean the drainage for us," it readily agreed. I felt terribly guilty about it, but when it told me that anything would serve as nutrients for it except for water and that it'd gladly eat up our filth, I had it live there as a test.
It was a huge success. Therefore, we stopped doing it with magic tools, and had the slime do all the cleaning for us.
Slime cleaning seems to be very normal for nobles, I heard. The maids knew about this method as well. But, apparently it was tough to handle the slimes. Since everything worked as food for them, they wouldn't limit their efforts to just filth, but instead begin to dissolve the building as well, if you were unlucky.
I told the slime to inform a Ryoku, if it didn't have enough food, and the Ryoku would get him more.
And thus we completely resolved any issues with our filth disposal. It made things a bit easier on the servants. Whenever they spotted the slime slithering about nonchalantly, the servants and maids pampered it by feeding the slime. Once they did, it went back to the tank. Even without catching a Ryoku.
By the way, I wanted to use a slime for the restaurant as well, and when I asked the slime whether it knew any other slime whom I could scout, it split.
I was totally startled.
Anyway, I asked it to handle the restaurant's filth disposal, too. It commuted to the restaurant, and it properly waited for further orders after coming back home. Quite the clever slime.
*
I planned to also take the slime along on our journey.
Sword flinched away, commenting, "Eh...? You plan to feed a talkin' slime the stuff we shit out?"
Isn't it fine as long as it's going to eat it for us!? To begin with, camping is totally fine with me! Camping rocks! Rather, the toilet situation in towns sucks!