A Stable Food Supply – Part 01
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Translator: Kell
I wonder if I ever questioned the food on the table when I was a kid.
Where does the bread come from? Where do they hunt the meat and how do they butcher it? What is the wine that my father drinks made from and who makes it?
As a stupid kid, I thought all food existed in the form of ingredients. If you cook the ingredients, it becomes a dish. That knowledge alone probably put me a little above other kids.
But my questions did not end there.
Who made the knives used for cooking? Where did the wood in the kitchen originally come from? Who built the house I’m living in and how did they do it? What is the blanket that we sleep in every night made of?
As I grew older, I slowly realized that the things that I used to take for granted around me were all important.
I left my village when I was thirteen. Yes. Thirteen. I didn’t know that knowing my age accurately was actually a special thing until after I left.
A soldier I met on the battlefield once asked me, “How do you know? Don’t tell me you’ve been celebrating every year?”
He was right. Every year, my parents would celebrate the day I was born. As the end of summer approached, they would say, “It was a cool day like this when you were born.”
So every time the end of summer approached, I would think, “Oh, another year has passed.”
Nowadays I don’t cherish the passing days enough to know how old I am. I left the village when I was thirteen. That’s the only thing I clearly remember.
When I left and learned solitude for the first time in my life, I realized how well my parents had protected me. I understood how much the village looked after me.
I learned that the firewood piled in the kitchen was dried fresh wood. I learned that freshly-cut trees can’t catch fire easily, so dead branches are needed to make a bonfire.
I learned that knives rust if they’re not taken care of, that bread can’t be made without flour, and that even if you have money, you can’t buy anything if people don’t trust you.
I also learned the importance of a community for humans, and sharing roles within that community. I learned how difficult and miraculous it was for a village to survive.
And now I’m learning how difficult it is for a Beastfallen and a witch to build their own village.
“We’ve gotta prepare nonperishables before winter comes,” I told the villagers.
It was the end of summer. Autumn was fast approaching, the season when the forest became bountiful and animals grew fatter.
After the northern half of the continent was ravaged by demons, those who lost their homes, families, and jobs were gathered together in early spring to build a village in the south.
The endeavor was spearheaded by a witch and a Beastfallen. I wasn’t sure if it would work out, but the displaced people were willing to repair half-destroyed houses, plow the fields and sow seeds, and with a strange kind of unity, they turned an abandoned village into a desolate village.
Beastfallen are half-human, half-beast monsters. Hairy, with vicious fangs and claws, their forte was killing people.
And I was one such Beastfallen.
There were some pesky reasons as to why a monster like me ended up leading the reconstruction, but the most obvious one was that the abandoned village was my birthplace. I grew up in the village’s tavern.
My parents died while I was out of the village, and the kitchen was in a terrible state, but with the help of the villagers, we renovated it to the point where we could open for business.
A tavern is a place where villagers gather after work to eat and drink. It’s a meeting place, so to speak, a place to socialize, and a place where people exchange all sorts of information. In this village of about a hundred residents, information from every corner of the settlement gathered in this tavern.
Consultations were always held in this establishment. After closing time, when others begin to leave, the village bigshots gather together as if they had already arranged a meeting beforehand, and exchange opinions about various matters.
Right now, they were doing exactly that. About ten men and women were gathered around me, wearing frowns. One of them, an unbelievably beautiful, silver-haired woman, who looked like she had stepped out of a painting, raised her forefinger.
“By nonperishables, do you mean salted meat and dried fish?”
“Exactly, witch.”
Zero, the extraordinary witch, furrowed her perfectly-shaped eyebrows and wore a troubled look that captivated the villagers.
“So what you are saying is that we cannot eat fresh meat and fish during the winter?”
“You can, if you can hunt game successfully, but you can’t get fruits and vegetables in the winter. You have to make preserved food in case you don’t get any meat.”
The gluttonous witch’s expression softened a little. “Then I will use divination to help during the hunt. With my powers, locating prey is easy.”
“That’s good to hear. In any case, we need nonperishables. Except there’s one problem.”
“What?” Zero asked.
“Salt, right?” the leader of the village’s women, a former governess, answered.
A woman in her mid-twenties, she looked like she had a wire running from the top of her head to her toes. Her magnificent red hair, which looked like it could burn your skin with only a touch, hung down to her waist, tightly braided. She was born with poor eyesight, so she always wore glasses. Her whole body exuded an aura of intelligence and elegance, but she lacked the punch because of her short stature.
She taught proper etiquette to a nobleman’s daughter in the north, but after the town fell into ruin, she had nowhere else to go and volunteered to move to this village. An oddball, if you asked me.
She was not without prejudice against witches and Beastfallen, but she firmly believed that dialogue can change people, or in other words, lead us to the path of virtue. She had been keeping a watchful eye on us, determined to correct us as soon as we started to go down the wrong path, but so far we had been staying on the right path, leaving her disappointed.
The villagers called her Madam, and so did I. Names of northerners are too long and difficult to pronounce for me.
I nodded at her response. “That’s right. We’ll need a lot of salt to preserve meat. And we have no way to buy salt.”
“Yes. There’s no commerce in this village. No merchants come close because of rumors that a witch and a Beastfallen would rip them all off of their possessions.” She gave me and Zero a sharp look.
“I told you, it’s to protect the village.”
“As a result, the village has become isolated.”
I flopped down my ears to block out her harsh remark. She had a point. We stripped the wannabe bandits who approached the village of all their belongings and drove them away naked. It was the best way to send them back without hurting them. Unfortunately, I failed to consider the possibility of them spreading nasty rumors outside.
After years of being a mercenary, I had developed this mindset that I deserved to be bad-mouthed, and if I ended up in a dire situation, I could just leave. I had totally forgotten that villagers basically could not move around.
In hindsight, we shouldn’t have let them leave alive. Dead men tell no tales, I reminded myself. Although killing them would’ve resulted in a different kind of problem.
Anyway, our village was not getting along well with the neighboring villages. To put it bluntly, our relationship was downright awful. I was prepared for this from the start, of course. Since trade was not possible, everything had to be done within the village.
“Anyway, if we dump all the salt we have in the village into salting meat,” I continued, “I’ll only be able to serve flavorless food in the future. And people will eventually get sick of salty meat.”
“Maybe we can ask Wenias’s Chief Mage for help.” The one who made the most reasonable comment was the man mainly in charge of manual labor in the village. A former bear Beastfallen, he was human now, but villagers called him “Bear” or “Mr. Bear” in a friendly manner. Even in his human form, he still had that bear-like vibe around him.
He was cheerful and caring, and was popular with the kids in the village because he wouldn’t get angry no matter how much mischief they caused.
“They’re supposed to be supporting this place, right? Isn’t this village an exclave of Wenias?”
“Yeah, but Wenias is a ten-day carriage ride from here. Besides, if we rely on the government’s help right off the bat, what are we gonna do in the future?”
“So first, we have to do everything we can on our own,” Zero said. “Inefficient, but I like it.”
“So you say, Mercenary.”
Needless to say, by Mercenary, they meant me. A former soldier of fortune, I now worked as a tavern owner. But because Zero called me Mercenary, the villagers started calling me that too. Incidentally, everyone called Zero Miss Witch, or Lady Mage. Almost no one called her Zero.
“Like the Madam said, we don’t have anyone to do business with. We don’t have any goods to begin with, so we can’t even barter with others. Unless there’s salt growing in the forest, we’ll never be able to solve this problem without the government’s assistance.”
“I mean, it’s not like we absolutely have nothing to sell…” I turned my attention to Zero.
The witch’s eyes widened. “A-Are you planning to sell my body?!” She turned pale, on purpose.
“Oh, that’s actually a good idea,” I said. “We might get a good price.”
The former governess cleared her throat, and I jumped. “Mercenary,” she said. “As the one responsible for education in this village, I can’t let such a vulgar joke pass.”
“Why me?! You should tell that to the witch!”
“You are just as guilty for humoring her. Don’t blame others.”
I held up my hands. Disobeying the Madam was a fool’s errand.
Selling Zero, however, was not exactly far off the mark. Our village had a unique industry—Magic. It would mean lending out labor, but it wouldn’t be hard to obtain money if people wanted Zero’s Magic.
However, the further south from the Kingdom of Wenias, the more pronounced the people’s hatred of Magic, and our village was located right on the border between the southern and central regions.
There were buyers near the central region, but there were already other sellers there. As for down south, well there weren’t any buyers at all.
In the early days of our village, we advertised to other villages that we would help them harvest their crops with Magic, but we were met with nothing but fear and scorn.
In Wenias and its vicinity, discrimination against witches had decreased dramatically, partly due to the fact that witches protected the people from the demons. However, in the south, where there were no demon invasions in the first place, the attitude toward witches and Beastfallen remained the same.
Witches are evil incarnate, and Beastfallen are symbols of depravity. Our village was supposed to be a stepping stone to overcoming these prejudices, but the road was harsher than we thought.
“Anyway, it’s clear that words won’t solve our food problem. If we run out of options, we’ll turn to the government. If this village perishes in the blink of an eye, the kingdom will have nothing to stand on.”
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