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Chapter 75: Compensation Plan for Labor Shortage

Translator: Haruchin   Editor: Marky

I formed a contract with the black spirit that was still in my hand, then released it deeper into the forest. Now that I think about it, Horsey is the biggest black spirit that I have formed a contract with so far, but Horsey still retained his self-control despite being blackened. Well, either way, both of them had been invigorated after forming our contract.

Black spirits eat their own kind, be it normal spirits or their fellow blackened ones. They do this in order to compensate for their missing body parts and for the energy that had been taken away from them. It’s a vicious cycle of eating and being eaten, because the pain will continue even after trying to compensate for it, so they will continue being cannibalistic.

According to Horsey, there are two ways to lessen their weakening; either form a contract, or find a vessel. They will continue to crave for power, so contracts are preferred. The pain will be suppressed and it can be controlled once their reasoning returns. There are also black spirits who lose themselves after being severely injured, and among them, there are still those who want to escape from the pain, so they let themselves be eaten by their fellow black spirits. Of course, my contracted spirits are prevented from doing that to each other.

I thanked the spirits who helped me, and gave them a bit of mana to take home, before changing into more comfortable clothes. I return to the water basin to continue watching the situation.

The guy who was on the verge of death and the guy that I had just peeled the spirit from were facing the three Gold ranks, and they were surrounded by the other folks. The two guys were naked above the waist, providing an unnecessary view of their bodies. Ah, the guy on the brink of death is starting to prostrate himself before Archer. Wait a sec, shouldn’t she be the one to apologize, given that she almost killed him…Well, they did say that he behaved abnormally, and even Ash and the guys were sticking together closely as they moved around, so maybe he did something. And now that I think about it carefully, he did slash at her first, and being possessed might not be an excuse for doing that.

I’m going to ask Ash and the rest about this when they return. I’m pretty sure they’re going to talk about the commotion due to the spirit possession when I ask「 How’s the subjugation? 」, so I’m going to follow that up with 「 Where was he when the spirit possessed him? That’s scary 」 . Yep, act naturally.

Horsey told me that he was possessed when he went to check the country where Sis is. The small country right between between Canum and Sis’s empire was always involved in war year after year, being unified and then scattered again, rinse and repeat, so I thought that it’s difficult to go back and forth between the two adjacent countries, but I still need to put up my guard just in case adventurers from that country come here.
There’s another thing that I need to consider. If people become unable to repel the spirits, it will turn into the earlier situation. Does the book that Ludere prepared tackle this subject? I plan to retrieve that book before the expedition team returns, so I’m going to read it first before thinking about it.

Okay, watching, doing and thinking about all these things made me hungry, so let’s have some soba for today! Time to prepare the ingredients — I made everything from scratch earlier and placed them inside 【 Storage 】, so I just have to take out the ‘freshly’ ground, kneaded and boiled soba noodles, and fry the tempura, too. I prefer cold soba noodles over hot ones, so I’m going to eat the tempura separately, but I modified the batter coating so that it’ll be delicious when I place it on top of the soba and the sauce seeps in.

I peeled the shells off the shrimp, made a shallow, diagonal cut on the belly where the vertical and horizontal fibers converged, and then stretched it and placed a weight on top as the last step to prevent the shrimp from curling up during frying. I coated them lightly with flour before dipping them into the batter and frying them. I use this technique of dusting flour on most of my seafood dishes. I pour a lot of oil, wait until it’s hot, and drop the shrimp into the pan. Look at how it sizzles! Did you know, scrimping on oil isn’t good since the temperature will go down, and it’ll be difficult to return it to ideal, and the moisture won’t evaporate.

The shrimp started to froth, and the sizzles calmed down, so I picked them up with the tongs, slanted them, and dipped the tail into the hot oil for a few seconds. I did this to drain the excess oil, and to make the tail crunchier. I fried all the shrimp continuously until everything was done.

I bit into the fragrant shrimp heads that had been fried to a crisp separately, and slurped the soba noodles. I didn’t dissolve the wasabi in the sauce and just placed it properly on the noodles. There are also some tempura fava beans and huge scallops that had been cooked medium rare, some meaty shiitake mushrooms served with citrus and salt, and sea urchins wrapped in green perilla with a dipping tempura sauce to complement it. The mixed veggie tempuras were bite-sized pieces, and I dipped them into the soba sauce before gobbling them with the noodles. The soft-boiled egg tempura’s sauce is plain soy sauce, but I enjoy the melt-in-my-mouth goodness of the yolk.

Wow, this seems like I did my own tempura convention solo. Yep, I was right in choosing the house, 【 Food Storage 】 【 Complete Cookery 】 skills. No matter what kind of world it is, I’m sure I can survive in it just by having these.

One more year and I can drink the sake of my previous world. I’m conscientious about the drinking age, after all, so I’m looking forward to it. I stopped using cooking wine in my dishes, and just went with the Japanese sake varieties that I heard were tasty. That’s also true for wine and other alcohol, and there’s plenty of them for when I want to make western sweets. The beer is more or less okay, but it’s expensive so I only have one type. Well, maybe I can make my own later on. I already have delicious water, so maybe I should grow grapes for now. As expected, there are no grape varieties that are specifically cultivated for making wine inside my 【 Food Storage 】, just the huge, sweet ones perfect for snacking on as is.

Alright, I can turn the slope into a vineyard now, especially since Pal, the spirit governing the Earth and Harvest, and Ish, the spirit governing Water and Healing, told me they’ll help.

Oh, speaking of grapes, I also need to peel the bark off the branches growing in my grapevine trellis. But then, maybe I don’t have to do that, since I had already requested my house to be pest proof, meaning to say those pesky insects can’t enter the garden, right? Bark peeling is only done to prevent the pests from entering under the bark. Afterward, the branches are trimmed to make the trellis neat and tidy.

There are still a lot of things on my to-do list, and I want to make more progress on my forest house, too. Daily maintenance of the field might be impossible, after all. Besides, I don’t even have any helpers. Pal and the rest probably won’t send over some ‘physical’ thing as help, right? Ah, but maybe I can ask the spirits for help, I guess. Spirits basically pass through objects without touching them. Well, even if they ‘touch’ it, they can’t cause any change in that object or person — and that includes the feeling of being touched. That’s because power is needed for change to occur. They will use up their power and vanish if I make them do something as trivial as pulling the weeds daily. Well, some mischievous spirits use their power to play pranks, and some also mess up when they release all their power in an instant of fright.

Actually, the spirits’ forte is their calm influence in things that can’t be seen by the naked eye. All they have to do is stay in one place, and they already have an impact there. Take a fire spirit for example. The presence of even the smallest of them, the ones who don’t have any consciousness, can already help make lighting fires easier. It is said that those smallest spirits are born from the mana released by the larger spirits as they move around. Hmm, so in other words, a spirit is a lump of attribute particles? Well, I’m not sure about this either.

At any rate, since the spirits can’t physically remove the weeds, I think it’s fine if I just ask them to make it harder for the weeds to grow right from the get-go, by suppressing the growth of any other plant aside from the ones I planted.

Alright, let’s do it that way.