Two months after we arrived in this isekai universe, Canaan managed to improve his rating at the Adventurer’s Guild to level 8. Since the average level of his party was now over level 10, they were allowed to take E-rank quests… although I was very conflicted about my boyfriend’s promotion.

  Even though E-rank quests paid better than F-rank quests, they were significantly more dangerous.

  I had a heated argument with Canaan over this subject.

  Specifically, I wanted my boyfriend to stick with F-rank quests as long as possible. Even though this medieval isekai had features of a RPG, this wasn’t a game. If Canaan was wounded or killed out in the Wilderness, there wouldn’t be any second chances. From my perspective, he really needed to value his own life.

  However, Canaan had disagreed with me.

  ‘EXP is everything’, he had insisted.

  I didn’t fully understand exactly how all of those weird system mechanics worked (e.g. ‘csses’, ‘skills’, and ‘EXP’), but Canaan had been attending lectures that were sponsored by priests from the Holy Church. The gist of what he had learned was that killing monsters gave ‘EXP’ that reted to the level of the monster. After accumuting enough ‘EXP’, an adventurer could go to a priest who would then then do some sort of ceremony to grant the adventurer ‘skills’ that required ‘mana’ to use. Obviously, stronger ‘skills’ required more EXP points and consumed more mana.

  The Adventurer’s Guild was essentially entangled with the Holy Church.

  Adventurers collected monster crystals, and priests provided ‘skills’, ’mana’, and ‘magic’.

  It was actually a rather intimidating political arrangement. When I thought about the ramifications of this system on a big picture scale, it was essentially a feudal system of power, and it was easy to imagine how the ruling elite of Adelgracia maintained a tight monopoly over military force…

  + + +

  The bright side to my boyfriend’s new rank was that he was finally able to purchase a rental property.

  Previously, we were essentially living in an improvised shack in the city slums, but it was amazing to see how his promotion immediately transted into a significant improvement in our quality of life. Of course, our new pce wasn’t anything fancy — but at least it didn’t feel like we were living in a neighborhood where everyone was digging through trash for leftover food scraps.

  Our new residence was actually in quite a terrible location — in the northeast corner of the city underneath the shadows of the looming city walls — which meant it was stupidly far away from downtown and the city marketpce. Lugging groceries around would be painfully inconvenient. However, this was the cheapest property that Canaan could find, and we both agreed that the value/quality of the building was more important than the specific location.

  Perhaps I was spoiled from my past life on Earth.

  I just didn’t want to live in a 50-year-old building with a rotting structural foundation.

  Like most of the properties on our street, it was a two-story medieval European-style building built out of timber. The bottom floor had previously been used as a storefront for a family business, whereas the upper floor had a bedroom and a storage space. The kitchen was an outdoor fire pit in the backyard, and obviously there was no indoor plumbing.

  There were some shingles missing from the roof as well as some damage to the dry wall, but when we inspected the building, it looked like the structural beams and hardwood pilrs were solid. The city of Rupelweld had no particur housing regutions or government inspection agency, so it was rgely up to ourselves to determine if a building was safe for habitation.

  Scammers were everywhere in the medieval housing market, and we read the property contract very carefully. Both Canaan and I had learned basic reading and writing, but we still consulted a clerk at City Hall prior to signing the document. It was a five-year lease on the nd, and we had to make sure the building on top of the property had equal or greater value at the end of the contract. In addition, we made sure to double-check that I wouldn’t be saddled with huge debts if the absolute worst-case scenario occurred (Canaan died while adventuring).

  Overall, it seemed like a fairly reasonable rental contract.

  + + +

  Afterwards, my boyfriend took several days off work in order to help with renovations.

  Repcing the flooring… repainting the exterior…

  Since the bottom floor was originally intended for use as a retail shop, Canaan asked me if I intended to open a pharmacy. However, after I did a little bit of research at the Merchant’s Guild, I confirmed that Witchshade really was an illegal substance in the Kingdom of Adelgracia, and a lot of common herbs (poisons) that the Old Grass Witch used were officially banned. It didn’t seem like these ws were tightly enforced in a remote frontier city like Rupelweld, but Canaan and I decided that it wasn’t a very smart idea to openly advertise that I was selling it.

  Instead, we decided to brand the shop as a “fortune-telling” establishment.

  The intent was to run a medical consultation service, and if I determined that an intervention was needed, then I could wrap any pharmaceuticals or procedures into the service fee. Naturally, there was always the possibility that a perfectly healthy person would walk in the front door hoping to get their fortune told by an astrologer, in which was it was easy enough to fake a palm-reading and make up some gibberish based on whether they looked healthy or not.

  We bought a crystal ball made out of gss as well as a decent set of furniture. I also started to keep track of the stars, consteltions, and the phases of the moon. Customers had a certain set of expectations when they walked into a fortune-telling business, and I knew that I needed to develop a cursory understanding of common superstitions in this isekai universe in order to py to their pre-existing beliefs.

  Half of it was performative smoke and mirrors, but the medicine itself was absolutely real.

  + + +

  An unexpected side effect of Canaan’s rank up was that my sleep quality got significantly worse. In the weeks after we moved into our upgraded home with a brand new bed, I’d often wake up in the morning with my entire body sore.

  I used to think that it was impossible for anyone to beat my high libido, especially since my prior ex-boyfriends used to say my sex drive was too much for them… but I was finally starting to develop some real sympathy for the other side of the equation.

  Specifically, there was one evening when Canaan wanted to show me a new skill.

  “Stamina+!”

  A magical symbol on his sculpted upper body (which was now decorated with dozens of holy tattoos) would then begin to glow.

  …Ever since that night, I didn’t sleep so well anymore.

  And to be totally clear — it was very enjoyable.

  However, there was a certain point when you ate so much ice cream that your stomach couldn’t hold it anymore, and then you’d probably throw it all up. Sex was very simir, in the sense that I used to end the night 60% satisfied every time I made love with my boyfriend… but now we were regurly reaching 200% or 300% every single time Canaan put his dick inside. If anything, he honestly could have kept going indefinitely, but nowadays I always had to beg for him to stop.

  This seemed to unlock a brand new sadistic streak in my boyfriend.

  Specifically, he would keep coming home with new skills that he wanted to try. One day, he’d hold up a vibrating wooden stick with an evil glint in his eyes, and on a different day he managed to produce some static electricity on his fingertips.

  Needless to say, I was utterly overwhelmed in the matter of days.

  Eventually, I had to put my foot down and insist that I couldn’t have hardcore sex every single day anymore. While I was perfectly happy to suck my boyfriend’s dick in the mornings to stave off his insatiable libido (which somehow seemed have grown 3-4x higher than before…), I couldn’t do a six-hour BDSM scene in our bedroom every night.

  There were physical limits to the natural human body, and even if I was a little bit of a masochist with a somewhat high sex drive, I simply couldn’t tolerate the impossible. Canaan might have steadily been gaining new physical enhancement skills and magical tattoos all over his body, but his partner was still a completely ordinary human being.

  In either case, I could now confidently say that I knew what having sex with a superhuman felt like.

  + + +

  By the time that I started to adapt to Canaan’s new bedroom techniques, my homegrown ’fortune-telling’ business began to pick up a slow but steady stream of customers.

  Although the location was terrible, I had gradually been building a reputation for myself over the past few months, and some of my clients returned to me periodically for cold medicine. Nearly all of my customers were people that already knew me or referrals from a friend, and we rarely ever received walk-ins from complete strangers.

  Given that this was a medieval society, many civilians did not carry money. Gold was scarce, and people preferred to barter and trade with perishable goods. It was very common for the storeroom of our home to be filled with potatoes, eggs, butter, vegetables, or random goods that my clients provided us as compensation for my medical services.

  It was frankly too much food for Canaan and me to eat, and I honestly could have spent hours upon hours of time in the market every day attempting to exchange our excess of perishable food for something that we actually needed. However, I didn’t have much interest in haggling prices (I didn’t go to business school for a reason…), so admittedly I didn’t spend as much time on the Medieval equivalent of ’Facebook Marketpce’ as I really should have.

  Still, this didn’t change the fact that the uneaten food was quickly going to spoil.

  + + +

  “You really do have a lot of potatoes,” Madam Theocred remarked after seeing our storage room.

  Madam Theocred was the Guild Master’s wife. We had first met when the Guild Master invited Canaan and me to his home for dinner several weeks ago, and ever since then, we remained in touch as our husbands had a close retionship with each other.

  Perhaps you could say that we were ‘friends’ because our spouses were friends.

  Although the Theocred household was significantly wealthier than our own, our social statuses actually weren’t that far apart. They were not nobility — both Master Theocred and his wife were descended from merchants and tradesmen (legally, commoners), although they certainly tried to build connections with aristocrats as often as possible. It was obvious that their career goal was to penetrate the ranks of nobility and gain an aristocratic title within their lifetime.

  I certainly couldn’t help them with their ambitions, but the Guild Master still seemed to believe that Canaan and I were ex-nobility from a distant foreign country.

  “Will you take some milk home with you?” I asked her. “We really have too much…”

  Madam Theocred ughed.

  “We don’t have a need for milk ourselves, but I can certainly ask the local orphanage if they’d be willing to buy any of your stock at a discount.”

  Madam Theocred was a sponsor for one of the three major city orphanages in Rupelweld. They were charitable organizations founded by a handful of wealthy individuals, and the Adventurer’s Guild was connected to the network if only because it was very common for a dead adventurer to leave behind orphaned children.

  The Church did not conduct any kind of phinthropy in this isekai universe, so charitable institutions only stayed afloat due to the kindness and altruism of their benefactors.

  “What if I sold it to them for one quarter of the market price?” I asked.

  A 75% discount.

  My logic behind this pricing was that it would save me the effort of tediously wandering around the city market trying to haggle with individual buyers. While I certainly appreciated any amount of money that we could receive, I wanted to offer a low enough price that it could still be considered a ‘donation’ to the orphanage.

  Canaan and I weren’t exactly desperate for cash. My boyfriend’s earnings from adventuring were more than enough to support the two of us, and recently I had started to make a little bit of income as well. While we certainly were not rich, I was fairly content about our current circumstances, and I didn’t feel a strong desire to acquire a whole lot of wealth.

  “Hm… I think our orphanage would accept those terms,” Madam Theocred said.

  “That’s great. I would hate for this food to go to waste.”

  + + +

  On our way out of our new house, I locked the front door and flipped the sign over to indicate that the fortune-telling business was ‘closed’.

  “So how much would it cost to get my fortune read?” Madam Theocred joked all of sudden.

  “The consultation fee is 2 coppers (~60 USD).”

  I looked at the Guild Master’s wife, wondering why she had asked.

  “Is it something serious? We can go back inside and take a seat. I’d hear you out for free.”

  The two of us had previously agreed to go shopping today, so I had been under the impression that we were going to spend the afternoon in the city market. However, if Madam Theocred had something that was bothering her a lot, I didn’t mind canceling our pns.

  The 35-year-old dy waved her hands in front of her.

  “No, no, no. It’s nothing serious,” she crified with a nervous ugh.

  She had a somewhat embarrassed pink tinge to her face.

  “Well… if you have a question, there’s no reason to be shy about it,” I said.

  “I just wanted to know how you get your hair to look so nice,” Madam Theocred finally admitted.

  “Oh, that.”

  In many medieval European societies, people simply did not wash themselves very often. Part of the reason for this was that medieval European soap was highly caustic. It was created using a mixture of potash (lye) and animal fat (rd), which was a strong base (potassium hydroxide). Attempting to wash one’s hair or skin with this type of alkali soap would simply lyse keratinocytes (skin cells) and make one’s hair brittle. If a person washed with alkali soap frequently, they would inevitably ruin their own hair.

  Since there wasn’t any kind of shampoo or body soap in Adelgracian society, it was quite easy to understand why everyone smelled so bad.

  Some aristocrats took to the habit of greasing their hair with oil, but that hardly made anything cleaner. It was simply impossible to remove tar or grease after it stained someone’s hair, although plenty of people tried to wash with an excess of oil in order to flush out the stains.

  “The simplest method would be to wash your hair in rice water every day,” I replied honestly.

  “Rice water? Not oil?”

  “Yes. Wash some rice and then soak it in water for a maximum of 1-2 days. You can strain the water and use it to wash your hair.”

  Rice water was the traditional method of hair-washing in ancient East Asian societies that had be used for thousands of years. Many pnts, including rice, contained natural surfactants which functioned as sulfate-free soap with a neutral pH. Obviously, it wasn’t anything as strong as modern shampoos, but a mild shampoo was obviously better than no shampoo at all.

  “You didn’t make this up? Did you?” Madam Theocred sounded a little skeptical.

  From her perspective, my advice must have sounded like a superstitious old wive’s tale. After all, would you believe it if a friend told you to wash your hair with milk and eggs? Food was retively expensive in medieval society and rice was an imported grain from the south. Most people were understandably reluctant to waste expensive foods by putting it in their hair.

  “I can give you some rice water to try, but you need to use it consistently for some time before you’ll really notice any effects.”

  “Okay…”

  Madam Theocred seemed a little less than enthusiastic.

  It sounded like she really wanted a fancy magical solution.

  “Maybe we’ll find a rare herb in the marketpce that I can use to create a cleansing potion instead,” I consoled her.

  Like many people in this isekai universe, the Madam Theocred seemed to believe that ‘magical’ potions were better than ‘natural’ remedies. The simplest way to change this type of perspective was to use different vocabury, such as calling ‘shampoo’ a type of ‘potion’.

  A rge caravan had arrived in the City of Rupelweld this week, which was the main reason why the two of us had agreed to go shopping together. Exotic goods did not appear in this remote area very often, and I wanted to see if I could find any other pnts or minerals that could be useful for my experiments.

  Soapnut (soapberry), for example, was a type of pnt indigenous to India and Nepal that had particurly high concentrations of saponins. While I didn’t know if I could find an exact equivalent of this pnt in this isekai universe, I understood the general concept behind extracting saponins from pnt tinctures, and it would take a fair amount of testing to determine if there were any other pnts that had simir qualities.

  Of course, it would be very difficult to expin to the locals of this universe exactly why I wanted to conduct strange and suspicious experiments inside of my house. It was indistinguishable from ‘witchcraft’, and I had learned over the past few months that people genuinely couldn’t tell the difference between science, alchemy, superstition, astrology, and voodoo-ism.

  To most people of this era, they were all the same thing.

  “I’ll definitely help you find an eye of a newt today!” Madam Theocred changed the topic, pumping her fists enthusiastically.

  The st time that I had tea with her, Madam Theocred had insisted that she once saw a merchant selling cssic witchcraft ingredients such as dried mandrakes and a basilisk’s fang. I initially expressed some skepticism over whether those things were real, but then again — this was a fantasy isekai universe. I couldn’t say with any degree of confidence whether unicorns and mermaids were real creatures or if they were figments of myth and imagination.

  Madam Theocred seemed convinced that these items were genuine, and I wasn’t going to turn down her assistance if she believed she could find interesting products in the city market.

  “I want you to know that I support witches, Lady Skyr,” Madam Theocred stressed as we walked down the cobblestone street. “The pagan ways are valuable, and the Old Grass Witch is an indispensable treasure for our city. Not all of the young people see it that way, but I want you to know that there are many elderly folk who still remember what it was like before the Church came to the city.”

  “Thank you… I appreciate the support.”

  While I never cimed to be any kind of a ‘witch’, the Guild Master’s wife had already reached the conclusion that I was definitely a practitioner of the pagan arts.

  She clearly had some romantic misconceptions about what it meant to be a ‘witch’, but I could tell that she was well-intentioned. If anything, she was quite courageous for intentionally trying to befriend a ‘witch’ in the most direct way possible.

  Many residents of the city had already seen me wandering around on behalf of the Old Grass Witch, so it was easy to see how they might have assumed that I was her apprentice. This was guilt by association, and I couldn’t remove the scarlet letter now that it was already established.

  If I was ever accused of witchcraft, I would never be able to disprove the allegations.

  Lately, some people averted their eyes away or quietly closed the shutters to their homes when I passed by in the city streets. With the rising influence of the Holy Church, many people did not want to be associated with a possible witch if they could avoid it.

  “If you ever need help, come straight to my husband and me,” Madam Theocred said while looking straight into my eyes.

  She reached out to grab my hand with a soft smile.

  “But until then, let’s go shopping!”

  ?