[Sacred Spirit Affinity (Prismatic) lv.1: A blessing from the Sacred Spirit. Favorability from nature spirits is increased, and magic power is boosted when cast.]

"What's this supposed to be?"

Banxia walked along the roadside, staring at the prismatic skill that had appeared on his status panel at some point without his noticing.

Looking back at the past few days, the only thing that could possibly connect to "Sacred Spirit Affinity" was the new-generation Sacred Spirit, Lia.

He hadn't expected that just fooling around a bit could actually net him an extra skill.

"..."

The memory of that impossibly soft warmth surfaced, and Banxia felt a sudden pang of regret.

Had he known, he would have stayed a few more days. Maybe he could have pushed the skill level higher too...

...

Out on the main road, a boulder sat wedged across the path, the parting gift of a landslide. Banxia was slowly shoving it aside.

"Sir Adventurer, you've truly saved us..." The caravan leader thanked him again, voice thick with the particular relief of someone who had just avoided a disaster.

The delivery deadline was breathing down their necks. If this young man hadn't shown up when he did, they would have had no choice but to watch their goods rot on the road.

"Don't mention it. Straightforward job, set price." Banxia dusted off his hands and took the folk magic book offered as payment.

[Magic to Display Fond Memories]

"Not bad." He glanced at the title and tucked it inside his coat.

He'd only moved a rock. He hadn't expected anything remarkable.

"Sir Adventurer, are you heading to the city up ahead?" the leader asked.

"Yeah."

"It's still a fair ways off. If you don't mind the company, ride with us."

Banxia considered it and didn't refuse.

He didn't believe for a second, though, that any merchant would hand out a free ride purely out of gratitude. The man almost certainly wanted a free escort without paying to hire one outright.

Shrewd fellow.

Not that Banxia minded. Running into monsters along the way would be ideal. No monsters, and he'd still come out even.

He pulled back the curtain, climbed in, and settled into a comfortable spot.

The wheels started rolling again. The caravan pressed north.

Banxia took a sniff. Seasonal specialty fruits, by the smell of it. No wonder the man had looked so close to despair before he arrived.

"You came from the south, didn't you, Sir Adventurer?" The leader was a middle-aged man with the particular shrewd smile that seemed to come standard on merchants.

Small operation, three carriages, two guards who didn't inspire much confidence.

"Yeah." Banxia wasn't in the mood for conversation.

He'd finally ended his dry spell with the Sacred Spirit, and then spent the entire stretch afterward without so much as a glimpse of a living female.

Anyone would feel the strain.

"I've heard there are plenty of beastfolk pleasure houses down south. You must have visited a few, Sir Adventurer?" The merchant edged a little closer, undisguised envy on his face.

Banxia gave him a sideways look. "From what I've heard, the closer you get to the center, the more people hate beastfolk — isn't that right?"

He wasn't pulling that out of thin air.

Never mind the central region; even back in Alterna, if the city lord hadn't needed beastfolk goods and labor, the nobles would never have tolerated them living inside the walls. Let alone the flesh trade of pleasure houses.

"That's the nobles and the Church. What does any of that have to do with people like us?" The merchant waved his hands. "Cheap goods from the beastfolk tribes, those one-of-a-kind bodies — what ordinary man could say no to that?"

"Good taste."

The man had earned Banxia's approval.

A kindred spirit, out here in the Central Continent. Who would have thought.

"So you must be a regular at the beastfolk pleasure houses, then?" The merchant's curiosity was genuine now, none of the earlier performative small talk.

Practical circumstances had kept him from ever actually experiencing beastfolk himself, after all.

"Heh." The topic lit something up in Banxia.

He perked up immediately.

With a proud flourish, he dug through his enormous pack and produced his meticulously kept Interspecies Review Guide.

Everything was in there, every insight, every encounter, his own mount aside.

"Th-this is..." One look, and the merchant was floored. His breathing went heavy. "Sir Adventurer! Five gold coins. Sell it to me!"

"Pass." Banxia waved him off.

The disappointment hadn't even finished forming on the merchant's face before Banxia added:

"Your caravan isn't exactly flush. Consider it a gift."

He'd already memorized every word inside anyway. Buy some paper and ink later, and he could write the whole thing out again from scratch.

"I-I couldn't possibly accept..." The merchant's mouth said one thing while his hands did another, taking the book and tucking it into his coat like it was made of spun gold.

He looked exactly like a kid back home pocketing New Year's money from a relative.

"In return, point me toward some pleasure houses nearby." Banxia paused, then added, "Not pure-blooded human ones. Anything run by beastfolk or other races?"

"Ah..." The request stopped the merchant cold.

He frowned, thought it over for a long moment, and spoke carefully:

"You may not know this, Sir Adventurer, but the Church's reach around here is considerable. Most of the beastfolk have retreated into the forests. Catching sight of one is hard enough, let alone finding a pleasure house."

"I see." A little of the light went out of Banxia's expression.

Was his Interspecies Review Guide really going to stall out here?

"However..."

"However what?" Banxia's eyes sharpened.

"Have you heard of the Mushroom Forest? The magical forest left behind by the First Hero."

"Heard of it." Banxia remembered the red dot Kaguya Shinomiya had pointed to on the map before he left.

"Word on the street is that male adventurers who made it out alive called it paradise. Mushroom girls everywhere. Endure the toxic gas inside, and you can enjoy them however you like."

"You're serious...?" Banxia's first instinct was that it was nonsense.

Then again, this world had never once played by normal rules.

"It's all secondhand. I can't vouch for it."

"Fair enough. Still worth a look." The mere thought of encountering mushroom girls, a race he had never come across, was enough. He made up his mind on the spot.

The Mushroom Forest.

"Oh, I never caught your name, Sir Adventurer." The merchant put the guide away, and something in his manner shifted, grew subtly more respectful. "As the great creator of a treasure like that, your name deserves to be remembered."

"Banxia is fine."

"Banxia?" The merchant blinked. "That sounds familiar. There's supposed to be a hero in the south by that name, rumor has it he wiped out a million-strong dragon army besieging a city, then killed the Great Demon Geist with a single spell from several kilometers away."

"...How do these rumors keep getting worse?" Banxia said flatly. "If there isn't a second person in the south who took down a Great Demon, then yeah, that was probably me."

"Wha—?! You're the hero who's about to launch a northern expedition against the Demon King?!"

"Who on earth is spreading that..."

The merchant's jaw had stopped working.

He turned his head slowly, looked down at the Interspecies Review Guide now sitting inside his coat, then looked back at the young man in front of him, currently slumped against the carriage wall, yawning with complete indifference to the world, and had a quiet, creeping realization.

This trading run was going to end up in the family records.

➤ Next: Preparing to Find the Mushroom Girl

Chapter 66 - Preparing to Find the Mushroom Girl

"This isn't looking good..."

For the first time in a long while, Banxia felt genuinely hesitant.

He sat on the inn bed, the map Kaguya Shinomiya had given him spread open across his lap.

The magical forest with the mushroom girls was still a considerable distance away.

But that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was what sat between him and the mushroom girls: a glaring red dot labeled "Human Forbidden Area."

He thought back to Kaguya Shinomiya's explanation.

Xiaoyan was about to awaken at that location on the map. Most merchant guilds were already rerouting around it.

"Xiaoyan..."

A legendary dragon species. Exceptionally hard to kill, with a decent chance of coming back even after death.

The name alone said enough.

And that was exactly what put Banxia in a bind.

If he could cut it down the moment it woke up, how much time would he harvest?

Just thinking about it, his fingers started tapping against the hilt of his bone dagger on their own.

He sat with it for a long time. Then he made his painful decision.

"Take out Xiaoyan fast, then make a beeline for the Mushroom Forest!"

In the end, the big head beat the little head.

Not that the little head was losing out. It was just a matter of order: Xiaoyan first, Mushroom Forest second. Both were going down eventually.

Either way, that was tomorrow's business.

You didn't travel outside the city walls at night.

Not because the monsters scared him. In Banxia's eyes they were barely a midnight snack.

The real danger was getting lost.

No ranger, no rogue, no guide, just plunging headfirst into deep forest in the dead of night. Lose your bearings and there was no telling where you'd end up.

"Before any of that, let's pump up the stats a little."

His gaze dropped to the panel.

[Held Monster Time: 5,320 years (Fusion available)]

For the sake of fully savoring the mushroom girls later —

No, right. For the sake of cleanly and efficiently killing Xiaoyan, he decided to prioritize the skill with the best returns: [Hundred-Forged Body].

A prismatic skill that hardened the body and raised resistances both. Any way you looked at it, it was the most efficient investment he had right now.

He focused, and time began to pour away at speed.

[Year 1: You begin to contemplate. The Hundred-Forged Body has already reached the highest realm recorded by the dwarf race. How do you go further?]

[Year 2: You return to the volcano where you first trained. Inspiration slowly takes shape. Even the same weapon, forged by a different method, will produce a different edge. You decide to use a harsher, more grueling approach to keep hammering this body of yours.]

[Year 10: In the deepest chamber of the volcano, you find your answer. Your conjecture was right. This path raises your resistances significantly.]

[Year 4,500: Your Hundred-Forged Body has completely surpassed the domain of dwarven heroes.]

[Hundred-Forged Body (Prismatic) lv.1 → Hundred-Forged Body (Prismatic) lv.2.]

Banxia let out a slow breath and squeezed his fist.

Same as last time. Explosive force rolled through him and then settled, quick and quiet.

If he faced Geist again right now, he could stand there with his arms at his sides and let Geist swing a bone blade at him all day without breaking through.

[Held Monster Time: 820 years.]

He flopped back onto the bed, too wired to sleep, and lazily looked over his skill list.

"Eight hundred and twenty years left. Enough for a few more upgrades."

None of the remaining options were critical for combat power or lifespan, though.

He rolled over, and it hit him, the folk magic book he'd picked up today. He dug it out of his pack.

[Magic to Show Fond Memories]

It seemed pretty useless on the surface. But it was the first memory-related magic he'd ever come across. He hadn't even seen anything like it in the stacks back in Alterna.

"System, let's max it out and see what happens." He went in with real curiosity.

[Year 1: You study this folk magic thoroughly. Your extensive magical foundation lets you grasp its principles quickly.]

[Year 2: You have formally mastered the basics. But you are not satisfied.]

"Huh? There's even a synergy effect?" Banxia blinked.

He hadn't expected it, all those hours logging and studying different types of magic had laid a foundation that actually slashed the time needed to learn something new.

The payoff from being well-read was way more tangible than he'd figured.

[Year 120: You have cultivated this folk magic to a height no one before you has reached.]

[Magic to Show Fond Memories lv.3.]

Banxia closed the panel and tucked the thin booklet back into his bag.

"Folk magic. Magic to Show Fond Memories."

He let the mana flow, and a water-mirror image slowly bloomed in front of him.

Reflected inside it was Lia's flushed little face from a few days ago, the color still not quite gone from those cheeks.

"Looks like this magic can only play back from first-person view. That's going to be a problem..."

Per the description, the spell could only surface memory images that actually existed in the caster's mind.

"And it's shaking way too much. Completely unwatchable." He stared at the jittering image and couldn't help complaining.

He reached out, pressed a finger to the surface, and swiped sideways, same as scrolling a phone in his old life.

"Wait. Weird. It actually switched to third-person."

Banxia frowned.

Technically, this magic had no business rendering anything from a third-person angle.

But he wasn't a magic novice anymore. He turned it over for a moment and landed on a guess.

Whatever caused that shift was almost certainly one of the skills sitting on his panel.

[Sacred Spirit Affinity (Prismatic) lv.1: A blessing from the Sacred Spirit. Favorability of nature spirits toward you is increased, and the power of magic is boosted when cast.]

"Huh. So that's it." He'd been underselling this prismatic skill.

He'd assumed it only pumped up offensive magic. Didn't expect it could touch something like this too.

A true all-purpose prismatic skill.

"If lv.1 can already do this much, then what if..." He stared at the description, and his gaze slowly drifted.

An outrageous idea surfaced on its own —

If only he could romance the nature spirits the way you'd clear a route in a galgame.

If that ever worked, casually throwing out any skill might start drawing on the power of the world itself. Almost too crazy to think about.

Of course, the prerequisite was that nature spirits absolutely could not be the yandere type. If they were, there would genuinely be suffering.

Not that any of this was more than fantasy.

Nature spirits were fundamentally unlike any living being humans understood.

No gender. No individual will.

Calling them creatures was already a stretch. They were closer to a collective consciousness scattered across the world and saturated with magical power, less beings, more phenomena.

Trying to romance a nature spirit was like trying to flirt with a gust of wind or an entire ocean. There was simply nowhere to grab hold of and no way in.

...

"Morning already, huh."

Banxia had spent the entire night watching pleasure house memoirs play out in his memory mirror. He drew a deep breath, trying to push the heat back down.

The result was —

"..."

Come on, man. Cut me some slack and stand down for now.

I'll get you a mushroom girl soon enough.

➤ Next: Frozen Divine Sword (Bonus)