Chapter 4: The Wine is Not the Problem (Patreon)

Suspicion stirring, Soma didn't hesitate. He scooped some of the liquid out of the pot with his ladle and tossed back a mouthful.

Two seconds later, he said quietly, "...There's nothing wrong with the wine."

Renan had watched the whole thing, but his attention was fixed on raising his proficiency in the Breathing Techniques, so he hadn't thought much of it.

Only when Soma walked up to him with the ladle in hand did he snap out of it. He put on a smile. "Lord Soma, can I update my Falna now?"

Soma gave neither a yes nor a no. Instead, he held the ladle out a little further.

Renan: "?"

A possibility occurred to him, but he didn't want to believe it. He asked carefully, "Lord Soma, what do you mean by this?"

Soma held the ladle out, his tone perfectly flat. "Drink it."

Renan: "..."

"Can I say no?"

Soma: "Then I won't update your Falna."

[DanMachi expletive]! The gods of the DanMachi world really are arrogant and willful, every last one of them!

Renan cursed inwardly, while the expression on his face only grew calmer.

The corners of his lips curled slightly. He stood up and gave the god in front of him, someone he was theoretically supposed to revere beyond measure, a solemn bow.

"Lord Soma, I'm sorry to have troubled you today. I'll take my leave now."

Having said that, he gave Soma no chance to reply. He turned around and headed straight for the workshop door.

Until now, Soma had worn the look of someone unmoved by gain or loss. Seeing Renan actually leaving, his face showed bewilderment for the first time.

He couldn't help asking, "You should have already drunk the divine wine when you joined the Familia. Drinking it a second time shouldn't matter, should it?"

In his own mind he'd done nothing wrong. He only wanted to confirm whether there really was a low-level adventurer in the lower world who could ignore his divine wine.

But Renan, his back to Soma, heard those words, arrogant without the slightest self-awareness, selfish to the extreme, and he still couldn't help laughing from sheer anger.

"If I'd known the Soma Familia's entrance test was drinking an addictive divine wine, I'd rather still be an ordinary person."

That wasn't a lie.

Even if he did it all over again and hadn't awakened his past-life memories, once he understood the harm the divine wine did, he would never have stepped into the mire that was the Soma Familia!

But precisely because it wasn't a lie, the words of the boy who'd just joined the Familia left Soma even more confused.

He opened his mouth. "You..."

Unfortunately, a second later the workshop door was yanked open, and then slammed shut with a bang.

What kind of sht is this?*

Renan strode toward the gate of the Familia's base, cursing inwardly.

Back when he'd watched the anime in his previous life, he'd known that hardly any of the gods in Orario, no, in the entire DanMachi world, had a normal personality.

But having Soma pull something like this on him out of nowhere still sent him into a blind rage.

Soma knew full well that divine wine was addictive to low-level adventurers. Yet out of a craving for the so-called possibilities of the lower world, he'd handed it out to ordinary members of his Familia.

Then, after everyone was hopelessly hooked, he went off and got angry, disappointed, and emotionally wrecked all on his own.

In the internet slang of Renan's previous life, wasn't that "close to the gods, far from humans"?

Oh, right, I almost forgot. Soma is a god. No wonder.

A god with a godly personality. That makes perfect sense.

But...

Now that I've fallen out with Soma, there's probably no way to update the Falna on my back for a long time.

And the Abilities I built up during my Dungeon runs will most likely be locked, since the Falna hasn't been updated...

Luckily, according to today's tests, the power shared from the other-world "me"s doesn't seem to be affected by the Falna and can be stacked directly.

Tch, this is getting a bit troublesome...

Renan walked out of the base, a string of thoughts racing through his mind.

After a little while, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

Wait, it's not like there's no way at all!

In the latest season of the DanMachi anime he'd watched before transmigrating, after Freya, the Goddess of Beauty, used her charm to lure the protagonist, Bell Cranel, into her Familia, she'd tried to win him over with an item called an update potion. Combined with her own divine blood, it let her bypass Bell's real patron god, Hestia, and forcibly update his Falna.

An item that could cause an uproar in Orario was certainly no legitimate product.

Still, as long as he had money, there'd be a way to buy one.

The real difficulty was finding a god willing to bypass Soma and update his Falna.

Hestia, Hephaestus, Loki, Freya, Hermes...

The names of the gods who'd appeared in the anime flashed through Renan's mind one by one, and he swiftly crossed each of them out with a big X.

Hestia hadn't descended to the lower world yet. Hephaestus and Loki headed a crafting Familia and an exploration Familia respectively, but both were prominent major Familias in Orario. Unless he exposed his cheat himself and showed potential far beyond anyone else's, there was no way he'd catch the attention of either goddess, let alone get them to defy all of Orario for him.

Then there was Hermes. The guy was a fun-loving trickster god who played both sides of the law, so he was the most likely to help. The problem was that he spent most of the year outside Orario, so finding him was a long shot. When Renan had visited the Hermes Familia's base before, he'd come up empty, not even running into a doorman.

As for Freya, who seemed the most "dangerous" of them all... Please. Even with a cheat from the shared-transmigration genre, Renan didn't think his soul was anything special.

After all, the skill on his Falna had been spelled out very clearly. It was called [Rabble].

As the name implied, it relied on strength in numbers, where quantity turns into quality.

In card-player slang, it was what they called "mortal bones": ordinary through and through.

How could a goddess of beauty who craved the unknown and the unique possibly be drawn to someone like that?

Of course, if he could actually persuade any one of those gods, he wouldn't even need an update potion. A visit to the Soma Familia from a god or a high-ranking member of another Familia would basically be enough to get him converted to a new Familia, and then every problem would solve itself.

But after being disgusted by Soma once already, Renan still lacked the accumulated knowledge in every respect and couldn't yet crack the underlying logic of how the Falna worked. Otherwise, he would never have pinned his hopes of growing stronger on those arrogant, willful gods.

Forget it. I'll take it one step at a time. If worst comes to worst, I'll wait until new people show up in the Space. Once I share their power, I can get stronger all the same.

While Renan was mulling it over, a crowd had gathered at some point on the street not far ahead.

They seemed to be watching something.