Somehow, Living Life in Another World is Wrong, as I Expected Ch. 15.1 (Patreon)

Perspective. It is something people tell you to change whenever yours makes a conversation inconvenient. Look at it from his perspective. Consider her point of view. Have you thought about how the teacher feels? Yes, actually. The teacher would like the problem to disappear before the next period, preferably without having to call anyone's parents. I understood that perspective perfectly. 

Understanding it didn't make me particularly interested in cooperating.

The usual example involves a glass with water in it. Half full, half empty, something about optimism. Personally, I would want to know who had already drunk from it before putting my mouth anywhere near the damn thing. This answer would probably lose me points on whatever personality test was being administered, despite being the only one that addressed a practical concern. 

Apparently, there were approved ways of looking at things, even during an exercise about looking at things differently. The consequences of going against the grain, of being the nail that sticks up, is that a certain Christmas cake of a teacher would bury her fist in my gut. Ouch.

Still, I could admit that being suspicious didn't automatically make me observant. Sometimes it just meant I had noticed the worst possible explanation first and stopped looking. It was efficient. Terrible for making friends, admittedly, but excellent for getting through the day without wondering whether somebody's smile meant anything. If every smile was courtesy, then there was nothing to misinterpret. 

There was also nothing to look forward to, but I had generally left that part out of the sales pitch.

The opposite problem was assuming that everyone else had access to the same information I did. In my head, my actions followed a perfectly understandable sequence. Something happened, I made a decision, and then I dealt with the consequences. Anyone watching only got the decision. Occasionally, they also got me telling them to mind their own business. An extremely helpful contribution to mutual understanding, courtesy of yours truly.

Karsten, for example, had heard me ask for research materials immediately after accepting a nationally recognized title. Until yesterday, she hadn't known why those books mattered more to me than the title itself. Now she did, and I was left with the uncomfortable task of revising several excellent arguments I had prepared against telling her. Apparently, explaining myself could occasionally improve a situation. I would have appreciated learning that through a less embarrassing experiment.

Her smile after my comment about Komachi had been particularly difficult to dismiss. There wasn't much political advantage in listening to me complain about my little sister. Argyle still looked as though he wanted to check whether I knew my own name, and Wilhelm hadn't found an answer among the bookshelves, but Karsten had asked to hear about home. I had spent so much time worrying about proving it existed that I hadn't considered someone might simply want to know what it was like.

By the following morning, however, I had to put my thoughts on all of this on hold. Telling Karsten why I wanted time for my research hadn't cleared the shop's outstanding orders, and I could hardly defend my right to keep running the place by failing to turn up. 

After all, no matter what happened, no matter if I knew the thoughts going around in the heads of other people, there was one thing that trumps all of it. You know it, I know it, we all hate it, but we all love the compensation we get from it.

Work.

…

The steel gave beneath the hammer with very little resistance. I fed yin mana into it, keeping the metal soft enough to work as I drew out the blade, then adjusted the angle for the next strike. No fire, no waiting for an ingot to heat up, and no need to roast myself alive just to earn a living. I had eliminated those particular inconveniences a long time ago. Unfortunately, the orders still required me to actually sit down and make things. Magic had its limits, apparently.

I checked the shape before setting the hammer aside and infusing the blade with yang mana. Enough to give it the durability and cutting power my customers expected, without getting carried away. Once satisfied, I placed it beside the others awaiting fittings. A respectable amount of work for the time I'd spent on it, though looking at the order book made it considerably harder to appreciate my own efficiency.

I would genuinely kill for a method to automate this shit. Mostly because, as easy as my method of blacksmithing was, the time I spent making sure my weapons were up to snuff was significantly longer than I wanted still.

I hadn't left the shop unprepared before staying at Mathers' mansion. There had been a stock of weapons made in advance, enough to cover what I expected Rom and Felt to sell while I was away. According to their accounts, however, Hoshin's mercenary company had bought quite a bit more than expected. The sort of purchase that made a merchant very happy, right up until said merchant remembered that he was also the entire manufacturing department.

“They paid what you asked.” Felt said from the doorway, the order book tucked under one arm, “Didn't even try to argue much. What was I supposed to do, tell 'em we don't like money?” She sounded personally offended by the idea. 

Fair enough. I would have been concerned if she had suddenly developed an aversion to being paid.

“No. We like money.” I picked up another piece of steel and pushed yin mana into it, feeling it yield beneath my fingers, “I'm allowed to complain about earning it when I’m the one doing most of the work.” Rom chuckled as he set more material on the workbench. Easy for him to laugh. He hadn't returned from Mathers' mansion to discover that his sensible preparations had been converted into someone else's equipment budget.

Still, restocking could wait until I dealt with the customers whose orders had been sitting here throughout my absence. Being able to make weapons quickly didn't mean much to someone who had already spent days waiting for theirs. I nodded toward Felt's book, “Start with the oldest unfinished order. Tell me what they wanted, and whether they've paid a deposit.”

Felt turned back several pages. I looked at the steel in my hand, then at the growing row of unfinished blades. From her perspective, business was doing wonderfully. From mine, I really should have charged more.

…

Around the third completed order, I realized that I had stopped checking how much was left. Felt would read out what the next customer wanted, I would check the measurements, and my hands would get on with it. Every now and then, I asked her to repeat something. Usually because her handwriting had defeated her before it could defeat me. Otherwise, the work continued without much conversation, and, to my considerable annoyance, I was starting to enjoy myself.

Enjoying work. Small talk with Felt and Rom. Me. Clearly, the events at Mathers' mansion had done something terrible to my brain. Normally, this would be where I considered asking Argyle to check. After yesterday, however, he was considerably more likely to take me up on it. I preferred my medical examinations without questions about whether my family existed, thanks. Besides, enjoying an afternoon with people I knew wasn't quite sufficient grounds for declaring me unwell. I hoped.

There was something refreshing about knowing exactly what my hands were supposed to do. A little more mana here, a lighter strike there, stop and check that I hadn't drawn one side out further than the other. The shape changed gradually beneath my attention. I could see where it needed correcting, make the correction, and move on. Nobody interrupted halfway through to explain that the metal was secretly related to someone important and that straightening it would cause a succession crisis.

I was tired. That hadn't changed. My shoulders complained when I shifted, and there was an ache in my fingers that encouraged me to loosen my grip whenever I put the hammer down. But I knew those sensations. I knew roughly how much more I could do before I needed a break, and what would happen if I took one. The unfinished pieces would remain on the bench. They wouldn't grow teeth, or turn into rats, or spew fire at my face, or try to steal my memories. 

Given my recent experiences, that was a luxury worth appreciating.

All that action-packed bullshit had apparently lowered my standards for a pleasant afternoon to ‘nothing is currently trying to eat me’. It was a little embarrassing. The version of me that used to read light novels would probably have been disappointed by how much time I wanted to spend doing mundane things after finally getting access to magic. That version of me could kindly volunteer to deal with the next disaster, then. I would be here, checking whether a guard fitted properly.

There was enough to pay attention to that my thoughts couldn't wander too far, but none of it required me to invent an answer from scratch. After finishing one piece, I reached for the next without needing to argue myself into it. The hammer's handle settled against the same places in my palm. Felt's voice came from the same side of the room. Eventually, I noticed that I wasn't listening past her for footsteps approaching the shop.

I hadn't realized I was doing that until I stopped.

This didn't invalidate my desire to automate the whole process, obviously. Enjoying an afternoon of work and wanting to spend the rest of my life doing it were different things. For now, though, I finished checking the blade in front of me, set it with the completed orders, and watched Felt draw another line through the book. That small movement was more satisfying than it had any right to be.

When she reached for the next page, I held out my hand for the measurements before she could ask. She gave me a brief, suspicious look. I ignored it. 

If she noticed that I hadn't complained in a while, the least she could do was have the decency to keep it to herself.

…

By the time the light through the window started becoming inconvenient, I had finished considerably more than I had expected. This was partly because I had actually worked, an unfortunate requirement for getting anything done, but mostly because nobody had stopped me. No urgent summons. No familiar idiot bursting through the door with a problem that somehow involved everyone I knew. I had been allowed to start a task, continue doing it, and then finish it.

Honestly, I didn't know what to do with that.

Ever since Natsuki had managed to get himself isekai'd, I had started treating an uninterrupted afternoon as something that happened to other people. The sort of people who existed in the background, had no names, and were represented in adaptations by suspiciously similar faces, or a complete void, like that one American animated show. 

Someone needed to keep selling bread while the protagonist was busy changing the world. I had rather hoped to qualify for a similar position, but apparently making weapons came with a significantly higher chance of being dragged into the main cast.

From the perspective of some higher being reading about Natsuki's adventures, I could understand the appeal. Assassins, monsters, political intrigue, a collection of women with increasingly complicated problems. Enough material to keep a light novel going for an unreasonable number of volumes. Every time things settled down, another incident conveniently arrived to prevent the reader from getting bored. Wonderful value for money, provided that you were the one holding the book instead of the one bleeding on the floor.

What would that hypothetical reader make of today? Several pages of me filling orders and thinking about my life choices. No new enemy, no dramatic revelation about the knife I was making. Just a knife, made to the requested measurements, for a customer who would hopefully collect it and pay the remaining balance without incident. I could practically imagine the complaints. Filler chapter. Nothing happened. When do we get back to the interesting part?

Buddy, I was having a fantastic time. Please consider finding a hobby that didn't require my continued suffering.

I had to wonder how much of that expectation was Natsuki's fault and how much was mine. Before he arrived, there had been plenty of days that ended because it got dark. Bad things happened then too, obviously, but I hadn't spent every quiet moment mentally preparing for the next one. Sometime between then and now, I had started behaving as though putting my tools down required permission from whatever bastard was responsible for the pacing.

Felt interrupted that particular thought by asking whether I intended to keep working until she needed to hold a lamp over my head. I looked down at the piece I had just finished checking, then toward the remaining materials. There was enough there to keep me occupied. There would probably always be enough there, if I insisted on finding something else to do.

“That's it for today.” I set the piece aside and began putting the tools away, “We'll handle the rest tomorrow.” Felt closed the book immediately, apparently unwilling to give me time to reconsider. Rom started gathering the completed orders, and I joined him after flexing the stiffness out of my fingers.

By the time we finished, the bench was clear. I washed my hands, checked that the door was locked, and waited briefly while Felt argued that doing well today justified spending more on dinner. The argument was familiar enough that I found myself agreeing before she finished. She looked pleased, Rom looked hungry. Neither seemed concerned that the afternoon hadn't amounted to anything more exciting.

I decided to follow their example.

Before we left, I found a scrap of paper and wrote down what I wanted to look for in Karsten's library. Accounts of unusual arrivals, for a start. I knew too little about my own to dismiss someone else's because it sounded ridiculous. Yesterday, I would probably have buried that request under several respectable questions about yin magic. Now I could hand her the list and expect her to understand why I wanted it. I folded the paper and put it in my pocket before Felt could ask whether I was coming.

If someone was waiting for a cliffhanger, they could keep waiting. I had finished work, I was going to eat, and afterwards I intended to (finally) sleep. Preferably for an offensive amount of time.

They were welcome to skip ahead. I wasn't going to.

…