Somehow, Living Life in Another World is Wrong, as I Expected Ch. 15.2 (Patreon)

Free time.

The phrase itself was a scam. Time was never free. At best, it was what remained after work, school, family, errands, sleep, and every other obligation had taken their share, and even then there was usually somebody waiting nearby to explain that the leftover portion could be spent more efficiently. Exercise. Study. Networking. Skill development. Self-improvement. Apparently, existing without attempting to raise one of your statistics was considered wasteful. Give a person an afternoon with nothing scheduled and society would immediately hand them a checklist explaining how to optimize it.

Back in Japan, people had managed to turn hobbies into another form of unpaid labor. Reading was good if the book was educational. Exercise was good if you tracked your progress. Games were acceptable if they improved your reflexes, social skills, or somehow became a career. Even sleeping could be discussed in terms of productivity, because heaven forbid a person close their eyes simply because being unconscious for eight hours was pleasant. If your hobby required goals, measurable improvement, and a carefully maintained schedule, then congratulations. You had successfully invented a second job that paid you in vague satisfaction.

I used to understand this better. My preferred method of spending a free afternoon involved a cheap light novel, something sweet to drink, and enough physical inactivity that my mother would eventually wonder whether I had died. Sometimes I played games. Sometimes I browsed the internet until one topic became six unrelated ones and I could no longer remember why I had opened the first page. Occasionally, Zaimokuza would send me several thousand words of something he wanted reviewed, at which point I would discover the equally valuable leisure activity of pretending my phone had stopped working.

None of those things accomplished anything.

That was the point.

Lugunica had gradually ruined that skill. At first, any spare hour had felt too valuable to waste when I could be learning magic, building the shop, collecting information, or researching how the hell I was supposed to get home. Then Natsuki arrived, and the concept of spare time was downgraded into the slightly less ambitious category of time during which nobody was currently attempting to kill me. Somewhere along the way, I had become the sort of person who looked at an empty afternoon and instinctively searched for work to fill it.

Which was how, after spending the previous day clearing enough orders that the shop could survive without my personal supervision for a while, sleeping for an offensive amount of time, and waking to discover that nobody had prepared a crisis in my honor, I found myself facing a deeply uncomfortable question.

What the hell did I actually do for fun anymore?

…

The sunlight coming through my window was far too bright for morning, which was my first indication that I had successfully followed through on my promise to sleep an unreasonable amount. My second indication was the absence of anyone pounding on the door, shouting my name, or otherwise providing the sort of emergency wake-up service that had become distressingly common since Natsuki entered my life.

I stayed in bed for another ten minutes purely because I could.

Then another five, because round numbers were a tool of oppression.

By the time I finally got dressed and made my way downstairs, the shop was already open. Rom stood near the shelves checking a bundle of spear shafts that had come in with one of our recent deliveries, while Felt occupied the counter with the order book open in front of her and an expression of concentration that would have been impressive if she wasn't also balancing her chair on two legs.

She noticed me first.

“Oh, you're alive.”

“Disappointing, I know.”

“I was starting to wonder if we should poke you with something.” Felt let the chair fall forward with a solid thump, “Old man said to leave you alone.”

Rom grunted without looking up, “You looked dead enough already.”

Heartwarming. Truly, I had built myself a wonderful little workplace family.

I walked behind the counter and reached automatically for the order book. Felt's hand landed on top of it before mine did.

I looked at her hand, then at her.

She looked back.

“Move.”

“No.”

“This is my shop.”

“And you spent all day yesterday making half the stuff in it.” Her fingers tightened around the book when I tried to slide it out from under them, “We've got three collections today, one repair Rom can handle, and nothing else that's late. Go do something.”

“I am doing something.”

“You're trying to steal my book.”

“I'm trying to be a responsible business owner.”

“You're trying to find an excuse to work.”

I paused.

Felt smiled with the deeply unpleasant satisfaction of someone who had discovered a weakness and intended to preserve it for future use.

Traitor.

I shifted targets and glanced toward the workshop instead. There was always something that could be done there. Stock could be checked, tools could be maintained, fittings could be prepared in advance. If I wanted to be particularly ambitious, I could make another batch of basic knives and pretend that this was sensible inventory management rather than a pathological inability to sit still.

Rom finally looked over.

“Don't.”

I hadn't moved yet.

That somehow made it worse.

“What exactly are the two of you proposing I do?” I asked, crossing my arms.

Felt stared at me as though I had just asked how breathing worked, “Whatever you want?”

Terrible answer.

The problem with doing whatever you wanted was that it required knowing what you wanted to do, which was considerably more difficult than following an order list. An order had measurements. A customer had expectations. Research had questions that needed answers. Even finding a way home, impossible as the task continued to appear, gave me a direction to move in.

Free time merely stood there and waited for me to justify it.

I hated open-ended assignments.

My eyes drifted toward the folded piece of paper I had left near the back, the list of subjects I wanted Karsten to help me research. Accounts of unusual arrivals. Old records mentioning people who seemed to have appeared without histories. Anything that might point toward another case like mine.

That would be useful.

Which was exactly why I didn't touch it.

Apparently, this was what personal growth looked like: deliberately ignoring valuable research because a teenage thief and an elderly giant had bullied me into taking a day off.

Hiratsuka-sensei would have been so proud.

Probably right before punching me for needing to be bullied into it.

I grabbed my coat.

Felt lifted an eyebrow, “Where're you going?”

“No idea.”

That answer felt wrong enough that I almost stopped at the door.

Then I left anyway.

…

Walking through the capital without a destination was surprisingly different from walking through it with one. Usually, I measured streets by how quickly they got me somewhere, remembered shops according to what they sold, treated crowds as moving obstacles with varying levels of spatial awareness. Today, none of that mattered. 

I could turn down a street because it looked quieter. 

I could stop because somebody was performing music badly enough to become interesting. 

I could spend several minutes watching two merchants argue over whose cart had technically crossed the other's painted boundary without needing to calculate how much time I was wasting.

It was profoundly inefficient.

I began to understand the appeal.

The capital had changed over the years, though perhaps it was more accurate to say that I had stopped looking at it as scenery. A new bakery occupied a corner that I remembered as an empty storefront. Someone had painted the shutters of a nearby home an aggressively bright blue that surely violated at least one reasonable standard of taste. Children were drawing shapes onto the stone with pieces of chalk while their parents pretended not to notice. Further down the street, a man had somehow convinced several people to gather around a board game that seemed to combine chess with the economic hostility of property speculation.

I watched that for a while.

One player lost what appeared to be three farms and a bridge because he had trusted the wrong card.

Finally, a game that taught practical life skills.

A bookseller eventually caught my attention. Not because I needed any of his stock, which was precisely why the stall qualified. Most of what he had displayed were cheap copies, serialized stories, collections of folktales, and the sort of dramatic adventure novels that respectable scholars would pretend not to read while somehow knowing every major character.

I picked up one with an illustrated cover showing a blond knight holding a sword toward a dragon while a woman in an impractically clean dress stared at him from the background.

The title translated roughly to ‘The Wandering Knight and the Dragon Princess’.

Perfect.

“Good one, that.” the bookseller said, noticing my interest, “Fourth printing.”

I paid for it.

The purchase felt almost irresponsible. The book contained no magical theory, no history that might help identify another world traveler, no information network contacts, no useful diagrams, and no possibility of improving the shop. It was fiction. I had exchanged money for a collection of lies whose sole purpose was to entertain me for several hours.

It may have been the most normal thing I had purchased in years.

I found somewhere to sit near one of the smaller plazas, where the foot traffic was steady without being loud enough to make reading difficult, and opened the book.

The knight…was an idiot.

This became apparent within nine pages.

By page twenty, he had ignored two explicit warnings, entered a forest everyone agreed was cursed, and accepted food from an old woman whose description might as well have included the phrase definitely a witch. The prose treated these decisions as evidence of courage. I treated them as evidence that natural selection had been taking an extended lunch break.

I kept reading.

A nearby stall sold coffee, or at least something close enough that the smell dragged my attention away from the knight's newest attempt to die heroically. Coffee in Lugunica tended toward the dark, bitter end of the spectrum, as though sweetness were a moral failing that needed to be discouraged. I bought a cup, tasted it, then asked for milk and enough sweetener to make the seller visibly reconsider his opinion of me.

It still wasn't MAX Coffee.

Nothing here was.

But after another spoonful of honey, it became close enough to trigger the memory of convenience stores, canned drinks, gray mornings, and sitting somewhere with absolutely nowhere important to be.

I stopped stirring.

For a moment, the noise of the plaza faded beneath things that weren't there. Komachi complaining that I had taken the last drink. Hiratsuka-sensei complaining about my personality. Yuigahama doing that weird hello that she always did. Isshiki attempting to drag me into a mess she’s made. Yukinoshita quietly sipping her tea at the far end of a table. And me, sitting contentedly with light novel in one hand, and drink in the other.

Homesickness was strange like that. Most of the time it wasn't dramatic. There was no swelling music, no beautifully timed sunset, no profound declaration about where you belonged. Sometimes it was just a cup of mediocre coffee tasting almost, but not quite, like something you used to buy without thinking.

I took another sip anyway.

The thought that followed had been waiting for me longer than I wanted to admit.

For years, I had treated enjoying myself here as something dangerously close to surrender. If I became comfortable, if I built routines, if I cared about people, then some part of me worried that I was choosing this world over home. Research was acceptable because it moved me toward Japan. Work was acceptable because I needed money to live long enough to get there. Helping people could be rationalized as maintaining relationships, paying debts, or keeping myself alive.

Fun was harder to excuse.

Fun didn't move me anywhere.

Which was probably why it mattered.

Komachi, if she ever learned that I had spent years deliberately refusing to enjoy perfectly harmless afternoons as proof that I missed her, would call me an idiot. She would then claim several thousand Komachi points for correcting her older brother's emotional dysfunction, even though inventing a currency and controlling its entire supply was the kind of economic policy that should have gotten her investigated.

Missing home and living here were not mutually exclusive. Wanting to return did not require me to spend every day miserable until I succeeded.

That sounded suspiciously healthy.

I blamed Karsten.

Possibly Argyle too. He looked like someone who would prescribe emotional stability just to be annoying.

I returned to the book before this line of thought became any more embarrassing.

The knight had married the princess by the time I finished my coffee.

The dragon, somewhat unfairly, had been killed despite being correct about nearly everything.

Literature truly was cruel.

…

I wandered for another hour after that, mostly because I still didn't have anywhere I needed to be. I bought a pastry because it smelled good, then two more because I knew exactly what would happen if I returned to the shop carrying food only for myself. This was not generosity. This was preventative conflict management.

There was a difference, I swear.

The shop was quieter when I returned. Rom had moved to the back, where the steady scrape of a file suggested he was handling the repair Felt mentioned earlier. Felt sat behind the counter, counting coins into separate piles with the intense focus she normally reserved for opportunities to make money or annoy me.

She glanced up when the bell moved above the door.

“You're back.”

“I live here.”

“Thought you might've discovered a hobby and run away.”

I held up the book.

Felt stared at the cover.

Then at me.

Then back at the blond knight posing dramatically in front of the dragon.

Her smile began to widen.

“If you say anything, I'm cutting your pay.”

“You actually bought that?”

“Your pay is now in danger.”

She laughed anyway, which was disrespectful behavior from an employee toward the man responsible for her continued salary. I placed one of the pastries beside her ledger before she could say anything else.

Her laughter stopped.

Suspicion replaced it immediately.

“What'd you do?”

“Bought food.”

“For me?”

“No. I bought three identical pastries and accidentally transported one directly to your side of the counter.” I rolled my eyes, “Yes, you brat, it’s yours. The other one’s for Rom.”

Felt narrowed her eyes at me, but she took it.

Rom emerged from the workshop a few moments later and accepted his with considerably less interrogation, proving once again that age occasionally came with wisdom. I kept the last one and took my usual place near the back of the shop, though for once I didn't move toward the workbench.

Instead, I sat down and reopened the book.

Felt watched me for several seconds.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

The next customer arrived before I could narrow my eyes. A middle-aged man came to collect one of yesterday's orders, and the familiar instinct to stand rose almost automatically when he began asking questions about the weapon's maintenance.

I stopped halfway out of the chair.

Felt answered him.

Not perfectly. She mixed up one term and described the oiling schedule in a way that would have made me phrase things differently, but the information itself was correct. The customer listened, paid what remained, and left with his sword without once requiring me to step in.

Felt looked toward me afterwards with an expression that was entirely too smug.

I sat back down.

There were few things more dangerous than competent employees. Eventually, they learned that the business could function without you.

On second thought, perhaps that was ideal.

I read another chapter.

The shop went on around me. Someone came in asking whether we sharpened farm tools, and Felt handled it. Rom returned to the workshop. A delivery arrived and was moved into storage. Coins changed hands. The door opened and closed several times, each interruption small enough that the world didn't end because I remained seated.

At some point, I stopped monitoring the conversations closely.

That was harder than leaving the order book alone.

Trust was an annoying thing because people rarely announced when you had started doing it. There was no moment where a notification appeared saying Felt and Rom had earned sufficient relationship points to unlock autonomy. You simply looked away one day and realized you expected things to be fine when you looked back.

I still wanted to go home.

That hadn't changed.

But this was my shop. Felt and Rom were my people, in whatever complicated, embarrassing sense I was willing to admit. The chair was mine because I always used it. The uneven shelf near the workshop door still leaned because I had been too lazy to fix it properly the first time. The counter carried an old gouge from a weapon somebody had dropped years ago, and I knew exactly which customer had done it because I had charged him for the damage.

None of those details existed in Japan.

That didn't make them fake.

I turned the page.

The second half of the book was somehow worse than the first. The dragon had apparently survived, the princess had an evil twin nobody mentioned earlier, the knight solved a diplomatic crisis by challenging another noble to single combat. Every development violated at least one principle of governance, economics, or basic self-preservation.

I finished another chapter.

Then another.

By late afternoon, the light entering through the front windows had shifted low enough that Felt lit one of the lamps. Rom had finished the repair and settled near the counter with a drink, while the number of customers gradually thinned until there was enough silence for the turning of a page to become noticeable.

It was…nice.

Not useful. Not productive. Not progress toward anything.

Just nice.

I had almost reached the end of the book when the bell above the front door moved again.

I kept my eyes on the page for another second, expecting Felt to handle whoever had entered, before the absence of her usual greeting made me look up.

Red hair caught the last of the afternoon light.

A familiar white uniform followed.

Astrea stepped into the shop.

I guess that marks the end of my little vacation, then.

…

A/N: You’re probably wondering why this chapter is so long. Well, the answer to that is that this was actually written over the course of three days, rather than the normal one day for a regular chapter. Hope you enjoyed it!