Chapter 83: A Request from the Guild Reference Room

The quill pen with char cloth wound around it and dipped in glue, Ren named the “Char Quill Pen.” Writing with it on a board caught slightly and made a light scratching sound, kari-kari.

The first thing he wrote was a note on the steps he had used to make the char quill pen. By the time he had finished one board, he had used up the part he had left sticking out beyond the shaft.

“It runs out fast…”

If he left the part sticking out from the shaft long, it broke easily; if he kept it short, he used it up right away. He would pull the wound cloth toward the tip, let it jut out, and fix it in place with thread. That way he could use it a while longer.

“…For now, if I just carry a few of them, I suppose I won’t be stuck without ink…”

Somehow he still felt he wanted to improve it a little more, but the sunlight had started to slant, so he decided to pack up the campfire.

“I need more feathers. If I go after bird-type magical beasts in the forest I might get all sorts of magic stones as well as feathers, but… it looks like it’ll get dark…”

He wanted to try repairing the magic tool at the hunting hut, so he needed magic stones, and the char quill pen wore its charcoal away so quickly that he was going to need any number of spares.

Time being what it was, he had no room to go into the forest, so on the way home he brought down three three-eyed eagles in the grasslands and headed for the Adventurers’ Guild.

While waiting for the appraisal at the Adventurers’ Guild buying counter, he headed for the reference room to read up on magical beasts—and heard what sounded like an argument.

“That’s what I’m telling you! At this rate it’ll be nightfall before we find the one board we’re after!”

The Adventurers’ Guild reference room. In one corner of it, thick with the smell of mold and drifting dust, the angry voice of Victor of the young adventurers’ party “Young Branch Squad” rang out. Facing him was Jade, one of the staff. Jade wore the expression of a man who found the whole thing a nuisance.

“…What’s the harm? Just ask me. I’ve got a fair idea where everything is.”

“And if you’re not here we can’t find anything!”

“I’m here most of the time.”

“That’s not the point!”

Victor raised his voice, clearly irritated, and pointed at one corner of the reference room.

“Take a look at the beginners’ shelf! Those boards are sorted properly by the number of lines cut into the side, and one index sheet tells you what’s in them. So why is the shelf for proper adventurers all jumbled up with magical beast material and medicinal herb material mixed in together?!”

Ren quietly made himself small in the shadow of a shelf. The one who had organised that “beginners’ shelf” Victor was pointing at was none other than Ren.

(Eh…? Wait, was there something wrong with me organising the beginners’ corner…?)

As he watched, feeling a little awkward, Victor seemed to notice him there. He spun round and called out.

“Hey! Ren! You’d rather the material was easy to find too, right?! I looked at this shelf for the first time today, and—! It’s a horrible mess, gave me a shock! Have you ever looked at it, Ren?”

Asked directly, Ren shook his head.

“Is that right. And here I was wanting to read all kinds of more detailed material…”

Victor, it seemed, had meant to read the material for proper adventurers. But he had been at a loss, unable to tell where anything was. The shelves for proper adventurers carried no markings of any kind—just boards of all different sizes lined up together. There were some documents that looked like several boards bound into a bundle, but there were no spines. It seemed you couldn’t easily tell what a document said without pulling it off the shelf first.

Jade let out a pointed sigh.

“Well then, all you want is for this shelf to end up like the beginners’ one. I’ll put a request out, so why don’t you do it?”

“Ehh?! Me?!”

Victor’s eyes went round at Jade’s words. Jade folded his arms, threw his shoulders back, and snorted.

“You talk big enough, so you can do it, can’t you? Ah, don’t worry—I’ll put a request out for the kid over there too. Eh?”

Jade looked over at Ren and lifted the corner of his mouth in a grin.

In the flow of it all, Ren too ended up being handed the job of organising the reference materials. Formally he wouldn’t take the request on until he had heard the explanation, but he could vaguely feel the pressure of “you’re going to take it, obviously?”

(Eh, all this material? Isn’t that going to be hard… but I don’t like the material being all over the place either…)

The situation—far more material than on the beginners’ shelf, crammed into the shelves with no classification at all—had bothered Ren a little, too. But Ren wasn’t a proper adventurer yet, and it would be a while before he used any of it, so he hadn’t been thinking of doing something about it right away.