Chapter 1: Will I Make It Back Alive?

—Any sufficiently advanced yakuza are indistinguishable from nobility.

A debate over the similarities between nobles and yakuza was raging in my mind. Well, I was just trying to escape reality.

After all, I needed some kind of buffer before I could accept the reality in front of me.

The ten-year-old girl, Resina, curled her lips into a grin as she stared at me.

“Starting today, Crow, you’ll be my personal attendant.”

Her long, moon-goddess-like silver hair was woven into an elaborate braid, and crimson eyes like fresh blood glowed faintly with mana beneath her sharp gaze.

The red dress matching her eyes was crafted down to the finest detail, so at first glance, she looked elegant enough to be some noble family’s young lady.

—But she was a yakuza’s daughter.

The Cineraria Family was the yakuza organization that controlled the underworld throughout this entire region. Resina was apparently the daughter of its underboss.

And now I’d been ordered to serve as that yakuza princess’s personal attendant. Just how had things come to this?

“You aren’t going to say no, are you?”

“I very much want to say no.”

“Hehehe…”

Resina merely smiled at my answer.

Burly men had abruptly kidnapped me at the crack of dawn and dragged me into this yakuza estate… Could I go home now? I had a life plan involving a peaceful slow life on the frontier, you know.

As I shook my head, Resina walked over and clamped a firm hand around my right wrist.

“You’re the only one who can talk to me like that, Crow. I’ll never let you get away.”

“I’m telling you I don’t want this.”

“Would you like me to stab you?”

With what? No, well… Fine. For now, I supposed I’d behave myself and limit my resistance to secretly planning my escape.

So please put that short blade—your dosu—back in its sheath… Yes, just like that. Calmness is a virtue. I think it’s a very important one. Be still, I beseech you.

The chain of events that landed me in this situation began when—

◆　　　◆　　　◆

In my previous life, I’d been a university student. Then a lot happened, and my biological mother beat me to death. The next thing I knew, I’d been reborn as a baby.

My parents were commoners who ran a bakery. My new father was a muscular, handsome man, and my mother was a brown-haired beauty… or so I thought. It turned out that everyone in this world was attractive, which meant that even after reincarnating, my looks were merely average.

Setting that aside, I was astonished to discover that this world came equipped with a game-like system called magic.

Magic arts, alchemy, magic tools, monsters… Every time I heard an exciting word like one of those, my enthusiasm shot through the roof.

“Heh heh heh… I’m absolutely going to recreate a crafting game. My goal is a slow life on the frontier!”

“Big Bwother, what’s a cwafting game?”

“It’s my hobby. I’m leaving the bakery and our parents to you, Hanna. And look, your nose is running again.”

Crafting games had been my only hobby in my previous life. That was why I wanted to recreate one in this world too, and I’d gone through all kinds of trial and error to make it happen.

I learned to compress excavated earth into cubes, automatically collect them in a subspace, and craft things from the materials I gathered. As I created spells and magic tools that worked along those lines, nearly ten years passed after my reincarnation. It had been difficult, but I thought I’d reproduced the experience quite faithfully. I really had worked hard on it.

Then, one day…

I was performing my usual mana-strengthening exercises by the river when a cylindrical magic tool came bobbing down from upstream.

I’d never seen one in person, but I’d read about them in books. If I remembered correctly, the space inside was expanded. They were apparently kept in noble estates and similar places for emergency evacuation.

I hurriedly pulled it from the river and opened the door. Inside, a silver-haired girl about my age lay unconscious and half-dead.

“Whoa, those injuries are awful… and her complexion’s terrible. Poison?”

Had the wound through her left shoulder been made by magic-bullet sorcery—a chaka? This was obviously going to mean trouble, but… I couldn’t exactly abandon her.

Everyone in this world possessed one unique magic of their own. My magic allowed me to manipulate subspace, and in preparation for my dream of a slow life on the frontier, I’d built a comfortable subspace base called Home.

So I collected the girl inside my subspace and left the riverbank before anyone arrived. I didn’t know what had happened, but given how badly injured she was, there might be pursuers after her. Hiding her this way seemed safest.

After administering first aid to her wounds, I used a homemade magic tool to examine her body in detail.

That was when I discovered she had several broken bones and was in worse condition than she appeared. The poison had weakened her internal organs as well, so I gave her an alchemical potion, but what in the world had happened to her?

She finally opened her eyes three days later.

“Where… am I? And who are you?”

“I’m Crow Amaryllis, the unremarkable son of a baker. I know a little alchemy, so I treated your injuries.”

As I spoke, I took a wooden bowl of bread porridge from my subspace storage.

An alchemical potion could provide the bare minimum of nutrition, but it was still better if she could eat proper food.

“I’m sorry. I still can’t… sit up.”

“Then I’ll feed you. Your digestive system is probably weakened too, so we’ll take it slowly, a little at a time.”

And so, I began treating and nursing her.

Humans in this world possessed a jewel-like organ below the navel that generated mana. It was known as the mana organ. Hers was remarkably large, and the mana cloaking her body was correspondingly powerful. If I could give her a place where she could rest undisturbed, the aid of her mana should allow her to recover steadily.

I found Resina in the spring. Assisting her with daily life, examining her body, compounding medicine, and treating her kept me busy through the whole summer. By the time her health returned, it was already autumn. The injuries were one thing, but eliminating the effects of the compound magical poison took some effort.

I sent letters at her request, but deliberately avoided prying into her circumstances. Her every gesture carried a refined elegance, so I assumed she was a noble. We simply lived in worlds that were far too different.

“Crow?”

“Hm? What is it?”

“Are you… not afraid of me?”

Afraid? I thought about it briefly, then understood what she meant.

Perhaps because of her bloodline, the quality of the mana surrounding her was entirely unlike that of an ordinary person. If a commoner’s mana had the presence of a mouse, then her violent mana skipped right past a cat and carried the oppressive presence of a tiger. She’d probably spent her life alone because everyone around her feared her.

“Take my hand.”

“Um…”

“Just do it. Try sensing how much mana I have.”

At first glance, the mana surrounding me was completely ordinary and unremarkable. It wasn’t frightening enough to draw fear—or even attention. But when it came to the volume of mana inside my body, the results of ten years of intensive training were very much present.

“I worked pretty hard at training, you know. And apparently, this massive internal reserve makes mana-based intimidation less effective against me. In other words… I’m not afraid of you.”

At my words, her eyes grew slightly moist.

“Crow. You see… I’ve never been close to anyone before. I have absolutely no idea what I’m supposed to do, but…”

Her voice trembled faintly.

“Would you… be my friend?”

“Hm? I thought we were already friends.”

“Hehehe. I see… Hehe.”

Her face cleared as though something possessing her had finally departed, and she gently wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. Pretending I hadn’t seen anything, I fiddled one-handedly with a vial of alchemical potion.

“There may be issues with our status and all that, but you can come visit me anytime.”

“Yes, I understand… When should we hold the wedding? I’d like our honeymoon to be at a seaside resort. We should have at least ten children. Oh, I’m not so narrow-minded as to forbid you from taking concubines, but I refuse to compromise on the hierarchy among your wives.”

“Hmm? What’s going on? Some enormous misunderstanding just sprang into existence between the two of us, didn’t it? Why?”

Also, she could let go of my hand now. I wasn’t going to run, so there was no need to squeeze it so hard. Ouch, ouch. My bones were creaking.

Well, after all of that, a few days after she recovered and went home, a group of burly men forcibly abducted me, saying, “The young miss has summoned you.”

I then learned that she wasn’t a noble but a yakuza princess, and my smoothly progressing frontier slow-life plan ran spectacularly aground. How sad.

◆　　　◆　　　◆

Under the formal class system, Resina was technically a commoner.

However, her late mother had apparently come from a noble family, her grandfather—the boss—held enough power to negotiate with high-ranking nobles, and her father was the underboss. In other words, he was the next boss and presided over meetings of the senior officers. This was more trouble than dealing with some half-baked noble.

Still, I couldn’t feel bad after hearing that she’d dressed herself in that beautiful gown to welcome me. And sitting here drinking tea elegantly in the courtyard really did make the difference between nobles and yakuza difficult to discern.

“There’s actually one more thing I’d like to ask of you, besides becoming my personal attendant.”

Resina quietly set down her teacup as she spoke. A request?

“Someone apparently slipped the same poison used on me into my grandfather’s food. I want you to treat him, Crow.”

“I don’t mind, but don’t you have a personal apothecary or someone like that?”

“The traitors who administered the poison were the family’s chief alchemist and head chef. I imagine they’re both feeding the magic fish by now.”

I see. They’d dealt with the culprits, but other traitors might still remain in the organization, so they didn’t know whom to trust. Meanwhile, I had already proven myself by treating Resina… Right. Why did everything around here have to be so blood-soaked?

Afterward, we engaged in an insane form of communication in which Resina drew her dosu whenever I gave the wrong answer, and I ultimately agreed to cooperate with her.

Now then… would I make it back alive?