Management of a Novice Alchemist: Volume 4 [Parts 1 to 7] by Mizuho Itsuki

Author:Mizuho Itsuki
Language: eng
Format: epub

Three days into their trek into the forest, things were going smoothly in some ways, but the team had gotten bogged down in others. Fortunately, they had managed to avoid encountering too many monsters, but...

“Ohh! This is a riftshroom! How unusual! Hrm, the rift is three centimeters across, the tree is a nucrite, humidity is high, and the surrounding moss is—”

“Hrm! I see there’s brefcario growing here. The rhizome is...quite thick. Is the soil responsible?”

“Oh my?! There are meonidies growing by the waterside! Let’s see... No flowers yet. We should be approaching the flowering season though, so is the location to blame?”

This was the source of the delays: Nordrad’s research.

Any time he stopped, it could be more than an hour before they got moving again. They couldn’t travel far like this, but thus far, Iris and Kate had been quietly waiting for him to finish.

They were being paid by the day, so it wasn’t a loss for the two of them no matter how far behind schedule they ended up. But after three days of this, they couldn’t help but get impatient.

They only had so much food with them, and monsters sometimes attacked if they stood around in one place for too long. If they slew those monsters, the smell of blood would draw more in, but even then Nordrad made no effort to move on, and it took considerable effort to drag him away from whatever he was doing. It would have been too much to expect them not to complain—but he was still their employer.

“Hey, Nord. I hesitate to say this, but don’t you think you’ve been taking entirely too much time? You were investigating the forest while we were preparing to set out too, weren’t you? Haven’t you had enough...?”

Despite how tepid Iris’s protest was, Nord pushed back hard. “I did survey the area around the village, but the vegetation here is different! As a researcher, not investigating it would be unthinkable for me!”

“Murgh... I don’t know about research, but I do know that food is becoming an issue. Considering the length of time we intend to spend once we arrive, I don’t think we can afford to dally too long along the way, you realize?”

“She’s right,” Kate chimed in. “We have the trip back to consider as well, and at the pace we’re going, we’re not going to have a lot of margin left for error.”

“When you put it that way...” The pair’s reasonable arguments left Nordrad at a loss for words. No matter how passionate he was about his research, he wasn’t so far gone that he could go on researching without food or drink, and he understood that Iris and Kate would be even less eager to tolerate such a situation. “I suppose I can’t force the two of you to survive on weed soup...”

“You’ve eaten such a thing?!” Iris was aghast.

“Depending on the state of my research, yes?” Nordrad replied, as if it were no big deal. “It’s quite edible, you know?”

“Keep an

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