Chương 194: Chapter 215: Lunch In a Lich's Crypt

"That was a lich," Kurumi said, pointing at the pile of dust that was collapsed onto the ground, still sifting as it settled. There was an ozone smell, as if ending a thousand years of magic had altered the air somehow. She stood over it with a challenging posture, her finger an accusation leveled at the peaked pile of particulate. I could hear heavy stones banging, one after another, fading into the distance.

Every door that had sealed shut behind us was now opening, clearing the way back to the three-way vestibule.

"Yes it was," I said. I separated the golden jewelry from the pile and hovered it in the air. I looked around the sanctum, and started collecting anything of obvious value. A lot of the furnishings here were gold or jeweled, and I happily pried them loose to join the stacked treasure. Speaking of stacked treasure, Kurumi stomped over in front of me.

"Explain!" she demanded. It sounded a little petulant. But I wasn't going to troll her any more than I have.

"Simple. I waited for him to demand the riddles, and then I interrupted him and distracted him. Which isn't hard because he's been sitting in here for eons wondering what the rest of the world has been up to. Then he asked three questions and I answered them, defeating his challenge. He came at us with the ancient magic, primordial stuff, absolute control. But in order to exert the primordial control, the victims have to fail a challenge. So he asks us questions, and if we can't answer he owns us body and soul.

So, either we die immediately or we're in real trouble. Anyway, I know that he's easily distracted by math he does not understand, so that let me control his questions. And when I defeated the challenge, that reversed his spell against him and he was destroyed. Pretty straightforward." She was still not happy with this explanation.

"And what about-" She forgot what she was about to say when I flipped open a chest full of coins.

"-oh," she said, her voice full of wonder replacing the temper she'd shown seconds before. Being a mathematician-philosopher cult leader and lich necromancer back in the ancient kingdom was lucrative as hell, and here's the lucre to prove it. These coins were almost entirely untarnished despite their age, and they stuffed the footlocker-sized chest almost to the point of spilling over. We could see copper, silver, gold and platinum all there.

"And these are... historically significant?" she said, staring. Oh right, she's got a buyer that will hand over a premium if they are bona fide relics with intrinsic value.

"Your buyer will have a variety of tests to prove it," I said, reaching forward.

"But here's a proof I can show you right now. Take a look at this silver piece."

"It's... got the stamp of a coat on it. Silver, but it's a crest piece instead of a key?"

"Yep. And this gold piece?" She held it up to the light.

"Huh. A chain."

"Modern coinage has its progression. The platinum crown, to show it's the value of a boon from the king. The gold coat-of-arms, to show it's the value of a boon from a noble house. The silver key, and the copper coop, which has an image of a chicken in a coop." Some regions call it the copper chicken, copper chick, or cruder names than that.

But coop is pretty widely used because "coop" as in chicken coop sounds very similar to "copper" and at the end of the day, whichever one rolls off the tongue easiest will win out.

"But," I continued, "it wasn't always that way. Silver used to be the price of a noble's favor. Gold used to be the price of a human being. If a slave earned the amount of a golden coin, they could buy their freedom. So the price to keep someone in slavery was a golden coin. And because of that, the golden coins were stamped with a chain. During one of the reforms, of which we know little, the mint changed it up.

For a brief period, the silver coins were stamped with a chain, indicating that now it was far cheaper for a person to buy their way out of slavery. This had the unfortunately unforeseen but predictable effect of dropping the price of slaves similarly, they were now traded for silver and exchanged much more freely. Then the law uncoupled the price of slave-trading from the price of manumission, and the silver coins were replaced with keys, to show that this is the price of freedom.

It would take another century to outlaw slavery, but the first step was to lower the price of human freedom."

"You just know this?" She sounded a little annoyed.

"Yeah," I said. That wasn't even a footnote in the game, this was part of my reading back when I was obsessively reading history texts in prison.

"I read a lot." She rolled her eyes.

"No, I read a lot. You're a know-it-all." She was teasing when she said it, no sting and no annoyance in her voice. She paused.

"Huh. Was this about the same time that the Great Houses were rising to prominence? And their favor was considered more valuable, as well? The coats shifted from silver to gold at the same time the chain shifted from gold to silver?" We discussed history and politics through the years while we stacked up valuables in the middle of the room.

Ofxupo's eternal crypt was extremely luxurious, and all of his vast wealth was spent either in building the traps and mechanisms to contain the other two, or kept in his own crypt. I think that he hoarded all his riches like that to help encourage people to try to get to him. Whether to rescue him or steal his gold, it's the same outcome. Unfortunately, motivating people to try to get his gold did not help people survive the process, so he stayed trapped with gold he can't spend. And now it's ours.

I watched Kurumi's XP roll in as we hit checkpoints on her [Cache Money] quest. She stepped back, mentally weighing and calculating the loot. Her lips moved while she did the math, and then her cheeks started reddening, her eyes glimmering. I think this is just how we work; hardly a kind word between us but she responds to money like sweet nothings whispered in her ear. Hang on. I gotta test something.

"Did I mention that because this is salvage retrieved on a Guild license, it's all tax-free?" I said to her. Her breath caught on a gasp. So, I guess I was right. Pillow talk. She's the only person that is a love interest for Nathan and I simultaneously. I probably spend more time than I should studying her because of this, because I want to understand how my progression is different. The more I understand about that, the better.

I know all about Nathan's path, so the best way to understand my own is to know all the differences between his and mine. I opened a portal and started shoveling in all the riches we had found. I can open the way to the void from here, but when I'm inside I can't open a portal away from here. I think that this dungeon was built to accommodate pocket dimensions but block teleportation. That's convenient for now but I'd find it much more convenient if they had less foresight and let me teleport around.

"And, finally," I said, moving to the center table and picking up a tatty-looking journal.

"The priceless gift of knowledge. All his thoughts about mathematics from his brilliant and misguided life and his millennium of postmortem calculation."

"Priceless?" she repeated. She had that gleam in her eye, she's in the grips of avarice.

"Metaphorically priceless," I clarified.

"It is our math homework, after all. The rest of this is just extracurricular. Let's get some lunch before we move on any further." I pulled out the food I'd stocked away that morning, and shared a simple hearty meal with her. I conjured silverware and plates, and she ate hers in the usual traditional way and I made a sandwich for myself because I'm stubborn and I'm still trying to get this practice to catch on.

I had always believed that when a traveler from Earth winds up in a fantasy kingdom and starts showing off their strange ways, everyone around them immediately recognizes their superior methods and adopts them gladly. Well, unless the fantasy kingdom is terrible and backwards and needs to be liberated by a revolution led by the outsider. Somehow, there's never really a question of the traveler from Earth having a hard time getting traction for their ideas.

I on the other hand can't seem to sell these people on baseball, roller skates, democracy, sandwiches, clocks or phonographs. I can't get them to accept that lawyers should be competent, psychologists should be confidential, and that anyone who calls themselves an Inquisitor is bad news. I've read stories about people like me winding up in places like this, and every time, everything they bring is wildly popular. Hearstwhile is resistant to change, at every level. I just got stuck with a sucky isekai.

Still, I can be grateful that at least adventure and violence are working out for me. It used to be that a half-dozen bandits were enough to nearly kill me, or a single sorceress. I had so much trouble with any kind of fighting, and I hated it so much. Now I really feel like this, at least, is coming together for me. What the fuck does it say about my life that my dungeon runs are smoother and more worry-free than my birthday party?

"I'm eating lunch in a lich's crypt," Kurumi said out of nowhere.

"Yes," I agreed, looking up at her from my food. I paused, waiting for her to finish whatever thought she was working on.

"That's weird. This is weird. This is extraordinary and it's noteworthy and remarkable. I am noting it and remarking on it. This is all so goddamn weird and you're just... just rolling with it. Like nothing bothers you. I can't ever feel like I'm reaching you because I have no idea what your perspective is, what your parameters are! None of this is weird to you and so I just can't..." She gestured helplessly.

"I just can't understand you. There's nowhere to start. Does none of this strike you as strange?" She almost sounded desperate. Time for conspicuous honesty.

"Kurumi," I said, solemnly, "you have no idea. The reason you think that you never see me looking particularly rattled is because you've never seen me comfortable. My sense of what is normal is so far from anything you've ever seen. This is all just different degrees of Really Fucking Weird to me."

"Really?" she seemed unconvinced.

"Really," I promised her. I went back to my sandwich, then a bite of apple. She gave herself a minute to consider this.

"You never actually told him what updog is."

"You're not ready either."

"Oh. So what is that simulation thing you were talking about?"

"Now, updog is a joke based on a miscommunicated figure of speech-" Like hell am I going to start giving away hints to her that this whole world is fake and fictional and that I come from outside it. I leave way too many clues around as it is, and Kurumi is extremely smart, dangerously smart. I sure do like the way quests in her line are always profitable, but I really doubt that I'm going to be sticking with her long-term. Maybe this time next year.

Because the longer she stays near me, the more likely she is to piece together enough evidence that she can't ignore, and set off a chain reaction. I think it's way too likely that one person who collects credible evidence to convince their own self, would then in turn be able to convince others, and so on. The only person I should share this with is Nux because he is literally never going to spread that information.

But anyone else could potentially break the secret open and set off a wave of nihilistic solipsism that makes it impossible to save the world. I can't convince people to act more like real people if they find out they're fake. After lunch, we walked back to the entranceway, passing up the various challenge rooms we had faced on the way in. She knew I was avoiding her questions about simulation theory. I never should have mentioned it in front of her, I guess I'm getting careless.

Around most folks this would be an amusing anecdote. But Kurumi was probably the one person in my orbit who is smart enough to figure out what I was talking about. Ryichsur is brilliant, but he's engineer-brilliant not theoretician-brilliant, and those are different things. Without asking her input, I steered us to P'gyaqu's path, pushing open the first door. Again, this route starts with math puzzles.

To weed out the non-genius adventurers, and to give the hypothetical cultist rescue teams a false sense of security. Nested algebraic functions, not really a big deal. I let Kurumi solve this one, it's perfectly within her abilities. I suppose the untranslated version of this puzzle was more impressive, but I am sort of insulated from the difficulty. She moves the tiles around until the correct number of dots are in place for each variable.

Now that she's seen a lich confronted and destroyed she's a little more at ease. Despite her outbursts about how weird it is that I'm not freaking out, she's steadier now. And, despite her protests that she's only studying to make money, she does seem to be truly proud of herself when she solves these puzzles. I let her take more of a role there, now that she's not quaking in fear, and she kind of gets into it. She doth protest too much, I know she's really a total nerd that likes having answers to riddles.

She can say it's about the money but I know that Nathan's impression of her is not wrong just because my interpretation of her is different.

"Hey, when you were cussing out those undead monsters?..."

"Yeah?"

"Did you tell that creature that its mother was both a prostitute and a carpentry lathe?"

"You phrased that more politely than I did, but yes."

"Harsh." The funny thing is that adventuring with just Kurumi does not feel like we're really bonding. When she's smiling at these puzzles, she's smiling to herself. Even when she's having a good time, I don't feel like I'm included in her joy. She does not often smile at me, not unless she is currently receiving something she wants. She's just not as happy around me. I have a much more serious and goal-oriented Kurumi.

Either I'm just not as good at making her happy as my brother is, or it's that she just doesn't mesh with adventuring like that. When our group came back from Uchislowi, I had a much easier time chatting with Quarl, Tiviti, Thumper and Kimothy. Not so much Licard, but I think he was on the way out of contention anyway. Was it because that one was more dangerous and stressful? Because it was a group environment and not one-on-one? Because she's also matched to Nathan and that is creating some kind of conflict?

Because she hated the idea of adventuring from the start? Or am I just fumbling her like a chump? Kinda wish I knew.