Episode 46: Parental Heart
Hmm, when it comes to Tempura, it’s gotta be eggplant, right?
When I was a kid, I thought chikuwa-ten (tempura of fish sausage) or shrimp tempura were the only way to go! But after becoming an adult, I realized how delicious eggplant is, and now there’s no going back.
Personally, I can also recommend maitake mushroom tempura. Maitake tempura is best eaten with salt. Matcha salt is even better.
Pumpkin and sweet potato are also sweet and delicious. Salt is good, but I prefer to eat these with grated daikon radish and ginger in the dipping sauce.
Of course, seafood and chicken tempura are also delicious, but as you get older, you realize how delicious vegetables are, and it’s shocking. I wonder why? I used to hate green peppers when I was a kid, but now that I’m an adult, I can munch on raw green peppers while drinking sake!
And also… ice cream tempura is also good, you know? I ordered it half as a joke at a tempura restaurant in Shinjuku a long time ago, but man, I was wrong to make fun of it. It’s delicious.
And then there’s kakiage (mixed vegetable tempura), right? The sweetness of the fried carrots and onions is more sensual than any mediocre dessert.
While talking about such things, I scoop Ginshari rice cooked in a mess tin into a bowl.
Rice… so good!!!
Tendon (tempura rice bowl) is delicious, but a tempura set meal is also good.
Like this, you see, you break a soft-boiled egg tempura on top of the rice…
You take a bite of the chicken thigh tempura, and then you shovel in the rice soaked with the soft-boiled egg and tempura sauce!
Ah~! So good~!
I eat bread in the morning, but rice for lunch! Although it’s night now.
Apparently, my taste buds haven’t changed even after reincarnation, and rice is just so delicious.
“…Saku. Yeah, delicious, ne.”
“Rosalinde-sama! Taste-testing!”
“Laurence, Lulaiya. You know, if Dru intended to kill us, I think he would have done it already. Besides…”
“B, besides?”
“I wouldn’t mind being killed by Dru. My life was saved by Dru, after all…”
Rosa is saying something, but I ignore her.
I slurp my miso soup. The ingredients are wakame seaweed and tofu.
When it comes to miso soup, wakame and tofu are the perfect side dish. I’d also like to mention that thinly sliced daikon radish and onions are also delicious.
But when it comes to late-night snacks, I like to add scorched, chunky green onions with a drizzle of sesame oil. That’s right, it’s called negibukajiru (miso soup with lots of green onions).
But ultimately, tonjiru (pork miso soup) is the most delicious.
If you melt a little butter and sprinkle some shichimi pepper into tonjiru, it’s practically a side dish in itself.
Seriously, you can eat rice with just this. It’s also good with udon noodles.
For side dishes, I guess pickles?
I prefer lightly pickled vegetables over takuan (yellow pickled radish).
Chinese cabbage and cucumber are staples, but tomatoes and turnips are also good.
Since coming to this world, I’ve started trying to make pickles, and yeah, it’s really good. It’s interesting and profound.
“I see. Is a Frontier Settlement good for your territory?”
Are you kidding me, Count Missgancia?
“Speaking of which, I recently got connections with the Eastern Continent! Life in the East doesn’t seem so bad either!!!”
For now, I’ll threaten him.
“Hmph, if I don’t give you a territory, I can’t reward you or tie you to this land. If you don’t want to do politics, you can just hire a steward.”
“Being a landowner is like being a noble, isn’t it?”
“Fool. You know that there are various kinds of landowners. I will give you a grand title, but your position will be that of a simple rural landowner. I’m just saying that I’ll give you the best land.”
“No, thank you.”
“…Speaking of which, I’ve heard that you’ve been quite the ladies’ man with the village girls, the Strider women, and the Guild’s daughters. If you had a village, your children would never have to worry about food as landowners, would they?”
Oh, as expected of a noble.
He’s hitting me where it hurts.
That’s right, the girls in this world have their youth sustained by magic, and the Strider women who are intensely trained can live with bodies that look like they’re in their twenties or thirties until they’re sixty years old…
But still, what are they going to do in the end? That’s the question.
My Strider female friends who are getting old and finding it hard to work.
The girls who have escaped here from distant towns with some kind of trouble and have nowhere to go.
Am I going to tell them to fight as Striders until they can’t move their bodies anymore, until they die?
That’s just too pitiful.
Wouldn’t it be better to get them pregnant with a kid or two and make them maids? That’s what I’m kind of worried about.
If I have them give birth, then group living is essential.
Eh? Ah, well… the Strider women don’t have any relatives or welfare to rely on…
Normally, in this world, raising children is done by the whole family and relatives.
The elderly who can’t move their bodies and the older children have the job of babysitting.
Marriage and chastity are ambiguous at the commoner level, and children born in the village are raised as village children even if the parents are unknown, or something like that?
Somehow, it seems like it’s not okay to bring up the sense of chastity from Reiwa Japan in this kind of historical background.
Well… the original meaning of a harem was a system to protect widows in times of war, or something like that.
In this world, it’s common for men to leave wills saying, “I want my young wife to be the new wife of a trustworthy man.”
That’s not because they have a cuckoldry fetish, but because there’s no insurance or welfare, so they come up with the idea of entrusting their beloved wife to a trustworthy friend and having her become his!
In the first place, the concept of chastity is kind of a Christian thing… Ah, if I talk about that, this world has churches, but it’s polytheistic, and the religious views are completely different from the teachings of Christianity.
…Anyway, I want to take care of my Strider female friends in the end and save them.
And if I do that, if I’m saving women who are past their prime, there are no disadvantages for me at all. Even though it’s the worst thing to do in Reiwa Japan, in this world, in this era, I’m treated as a philanthropist. I don’t lose my freedom, and I can have women who can’t resist me serve me. There’s no “responsibility.”
But to do that, I have to earn a lot of money…
If I could get land, all those problems would be solved in an instant, and the position of a direct vassal of a powerful noble would give me enough power that the mere Strider women wouldn’t be able to resist me…
Yeah, really, as expected of Count Missgancia.
Being able to give the negotiating partner what they want most is truly noble. He’s a paragon of nobility.
“Then at least, could you tell me after that ‘Frontier Settlement’ is completed?”
“So you’ll accept if I build a village?”
“I didn’t say that. Even if a village is built, it’ll probably be more inconvenient than a city, right? Dealing with the people who developed it will also be a pain.”
“Hmm… I see. Well, I’m aware that I have a mountain of problems too. But instead of an empty promise, I’ll make a written commitment to grant you a fiefdom in the future. Otherwise, Rosalinde can’t be given to you in terms of family status.”
Oh, geez.
It’s a pain, really.
That’s why I didn’t do a serious climb to the top! Because I hate these kinds of entanglements…
But even so, it’s still not a reason to abandon the comfortable land of Missgancia.
The Striders in other lands are treated even worse…
If I were to go to another land, I would have to give up my human rights, seriously use magic to become a top-notch Strider, become a retainer of some noble and serve him for many years to show my loyalty, support the next generation of children of that noble, and by the time those children become adults…? It’s ridiculously troublesome.
That’s why Count Missgancia is stabbing me like this…
Ah, really, it’s difficult.
Being a working adult is hard.