Chapter 100: Hidden Door
I sold the rental house to the butler and bought the house next door.
It’s better if the owner is different if I’m going to use it as an escape route. If the attackers are thorough, they’ll check the owners and residents of the surrounding houses.
I made a bit of profit since I sold the rental house along with the bed. In fact, three of the beds were personally bought by Retze, Dean, and Chris. They seem quite eager to take them with them if we end up moving.
I brought in the materials and assembled everything in the room, but I feel like it would be a hassle to carry the finished products out.
The butler participated in the investigation and subjugation as a Silver Rank, having received a recommendation from the Adventurer’s Guild. I thought he registered as an adventurer alongside Ash, but he turned out to be Silver Rank without any fuss. He claims it was just youthful folly.
As for the Merchant Guild, there were no objections during the deliberations since it was known that he helped Ash with the creation of the medicine for Yellow Spot Disease. The location he wanted to buy was in an area where people were leaving, so they probably wanted to fill that gap.
Most of the Gold Rank entourage has pulled out, and even if the Merchant Guild temporarily holds onto the rental house, it’ll be tough to fill the rooms for a while.
I’ve been doing a lot of renovations; I like it, but still.
I requested plumbing work again and started scratching at the wall to smooth it out. Since this house shares a wall, I can’t do everything, but there are quite a few gaps… Well, I suppose they hung tapestries to prevent drafts from those gaps.
There are traces of a window on my side of the wall… It’s all been crudely filled in with plaster, window frame and all. It feels like a crime scene or something out of a horror story, so I’d rather not have that.
My house feels like it was forcibly built onto the street later, so it affected the neighboring houses as well. I scraped away at that too, turning the spot where the window used to be into a small shelf.
I sold off all the remaining furniture, leaving everything pristine. I’ll also remake the shutters to match those of my house. The process is the same as when it was a rental house, but this time I’ll be removing the stone wall in the attic. I cheated a bit and used the Zanzenken to cut it, but I’m breaking it a little to cover my tracks. The cross-section was just too smooth.
I opened a one-meter square hole and set up a shelf with a mechanism that allows the lower back panel to open. If Dinoss and the others aren’t living here, I plan to make it so that it can only be opened from Ash’s side.
While testing the opening and closing of the hidden door, I carried in materials to make the same shelf for Ash’s house.
“Excuse me.”
“Welcome.”
I made my way around to Ash’s house from the front.
“Sorry for the trouble.”
I was guided to the attic by the butler and Ash.
“We can’t really have a key for the hidden door, so will it be a key for each room?”
“That seems to be the case.”
I asked a question that had been on my mind as we climbed the stairs to the third floor.
“I’m not too fond of room keys…”
“Why’s that?”
“It makes me feel like I’m being locked away.”
It’s rare for Ash to voice something unpleasant. When I asked, he said that as a child, he was locked in his room at night. In this world, even infants are given a room, and once they grow a bit, they aren’t allowed out at night. It seems that this is generally the case for noble families with larger houses.
“What about the bathroom?”
“I had a nurse or maid in the waiting room, but…”
I wonder how they manage in houses that aren’t that spacious… Oh right, the bathroom itself was just a pot in the room.
The attic has a ladder, so I want to figure something out for the rental house as well. It’s dangerous to carry things up there.
“Is the other side already done?”
“Yeah. This side just needs to be assembled.”
Naturally, since the back-to-back sections are the same size, the shelf dimensions are identical.
While getting help with assembling the shelf, I explained the structure. The shelf is quite heavy to ensure it doesn’t shift from the hole in the wall, and the back panel is thick.
“Hmm, well done.”
“It’s a good shelf too.”
“Given the placement, I kept it simple. The back panel slides along the wall, so it might be good to keep items about three centimeters away from the wall on this side. Deciding what to put on the lower shelf might be tricky.”
I’d prefer to keep the fact that I fled next door hidden, so tossing items around wouldn’t be ideal.
“I’ll put some old cloth in the basket.”
“I see.”
I’ll leave that part to him.
Still, since we share walls and the back of the houses are tightly connected, the only windows are on the courtyard and street sides. Ash’s house and Retze’s rental house have an alley in between, so they have windows on one side.
Should I add windows to the roofs of both houses? The windows that protrude from the roof, what do they call those again? Dormers, right?
If I change the stairs leading up to the attic and turn it into a bedroom, would it feel like a secret base? I wonder if Tina and the others would be happy? No, maybe that’s just my Japanese sensibility. But I want to make it, so I’ll go ahead and do it.
I’ll intentionally make the stairs a bit narrow, so it feels like you’re lifting the ceiling to enter—yeah, it’s more fun for me to build it. Ah, but it’ll probably be hot in summer and cold in winter.
Cold is one thing, but the heat is a problem since there’s no air conditioning. But I have a feeling my wife’s Spirit might help with that…
No, first, I’ll focus on remodeling the attic in my house.