"Whew, now I'm starting to feel warmed up."
After completing the repetitive quest, I felt incredibly refreshed.
But somehow the nuns watching me seemed to have increased. Most were young nuns, and when I looked back, they giggled and chatted excitedly among themselves. Then a solemn-looking senior nun appeared, gave the young nuns hell, and dragged them away. What was that about?
The boulevards extending long in all four directions from the plaza each had names: Linz (west), Kisling (east), Neuden (north), Beien (south). The royal castle was at the far edge of the northwest district. Originally a fortress city, but as the population increased, the current Breisburg was completed.
So in the northwest district, upper nobles with titles and court nobles sitting in high government positions were established. The northeast district was inhabited by lower nobles of the knight class and some titled nobles. Among the knight class, the lower the rank, the closer they were to the boulevard. That's why my house was close to Kisling Boulevard.
The south of the boulevard was an area where commoners lived. The southeast district was relatively wealthy, with commoners, merchants, and various guilds established, but the opposite southwest district had poor public safety, with slums created by the poor, starting with the brothel district.
There was a stark class division across the boulevard.
"Venetian textiles! Beautiful ladies! Come take a look!"
"Selling Rosenheim rose perfume! The perfume Madam Beatrix used!"
The market had abundant sights to see. Each store had tents as roofs. Livestock merchants selling pigs and chickens, textile merchants appealing to ladies with fabrics, craftsmen selling baskets made of straw, artisans displaying various crafts: there were many merchants.
And agricultural products brought from nearby villages accounted for 50% of all stores. Many people gathered to look at goods, watch the hawking, or eat snacks from street stalls. No different from the traditional markets we know.
Occasionally there were relic merchants making a fuss about suspicious veil fragments supposedly brought from Rome or claiming to have St. Peter's finger bones. Who the hell buys that stuff? And there were many flocks of geese and pigs swarming the market floor.
After thoroughly looking around, centered on the boulevard, I returned home. I didn't forget to carefully check if there were any ladies upstairs dumping filth. If you were careless, you could get hit by filth. Personally, I wanted to wash this smelly coat and hat, and I wanted to take a bath.
So first, I tried to light a fire in the furnace to heat bath water.
I somehow managed to strike what appeared to be flint to create sparks and light the firewood, but it took about an hour. Hmm, not bad for a first time.
The problem was there were absolutely no toiletries.
There was one bar of soap made from some strange oil, and it was very black.
So I accessed this thing called the shop for the first time.
I went into the sundries section and could easily find a toiletries set. A week's worth of toiletries was 50 points. I got 100 points from completing the repetitive quest twice, so wasn't this enough to pay for it?
Soaking in the warm bath water and looking at the toiletries I thought I'd never see again, the frustration and tension seemed to melt away. The fact that I could wash cleanly in the Middle Ages with something called points seemed to bring peace of mind.
But the happy feeling was brief. Rubbing my hungry stomach, I rummaged through the kitchen and found 3 pieces of black bread and 1 bottle of wine in a small wooden barrel. I touched the hard black bread. Could a person really eat this? I searched around to see if there was anything else.
"...This is all there is to eat?"
I didn't often enjoy wine, but as soon as I tasted it, it tasted like it was made from grape dregs, so it wasn't to my taste at all. A cheap red wine from the convenience store would have been perfect for my palate. And this hard black bread was difficult to cut with a knife.
How do you make bread so black and hard?
Did it have impurities in it? Or had it gone bad from being too old?
Gathering courage, I chewed the black, hard bread like chewing sand and barely swallowed it with the cheap wine, then reflected on past days when I wasted the abundance of civilization without gratitude. If this was the typical staple food, I had no confidence I could survive eating it.
But the fortunate thing was that I had the shop service provided by the System. I had bought toiletries from sundries and enjoyed my bath quite a bit. So when I accessed the shop again, the first thing I discovered was food. Inside were countless types of dishes.
It felt like seeing paradise.
To put it in Catholic terms, God was there.
"Thank goodness. I almost lost heart."
I was a modern person who took abundant meals for granted. Of course, it's true that there are still many people suffering from hunger throughout the world, but by my standards, I lived eating abundantly. I wasn't wealthy, but I was the type who didn't spare money for the pleasure of eating.
So the shop service the System provided was like light and salt to me.
There was every type of cuisine imaginable from across the modern world: all kinds of ingredients, drinks, and desserts spanning every culinary tradition Earth had to offer. Desperate for something warm and familiar after that awful bread, I searched for comfort food, and right there I found a hearty home-cooked meal with roasted meat, potatoes, miso soup, and so on.
20 points per meal.
After paying 50 points for a week's toiletries and 20 points for a meal, the points I'd earned from running repetitive quests decreased to 30 points. But it was definitely worth paying. I didn't know what principle made it appear, but the set meal was showing off its beautiful form on the table.
With trembling hands and an excited heart, I carefully brought it to the table and quickly tasted it. A familiar yet utterly satisfying flavor spread from my tongue through my whole body. Ah, this is what delicious means.
Just being able to taste the hometown flavors I thought I'd never taste again gave the System shop tremendous appeal. Personally, I believed that if I had familiar food, I could easily adapt to any place. So I had to consistently perform repetitive quests.
After scraping up even the soup without leaving anything, I finished a satisfying meal. I must have looked starved. I ate so cleanly I didn't even need to wash the dishes. Then the dishes disappeared in the blink of an eye. Well, that was convenient and fascinating.
With a clean body and a full stomach, I drew the longsword engraved with the crest of the Streit family that my father had left me. Our family crest was a relatively simple design with two longswords crossed in an X against a blue shield background. A lower knight family's emblem wouldn't be fancy.
This was my first time seeing something called a longsword in real life. It was a representative sword that appeared in almost every game as essential, but it was mostly depicted as a one-handed sword. The longsword wasn't a one-handed sword but a two-handed sword. It was heavier than I thought and similar in length to a bamboo sword.
The handle and the cross-guard to protect the hand, and the blade that got thicker the closer it got to the handle. Peculiarly, the blade wasn't sharpened, so there was no problem grabbing it with bare hands. The long blade at the tip of the sword was sharply honed. I liked the sword itself more than I expected.
The problem was that I, who didn't know the first thing about swordsmanship, had to be able to use this longsword freely. The only weapon I could handle was the M4 carbine I learned in the army. I couldn't even trim ingredients with a kitchen knife, so could I really handle this sword well? That's what the shop was for.
[German Swordsmanship Manual]
This was the first thing I found in the shop's secret techniques section.
If I, who knew nothing about swordsmanship, could learn swordsmanship through this manual, couldn't I live without shame as a knight? It was expensive at 1,000 points, but if I consistently did repetitive quests, I could purchase it within a week. According to the System's explanation, repetitive quests were endless.
So my current goal was to secure the German Swordsmanship Manual.
"Yeah, let's cheer up. I have to adapt slowly and live."
I muttered like that, as if telling myself to take courage.
I had no choice but to adapt and live in this world anyway.