He walked back to the inn in a daze.

Despite the boost the food gave him, it was more of a momentary pick-me-up than an energy drink. Packing up took but a moment, and the walk back was uneventful.

The night sky turned overcast, blanketing the streets in near darkness, causing Daire to miss the days of electricity. Walking home after a late-night in college. Walking down a deserted asphalt road while streetlights lit his path. Music playing in his ears while daydreaming of a different life.

He now had his different life. Walking down that same road. In the dark. Without his music.

In exchange, he was accompanied by a pretty girl ten times smaller than him, a giant predator, comatose caged rabbits, and one tiny frog that Daire was pretty sure enjoyed watching him burn.

The aches in his arm were back. He was sweating again. The stitches in his right arm throbbed as if backing up its uglier cousin in a fistfight. Daire didn't even want to look at the limp limbs hanging by his sides.

It was true that most of the pain was gone due to Daire telling Fire to "eat" the pain. But the absence of pain didn't mean a healthy limb. Daire pushed himself today. He wanted to make it up to Violet. Making new food was the best way to do that. Running the stall was a way to make her more comfortable with people.

It had been one hell of a day. The emotional rollercoaster didn't stop.

Absently entering the inn and holding his key, he didn't register his surroundings but somehow made it to his room and the itchy straw bed.

Collapsing into oblivion.

=

Violet was tired after the long day. She had been curious, then excited, turning afraid and terrified to emotionally-drained. Rejuvenated by the smell of food, Violet was blissful, and then strangely aroused. Embarrassed and then businesslike. Now she was just plain exhausted.

Her wings sagged as she flew next to Daire. He seemed to be in a trance.

He's acting tough.

Violet looked to his bandaged arm to see it... leaking in places. Violet wasn't sure why he pushed himself so much. Making dinner for the two of them would have been more than enough.

Calculating the total costs and benefits...

Daire butchered twenty-two rabbits. Each rabbit making up about four meals. Every meal except three sold, which they ate themselves. Earning about 17 silver. Buying the ingredients for today's cooking, which nearly all had been used, cost around 2 silver.

Since Daire supplied the rabbits himself, the price of the meat didn't factor in. Making their total profit 15 silver.

There were still the pelts to sell. The blood barrel to dispose of. Daire said he would talk to her about his plans tonight, but he seemed too drained to say another word.

Daire was walking on autopilot, and Violet was forced to lead him inside the inn and up the stairs. He waited outside the door of his room, staring into space, while Violet put in the effort to turn the key. When the door opened, he roamed over to the bed and fell onto it.

Violet was worried about him. There was no blanket, and the bed didn't look as soft as Trinket. The room was clean, small, and unadorned other than the bed and a small trunk. No window adorned the walls. She wondered how he would sleep and if they would

Violet looked at him one last time before pulling the door closed.

=

Daire had a nightmare.

It wasn't concise. Making no sense.

Daire was walking around when he felt an itch on his palm. Scratching the itch, he tried to make it go away, but it kept moving. Looking down, he saw a bug crawling on his hand. Freaking out, he tried to smash it, to no avail. Then he tried to catch it.

That was when the bug burrowed into his hand.

Panicking, he tried to dig it out. But it was moving around his hand now, a small bump. Daire tried popping it out like a pimple but it would never pop.

Once he caught it and finally made it pop, a sprout grew from his hand.

Truly losing his mind, the sprout grew and grew into a plant as tall as him. Soil sprouted from his open hand—the wound growing bigger. No blood, just empty skin and a hollow hand filled with black soil.

Worms crawled through the earth.

Daire broke the plant off. Manically digging out the dirt and picking out worms. His arm was open. No pain. Just a bizarre vessel, his skin peeling back like paper.

He was trying to dig green poppy seeds out from his flesh when he finally woke.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

=

A cold sweat and enough pain to briefly knock him unconscious again.

Daire looked at the mess.

His bandages were soaked through in moisture, blood, and pus.

Quickly digging out his phone with his right hand, Daire quickly searched how to treat burns. Intense burns. According to numerous charts, he believed that the degree of his burns was scientifically classified as Fucked.

Magical burns were hard to compare to normal burns. Something was fundamentally different. Fire torched his arm but he knew hostile magic would turn usually turn him to ash. That it stopped at his shoulder when it could have engulfed him completely was an oddity. The Fire he controlled initially was intense, but it was also small. Perhaps it didn't need much surface area to fuse?

Daire felt the Fire mana in him like a secondary sun, distant but ever-present.

He firmly ignored its cries to be used.

Remembering how his index finger turned pure black, he couldn't compare it with any standard charts. The fact that he could move his arm freely and still had his sense of touch was another deviation. Using the otherworldly information the best he could, he determined his arm was mostly covered in second and third-degree burns. His pointer finger was definitely third-degree.

It was like he shook hands with a fire elemental.

Finding out a few ways to treat his arm, he thrust his phone back in his pocket.

The room he was in barely registered. Completely pitch black, Daire needed to go outside to see the time.

Finding the key shoved in one of his back pockets, he walked out and locked the door behind him out of habit.

Daire wasn't intimately familiar with medieval culture. There were several inconsistencies. Like the glass storefront they walked past yesterday morning. Magic existing could account for some irregularities, making some tasks and creations more straightforward. Or it could be the author of "The White Tragedy" wasn't being entirely thorough in his world-building.

Walking down the stairs, he saw Gunter was absent. It was still dark outside the windows, with the first light barely peeking over the nearby rooftops.

"Ah, that explains it."

The lack of sleep. The aches and pains. He barely got any sleep at all because of that stupid nightmare.

Daire walked over to the awning where Trinket and Violet slept. Trinket was curled up near the cart, and Violet was mostly sunken into his fur as she slept. Daire moved over to the cart where his bag rested. Digging out two notebooks, he was about to sit down when he saw Pebbles sitting on the cart's ledge. It stared at him. Its gaze unblinking, even as it licked its own eyeball.

Daire moved away, sitting against the inn's wall, facing Trinket and Violet's sleeping forms. He flipped through his journals, looking through old material and cross-referencing what turned out to be accurate and what was hogwash.

Writing down his findings on how Fire magic worked, how simple it was, and how dangerous it was. He also took the time to make an anatomical drawing of the burns on his arm. He remembered the grotesque patterns and could even feel how it was carved into his skin...

Replicating it wasn't an issue.

His finished drawing looked a lot like something you would see on a medical chart. Artistic in only the most methodical sense. It helped him calm down, realizing how much worse it could have been. If he stretched his imagination, it could even look cool.

Nah.

He shook his head, dismissing that thought and deciding to keep his arm wrapped from now on, only taking it off to change. He'd probably be mistaken for a chunibyo...

A long and suffering sigh.

Daire softly snapped his notebook closed.

Violet was stirring. He watched her yawn and stretch with a warm smile on his face, momentarily forgetting everything around him.

=

Violet slept soundly with no dreams.

Stretching and letting out a quiet yawn, she rubbed her eyes open.

The first thing she saw was Daire several feet away, looking at her. Letting out a tiny eep, Violet immediately tried covering herself and hiding in Trinket's fur. Slowly realizing she went to bed wearing her dress, she calmed and emerged from hiding.

"How... How long?"

Daire turned away to look outside. Violet followed his gaze; the sun had risen.

"It's been about an hour. I didn't want to wake you, so I was writing some notes."

Daire waved a small hand-sized journal in one hand.

"I saw you were waking, so I stopped."

The red in her cheeks lessened upon realizing he hadn't watched her long. Fixing her bed head, she flew over to the cart. Pebbles was there, cleaning himself. Patting him on the head, she checked her belongings and restored her appearance out of sight.

Finished, she hopped back up over the cart and saw Trinket was awake and licking Daire's face.

"Morning buddy, don't go overboard, please. I'm injured."

Trinket seemed to detect something in Daire's voice today. He gave Daire a nudge and then backed off. Violet took this opportunity to observe that Daire didn't look his usual self. Not at all.

"I owe you some answers, don't I? Let's get those out of the way. We have a busy day today."

He was trying to act normal. And she decided to let him have his way, for now, ignoring the way he let his arm hung limply. Humoring him, she asked a question.

"Why did you give away those coins to the guards? They're from your home and will trouble if they reach the wrong people."

Daire nodded, expecting this question.

"It's an experiment. I wanted to test what would happen when giving it out to strangers. If they try to sell it immediately after being told it's possibly worth several gold coins, that tells me about their character or financial situation. Since we will be seeing them a lot from now on, I thought it would be a good test."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, this is the closest town to home; that entrance faces us; they are full-time guards... Since we will see them often from now on, it will be good to know their character. Giving them a small gift will give them a decent impression of us regardless if they are benevolent or malevolent. If we are attacked near the entrance, I am hopeful they will be more obliged to intervene."

Violet rubbed her chin before asking.

"What about the consequences? I remember you said wanted to keep a low profile."

Daire nodded again.

"As much as possible anyway. This a reasonable risk. If they sell the coins and they reach collectors or curious people, it will let me test the waters. If they send someone to ask where I got them, I can say I found them in some old ruins. If they know I mentioned they are from my homeland, I will say home is beyond the mountains, and they will likely give up. If, for some reason, they send assassins? We will know just how much people don't like new things."

"That's a lot of if's."

"All of those examples are from transmigration novels where the MC made too big of an impact."

Violet had read a couple of those, so she understood. Neither of them mentioned the more morbid novels where the MC was captured, tortured, and forced to spill their secrets.

"I think I understand now. But what about how we are making a splash as traders?"

Daire gazed up and to the left as he answered. The morning sun rays hitting his face.

"Being traders will explain how we come across rare things. I thought about us becoming Adventurers, but it would be harder to sell, and we would be documented individuals then. Harboring a bear, our abundance of meat, the strange clothes, you being Pixie, and my strange device, can all be explained as being northern traders. Things get stranger in Joral the farther north you go. The fact we are so far North already was beyond my expectations, though."

"Does that mean we are closer to Iris?"

"Not necessarily. I don't think we will get access to a reliable map since those are coveted. But, we can at least ask around. That leads me to my next point."

Daire paused.

"Do you have any more pressing questions?"

Violet looked to the dirty bandages covering Daire's arm. Biting her tongue, she shook her head.

"Then lets pay a visit to the Adventurers Branch. We're going on a tour."