It proved much harder than expected to find a restaurant. After all, in the middle of the slums, while it was still possible to get food, this area was relatively impoverished, and so there weren’t exactly bakeries lining the streets.

However, after a bit of searching, Sallia and I ended up in the place where my mother most likely worked - the red light district. Unlike the rest of the slums, this area had a lot of abundant entertainment facilities. And, since plenty of wealthier people also visited the area to enjoy themselves, there were also plenty of restaurants, bakeries, and similar stores in the area.

Before leaving the alleyway, we had looted the gangsters who had attacked us and found a few notes of money. After asking Anise, we learned that we were holding 1 arling and 42 Sterlings in our hands. One full meal for an adult male cost about 7 sterlings, and most adults ate two meals a day in this era. 50 sterlings made up 1 arling. So 1 arling and 42 sterlings was a pretty sizable sum of money for random kids, even if it was probably less than a week of pay for an average factory worker. Since Sallia and I were small, we ate much less than the average grown man, so the money was enough to splurge on one meal and then store some food for the future.

I estimated that I could stretch the money to last me a month if I ate conservatively. Not a bad haul.

“We should probably avoid spending too much at any one place,” I said. “If anyone sees two four year old kids spending a bunch of money, they’ll know something is wrong.”

“They’ll think we nicked the money,” said Sallia. “But we should still avoid spending too much in one place. Two four year olds holding a decent amount of money will make us seem like easy targets. Though you are right that nobody in their right mind will trace the deaths of those thugs to us. In this world, nobody would expect a four year old to do any sort of fighting.”

I blinked.

I had… forgotten that. I was very used to the notion that even a four year old could be incredibly dangerous when armed with the right spells, since in our previous two worlds, magic was an incredibly potent and powerful combat method. But in this world, magic was mostly related to item creation.

Perhaps I had been overly cautious all this time? Since magic was so rare here, people were spectacularly unlikely to think of four year olds as being dangerous. Of course, that also meant that people wouldn’t hesitate to mess with me. In our second world, an adult male challenging a teenage witch would have been considered a suicidal madman. And a few seconds later, they would probably be charcoal. In this world, a grown man could probably punch out a trained alchemist without issue. Magic was both common and nonthreatening, so even if Sallia and I could probably fight a smaller gang on our own and win, people would still think of us as weak until we proved otherwise.

It was a strange thought. I mulled over it for a few seconds, thinking about how drastically the presence and type of magic in the world could alter the way people thought about each other, before I decided to focus on food again.

“Either way, best not to draw attention to ourselves. Let’s spend half an arling at one shop, and then half an arling at a few other shops, stock up on food and other necessities, and then stick it all in my backpack. And let’s also stay away from shops in the same area,” I said.

Sallia paused, and then shook her head. “I think we should get a nice meal first. You really need to relax a little. You seem pretty stressed out. Let’s relax a little and then make a more concrete plan.”

I paused, and then nodded.

Finally, after searching through the red light district for a while, the two of us found a restaurant that was open.

The woman standing behind the counter looked to be a little on the plump side, and wore a chef’s apron. The fact that she was a bit chubby caught me off guard, considering how scarce food usually was in the slums. It had been a while since I saw plump people.

Clearly, she wasn’t financially struggling at all.

She gave me and Sallia a distrustful eye each, before snorting. “My shop doesn’t do handouts. If you want to beg, go to the church or look somewhere else. I don’t need little thieves wandering into the shop and looking for things to steal. Shoo! Shoo!” she waved violently towards the door, before shooing us out of the shop.

I sighed, and we quickly left the shop. I took a look at myself, and realized I was still wearing the ragged dress my mother had put on me over my {Lake-Gazer’s Dress}. It did indeed look like I was a beggar of some sort. However, even if I spent a lot of time changing around the style of the {Lake-Gazer’s Dress}, it would still look far too nice for this area.

We spent another ten minutes carefully moving from one shop to the next, this time taking more care to pick which shop we went to eat at. We wanted a restaurant that looked like it was doing well enough that it wouldn’t feed us moldy bread. However, we also didn’t want a shop so well-off for the slum area that it would kick us out for looking like ragamuffin street kids.

Finally, we found a shop that met our requirements. It looked and smelled like a bakery.

The old man behind the counter had a somewhat gruff expression, but when he saw us, his gaze grew a little bit gentler.

At least, for a fraction of a second, before it returned to a more normal, indifferent look.

“What are you two doing in here?” he asked, giving us careful looks. “I don’t do handouts.”

“We can pay for food!” I said.

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The man frowned, then looked at my ragged clothes and Sallia’s ragged clothes. Then, he sighed. “Get lucky today? Fine, I won’t ask where the money came from. What do you want to buy?”

I nodded, and quickly checked the prices in the man’s shop.

This shop appeared to be a bakery that also sold some soup. The bakery side had a few different kinds of bread, but the majority of the bread types seemed pretty basic. And at the back, there was a bin of slightly older-looking bread. It had started to harden up, and wasn’t quite as soft-looking as the loaves of bread near the front of the shop. The loaves of slightly stale bread also didn’t smell quite as nice.

I pointed at the bin of slightly stale bread.

“What kind of bread is that?”

“Discount bread,” he said. “Sometimes I prepare some extra bread because I think sales will be better the next day. I’m usually right but… not always,” he said with a shrug. “Last week, sales didn’t go up as much as I expected, so I have some slightly stale bread laying around. I’m selling it for five sterlings instead of the usual seven. You want it?”

I grinned, and nodded.

“One loaf for both of you?”

“And some soup, please,” I said, eyeing the soup menu on the side of the wall. Unfortunately, I couldn’t read it either.

“What kind of soup are you selling?”

“Can’t read?” asked the man, before shaking his head.

“You see this letter here? It makes a ‘ku’ sound. Then, this one makes a ‘la’ sound, and this makes a ‘ren’ sound. So this is kularen soup. I only sell one kind of soup each day.”

“What’s a kularen?” I asked.

“A kind of vegetable. It has a hearty flavor. It tastes pretty good. Do you want to try it?”

I nodded.

Then, I paused, and smiled at the man.

“Thank you for teaching me those letters,” I said.

The man gave me another, softer grin.

“No worries. Least I can do for paying customers,” He said, with a grin. “One bowl for both of you?”

“Should be fine,” said Sallia. “We’re a bit small.”

The man cackled. “True enough. Two sterlings for a smaller bowl of soup good?”

“Yes please! And can we have a table near the back of the shop?”

“That’s fine. Usually takes another hour or two for people to really start coming in. Seven sterlings in total,” said the man. “And my name’s old Mo.” he gave me a slightly larger grin.

I smiled back.

“My name is Miria,” I said. I had a decent feeling about the man, and even if I turned out to be wrong, I doubted he could do anything to hurt me just from knowing my name.

“Sallia,” said Sallia.

“Nice to meet both of you little ladies,” he said, before quickly showing us a table we could occupy. It was far enough away from the front that we could talk in peace, without fear of being overheard. Then, he gave us a friendly smile, before disappearing towards the kitchen.

After seeing the walking catastrophe of my mother’s drug addiction, having a nice, normal chat with somebody felt… amazing.

A few minutes later, he plopped down one of the pieces of stale bread and a big bowl of kularen soup in front of Sallia and I.

The kularen soup looked kind of like someone had stuffed a bunch of purple carrots into a broth, along with a few other vegetables. It smelled nice, although I decided not to think too hard about what exactly I was eating.

It did taste nice and warm, though, and with the bread to mop up the soup broth, it tasted lovely. The soup broth also softened up the stale bread, making it taste decent.

“So, let’s talk,” said Sallia, after old Mo went back to the front of the bakery/restaraunt.

I paused, and then sighed.

“Yeah, let’s,” I said.

“You seem stressed out,” said Sallia, temporarily switching to the language we had spoken on the islands to prevent any unnoticed eavesdroppers from listening to our conversation. “Not just stressed out. You seem… uncertain?” she said. “I think? I’m not used to that.” She smiled at me. “When you were living in the islands with me, it never seemed like you were unsure what to do. You always had some kind of plan. Your plans were usually insane, and they did get us killed, but you were never worried about how to move forward.”

“It’s just…” I sighed. “Everything. I’ve done a lot of insane things, but I always had people I cared about pushing me forward. I mean, in my first life, if we hadn’t pushed back the invaders, my parents would have suffered or died under the rule of the outsiders. And in the second world, if we didn’t find a way to push back the black sun, I thought that maybe that world would die, along with us and everyone we cared about. But I’ve never had doubts about my family itself. Every single time I’ve been reincarnated so far, loving my family, and knowing that they cared about me and prioritized my well-being was… easy, I guess.” I said. “I didn’t need to think about it. My family loved me, and I loved them, and there wasn’t anything more to think about in that respect. This life, I haven’t even properly communicated with my mother - she’s drugged out almost all the time, and the one time she wasn’t drugged out, she said she was sorry and cried while holding me. But…” I sighed. “I don’t know. She’s slowly killing herself - and it’s just… I’m worried.”

“Worried?” asked Sallia, before stuffing a heel of soup-soaked bread into her mouth.

“Worried,” I said. “Can I heal her? Even if I do… will it matter?” I took a deep breath. “I mean, I know I can heal the physical aspects of addiction, given enough time. I can even regrow limbs that have been severed. I’m sure I can heal whatever drugs do the physical body. But…” I paused, sinking into thought as I arranged my words. “Addiction is really complex, and usually stems from a mixture of physical and psychological factors. I suspect that I can’t heal the psychological factors… and I also can’t fix whatever made my mother turn to drugs in the first place. Maybe I can figure out how to alter my spell a bit more, or come up with some creative use of the madness component of my abilities to fix it, but… I don’t know if I can do so in a reasonable time frame. And I’m also very afraid to experiment with magi that messes with people’s minds. Odds are decent that I accidentally turn my mother into a vegetable instead of curing her.”

“Do you have any guesses what caused her to start using drugs?”

I shook my head. “I noticed that there are no hints of a father at all in the house. That could be linked, or might be random. Maybe he died, and mother started using drugs after that? Or maybe he left?” I shook my head. “That’s my best guess, but honestly, I have no idea.”

Sallia paused, as if thinking for a moment, and then got up from her chair, and moved over to me. Then, she folded me into a gentle hug, and gently stroked my head.

“It’ll be all right,” she said softly. “Whatever happens, I know that you’re a strong enough person to overcome it. And I’ll be here to help. Not just me, but Anise and Felix as well.”

My eyes started watering a little bit as I let my best friend hug me.

For a moment, at least, I felt safe and happy again.