Teleporting far from Helenna, I drank MP potions as I chain Jumped along the riverbank.
The yellow sea of fluff was nowhere to be seen by the time I arrived back at the camp.
While I found our belongings in one piece, I couldn’t say the same of the campground—it had been trampled and laid to waste. The mermerls must have rampaged through it when their little one had vanished.
But honestly, thank goodness the mermerls themselves were gone. The “big one” was their enemy, after all.
“Well,” I muttered to myself, “since I came all this way, I might as well get myself ready here.”
I gathered up the barrier tools and the prince’s pack. I stashed them away and then pulled a large basket from my interdimensional storage.
I stripped out of my clothing and swapped into a set of ordinary everyday wear. I also hid my long braided hair inside my jacket.
There, I’ve now changed my job from “Holy Shit, It’s a Mountain Barbarian!” to “Wow, Go Shave Your Beard, Filthy Commoner!”
Hmm...
Now that I thought about it, I considered shaving my beard so I could go undercover. I could even wear a fake beard, which would add some variety to my disguise.
However, the papers I had gotten at the town’s gates had described me as bearded. If I wanted to leave town later without much hassle, I was better off keeping it.
Oh, right. I should forge a second permit.
I’d probably be caught red-handed if anyone were to bother looking any deeper into my forgery, but should push come to shove, I could probably fake my way out of the issue in a pinch. So, I went ahead and made a permit for a villager version of me on the spot.
Now that I had finished my prep work, I returned to Helenna while drinking MP potions. Since Helenna was only a mid-sized town, it wasn’t protected by a Jump-blocking barrier like Tachyrinn Citadel had been.
Now, for my last Jump, I wanted to go back into the alleyway I’d used to exit out of town earlier. If witnesses were a concern, the trick to Jumping into places while keeping people none the wiser was to first warp to a high location. From there, you could check whether the coast was clear. After all, people didn’t really notice things that were above their line of sight.
Once I had infiltrated the town again, my first stop was the bank.
Of course there was a bank here. They had existed in the game too.
In Golden Dawn, bank accounts had been entirely free. There were no fees for withdrawals or deposits either.
But that was just how it’d been in the game. In this world that I’d been reincarnated into, banks charged handling fees for their services.
Speaking of bank accounts, Kariya of Gaelius did not have one. To open an account, a person needed to be well-connected enough to oblige someone to be their referee. They also needed the cold, hard cash to pay the bank fees. A peasant had access to neither.
Besides, I hadn’t known about banks in my childhood, and once I had found out about them, I’d already discovered that I was a transmigrator with a Pocket Dimension-sized wallet. I hadn’t ever felt the need to leave any money with the bank.
Not that I’d had the money to do so anyway. People in the boonies had principally traded in goods, so I hadn’t had much opportunity to handle cash.
Even though I had my massive, interdimensional wallet space, the amount of actual money I’d had to store was no more than a drop in a bucket. That is, until I’d been hired by House Tiuccia and had gone from rags to riches.
I’d made entirely too much money there.
They hadn’t had enough gold coins to pay what they owed me. And not simply “gold” as a currency system, but actual solid gold coins. One gold coin was valued at ten thousand “gold” currency. Anyway, because of that, I had allowed them to pay me in rare metals instead at the time.
However, now that I was back to being a peasant, I understood my situation with greater clarity.
A gold coin, which was equivalent in value to one million Japanese yen, was not an amount of money a simple peasant could be spending. That wasn’t a coin that could be used in a poor, desolate village. For starters, anyone I might’ve tried to trade with wouldn’t have enough hard cash to make change. But more importantly, having that much money would only cause bad rumors to spread.
So, I didn’t really keep much cash on me. To tell the truth, I had spent nearly all I’d had on the inn earlier. The proprietress of the inn had somewhat apologetically watched me count out every last coin I had to pay the bill in full.
I had no intention of asking Prince Wald to foot the bill for anything either. There was no point in asking anyway. We had escaped from Tachyrinn with nothing but the clothes on our backs—he didn’t have coin on him. He had regularly spent his days without carrying any money on his person.
He’d requested that I sell off the clothing and other accoutrements he’d given me for safekeeping to help pay for our journey. But even if I were to turn it all into scrap to sell, even a single button off his uniform was so valuable that we’d be easily tracked.
It’s fine, we don’t have to sell your clothes.
I have money—even if it’s in gold coins.
Basically, I needed to liquidate some coins in order for us to have usable money.
At the bank’s exchange counter, I asked them to give me enough gold for three coins. I was pretty sure that amount of money would be just below their radar and wouldn’t raise any suspicions, given the mercantile background I had invented for myself.
With that, I had safely secured thirty thousand gold, minus five percent for handling fees. That put my on-hand finances within the realm of spending money.
They’d asked me for my identification papers and had simply accepted them at a glance; my cover hadn’t been blown. Wow, were they ever lax.
Putting the money into my coin purse, I let out a quiet sigh.
This should last about half a year...hopefully. At least as long as we don’t keep staying at fancy inns.
Upon exiting the bank, I headed toward the adventurer’s guild.
While the guild hadn’t had a branch in Ruicerl, they did have a location here in Helenna.
I needed to get into the guild and ascertain the state of the war between Tiuccia and Khrasiel after our escape from Tachyrinn. I had to find out whether a bounty had been placed on Prince Wald’s head...and on my own.