Searching from overhead, I was immediately able to locate a town.
Rather, it was just down the road leading from the ruined Kingdom of Alchemy. It was a castle town built atop a plain and surrounded by fortress walls. According to the Tome of General Knowledge, apparently the town’s name was Solasidore, and it was part of the neighboring kingdom, Pavelkant.
“All right, this’ll be my first stop!”
First, let’s nail down my background in case anyone asks: As the Kingdom of Alchemy was getting razed by God’s wrath, I ran here for refuge. I’d just become a merchant in the Kingdom of Alchemy the other day, and I was now out of work. I needed a place where I could set up a new storefront. Something like that, maybe?
After mulling it over for a while, I decided that becoming a merchant would be my best option. Using the spatial magic the Goddess gave me, I could store a hundred copies of this planet or more, which for my purposes might as well have been infinite. Also, with the ability to teleport, I could zip between towns and cities regardless of road conditions! I could carry as much as I wanted without having to worry about transport fees! Yessiree, it’s a merchant’s life for me!
“Plus, I can read and write, and use magic besides. Finding work should be simple enough anyway.” Even if I couldn’t hack it as a merchant, I could definitely become an adventurer for hire. As long as I had spatial magic, no monster could scare me! If possible, I’d like to make a killing right off the bat, then spend the rest of my days living a comfortable life. Then I could work only when I felt like it and laze around the rest of the time!
I teleported myself to Solasidore’s gates. Fortunately, there was no queue to get in. The wall was so enormous that you had to look up to see the top, and the gates were just as imposing. A guard stationed at the gates spotted me and called out.
“Proof of identification?”
Proof of identification? Dammit, I don’t have anything like that.
“I-I’m sorry, sir. I lost it.”
“Then I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
“Um... W-Wait! I need help! I’ve been attacked!” Realizing he was about to shoo me away, I thought fast.
“What?! Explain! Where did it happen?! Who attacked you?!” The look on the guard’s face changed immediately, and he began pressing me for details.
Huh? Now you’re interested?
“Um, well, you know the Kingdom of Alchemy, right? A god attacked there! I had no choice but to leave all my belongings behind and flee!”
“Huh? Oh...the Kingdom of Alchemy, you say?” The guard mulled over my story (that did contain a grain of truth) for a while. Just as I was worrying that I’d said the wrong thing and accidentally made more trouble for myself, he nodded.
“So you’re a resident of the Kingdom of Alchemy, then?”
“Um, yes, that’s right. My name’s Karina.”
“All right. Come with me. I need to ask you some questions.”
The guard led me into the guardroom.
K-chak, came the sound of a door locking behind me. Wait, huh?
“Now then...Karina, you said? Just who are you, really?”
Was I being interrogated, by any chance?
I immediately came up with a story off the top of my head. It was a little long-winded, but to sum up:
I’m Karina, eighteen years old! I moved from the Kingdom of Alchemy to Pavelkant’s fort town Solasidore to try to strike it rich as a merchant! But since my home was destroyed, I have nowhere to go back to if you don’t let me in! I’m in a tight spot here! My possessions also all got stolen by a hometown acquaintance who I thought was my friend, so I have nothing to my name!
“Oh, is that so? Sounds like you’ve had it rough—if you’re telling the truth, that is.”
Despite my efforts to explain myself, the guard couldn’t have looked more doubtful. Come to think of it, I’m really kind of too pretty to be walking around on my own, huh? I mean, would anyone in this world with looks like mine normally be traveling on foot from one kingdom to another by themselves? And even though I’d said I was attacked, my clothes weren’t dirty, and I didn’t have a scratch on me. Yeah, no wonder he was skeptical.
“A-Actually, the truth is...I flew here using magic,” I said. I didn’t tell him it was spatial magic, but it probably wasn’t impossible to use magic to fly in this world, considering I’d seen the old man try to use it to escape at one point. Still, when I finally admitted a little of the truth to the guard...
“Oh? Then you’re a mage, I take it? And your stolen possessions? How did that happen?”
“I, um, woke up and everything was gone?”
“And you plan on becoming a merchant?” he scoffed.
Wah, this guy doesn’t miss a thing! I mean, I know it’s his job and all, but still! Crap, I should’ve just teleported to the city proper instead of the gate!
After that, I showed them that I could read and write—to which they then suspected I might be a spy. “I don’t think someone as dumb as her could be a spy, though,” another guard helpfully pointed out. So then they thought I might just be a decoy for an actual spy, at which point they added more guards to keep a close eye on me— Aaah! O Goddess, please save me! Your disciple’s in serious trouble here!
“Hm? Did you call for me? I thought I heard a sincere prayer from you just now.”
“Goddess?!”
Suddenly, I heard her voice. When I turned to look at the first guard again, he’d stopped moving, almost as though time itself had frozen.
“Did you...stop time?!”
“Well, yeah. I am the Goddess of Time and Space, after all. I’ve only stopped the flow of time within this room, though. That said, you’re lucky there wasn’t a dog in here—the rules say I’m forbidden to stop dogs with this spell, so I can’t do this if there’s one nearby.”
Huh? Why? And why only dogs?
“By the way, I’m also forbidden to grant you temporal magic. But if you want to learn it on your own, I’m not gonna stop you.”
The Goddess casually admitted she didn’t care whether I learned a spell I wasn’t supposed to learn. Isn’t that, like, a big deal?
“Anyway, so you need my help, huh? Very well, but do just this one thing for me in exchange: leave me an offering at the next church you come across.”
“I-I’ll do it! Oh, but it’d be great if you could help me resolve this situation as peacefully as possible, though. I’d rather not kill anyone...and I hope by ‘offering,’ you don’t mean a sacrifice or anything...”
“Hey now, just who do you think I am? I don’t just go around killing people indiscriminately.”
Sorry. To be honest, I didn’t think you were too different from an actual god of destruction.
“I’ve made a fake ID for you and put it in your space of holding. Just show ’em that, and you’ll be off the hook.”
“Th-Thank you so much, Goddess! I’ll give you a great offering as a token of my gratitude!”
“By the way—and this is very important—rather than a regular offering, I’d like the stockings of a beautiful girl. Other than yourself, that is.”
“Why would you want a beautiful girl’s stockings? Aren’t you basically a girl too?”
“It’s just what I’m into.”
Who knew the gods had such...eccentric hobbies?
“Now then, on my count, I’m going to restore time to its normal flow! Ready? Three, two, one...”
At the end of the Goddess’s countdown, time moved again.
“Oh! I-I have proof of identification after all!”
“You do? But I thought you said you lost it earlier.”
“W-Well, I forgot I hid it underneath my clothes! Here you go.” As I reached into my shirt, I stealthily opened up my space of holding and pulled out the proof of identification the Goddess had given me. It was a medallion only slightly larger than a five-hundred-yen coin but with a hole in the center like a five-yen one. I handed the medal to the guard, who scrutinized it.
“This is... Yes, I see now.” The guard had clearly changed his tune—his stern expression had relaxed. “All right, you’re clear. You can pass. Really, why didn’t you just say who you were from the start?”
“S-Sorry. Thank you very much.” Wow, that proof of ID must’ve really been something special. I wasn’t sure what it signified, but at least it had let me through. The guard handed the medal back to me, and I took another look at it.
It looked no different from a jumbo-size five-yen coin.
Seriously? Five-yen coins count for identification in this world? No sooner than I thought that, the Goddess’s voice resounded in my head once more.
“Actually, no. That’s a hypnosis item, and it fooled the guard into thinking you’d given him proper identification. But the effect wears off the more you use the coin, so be careful!”
Is it just me, or is this “goddess” more like a demon? But, well, she did save me, so I kept my mouth shut. Let’s just count it as a blessing for now.
“Oh, by the way, I forgot to tell you something when we first met, so do you mind if I tell you now? Doesn’t matter, I’ll say it anyway—truth is, this world’s actually on the verge of collapsing.”
Excuse me? What did she just say?
“You see, there are these superspecial, ultra-awesome things called ‘sacred treasures,’ but there are so many of them that they sorta ended up consuming the world’s energy, and we’re kind of in an energy deficit right now. So if you feel up to it, I wouldn’t mind if you retrieved them for me.”
Huh? That sounds awfully urgent, don’t you think?! Should you really be saying something like that so nonchalantly?!
“Well, it’s not like the world will fall apart immediately if you don’t. I just thought that if you had nothing else better to do, it might be good if you did that. I’ll tell you more once you bring that offering I asked for to the church. Laters!”
The Goddess’s voice in my head fell silent.
Wh-What the hell?! The world’s on the verge of collapse?! Then I can’t waste any time—I need to get a beautiful girl’s stockings as soon as I can and learn what I need to do to keep this from coming to pass!