It’s been two months since the viscount got arrested, and a lot has happened since then.

Of course, we all got stronger during that time.

Since Thalia had the lowest level of us, she had quite a few level ups. But since she is about to catch up, the progress is obviously slowing down now. After all, the higher the level, the more experience it takes to get to the next level.

Thalia she got four level ups and is now level 17. But even I got two new level ups and even Rika got another level up. So I am now level 21, while Rika is now level 29.

My Magic Manipulation skill also went up by one rank, just like my Ice magic affinity.

But apart from magic, I am more surprised that my swordsmanship went up by two ranks, including my katana proficiency. And now I feel a bit stupid that I never practiced my swordsmanship outside of fighting monsters.

It started with me having a sparring match with Rika. No magic, just swords. I could hold up a good fight, but in the end I lost, despite my enhanced physical capabilities. In fact, they were the reason I she couldn’t defeat me in an instant.

After that sparring match, Rika started to teach me. Even though our fighting styles are completely different, there were a lot of basics I didn’t know. And just that helped a lot.

With that, after these two months, Rika and I are now evenly matched, and I even won some of our sparring matches. Well, without my enhanced physical capabilities, she would still beat me. But it seems that for now, it is enough to make up for the difference in level and swordsmanship skill.

Apart from that, even Thalia’s and my guild ranks went up by one rank. So, I am now an E-Rank adventurer, while Thalia reached G-Rank.

But enough of our progress. The guildmaster also informed us about the punishment viscount Hayes received.

Since he had his hand in a lot of criminal activities, not only fell his noble house into ruin. It was not bad enough to receive the death penalty. Something like that will only happen for crimes like treason. Instead, he was made into a criminal slave and they sent him to work at the mines. Honestly, I don’t know how he is going to work there with his lack of physical strength.

His oldest son received the same punishment for his involvement in these crimes.

Only his second son and his wife got away. I didn’t even expect him to have a family. Well, I am not sure if it is right to call it a family. Apparently, he even held his wife like a prisoner. She is the daughter of a baron and he used his influence to force their family into this arranged marriage. Because of that, and since the second son was simply too young to get involved in his father’s crimes, both of them were treated as victims and were allowed to go back to her family.

But that concludes the whole incident and we finally live a normal adventurer’s life.

We currently work in a schedule of doing requests, followed by one free day.

Obviously, I spend most of my free days reading in the library. But I also do a lot of sightseeing with Rika and Thalia.

To me, the most interesting part during sightseeing became exploring different restaurants and trying out new dishes. There are a lot of similarities to the dishes of my old world. There are dishes like stews, casseroles, pasta dishes and so on. But since the ingredients are different, they taste completely different. It’s like I am exploring a whole new food culture. And that makes it so interesting for me.

Well, but unfortunately, that enthusiasm about the food turned into a weird situation at one point.

“I’m a bit curious. Why are you so excited about the food? I mean, it’s delicious, but they are still common dishes.”

When Rika asked that question, it felt like my eyes turned into dots. I mean, how should I explain this? Because of my reaction, Thalia had a hard time trying not to laugh, but I could see that she was also curious about my answer.

For a moment, I thought of staying with the story of having lost my memories. In the end, I didn’t want to lie to them. But I also didn’t want to tell them I came from a different world. So, I went with something in between. If the unlikely event happens, that someone asks me why I told earlier that I don’t remember my past, then I can just say that I remembered it later.

“Ah, you see, my home country is extremely far away. Even if I told you the name, I think nobody in this country would even know about it. I don’t even know how I got here myself. I just know that woke up in the Cursed Forest a few months ago.

Although we had similar dishes in my home country, we used different ingredients, and that’s why everything tastes so different from how I remember it.”

With that, they could relate why I got so excited about food, and they even proactively recommend food I should try next.

It kind of became a competition between Rika and Thalia to recommend new dishes for me and we had a lot of fun during these days.

The only difficult thing was to evade the question about my home country.

Then there are the days we spend in the library. Sometimes Rika and Thalia decide to have a girls’ day and I visit alone, but most of the times they come with me. On a side-note, I used one of their girls’ days to refuel my blood power.

During our visits to the library, we split up into the different areas we are interested in.

Rika mostly reads hero or adventuring stories and old legends, while Thalia is obviously more interested in magic books. I spend most of my time learning about history or culture, while hoping to find relevant information about vampires, but sometimes I join Thalia in the magic section.