As Jude walked deeper into the hills, far ahead, there was a tree with something that looked like pale fruit hanging from its wide branches, and a window appeared above it.
[Frozen Berry]
It was his first time seeing the fruit, but he knew the name. In the beta, there had been an endurance recovery potion that could be bought in the store, and its name had been Frozen Berry Juice. He had never expected to find the fruit itself on these hills.
Jude turned the pale fruit over in his hand and smelled it. It had the same fresh scent as the potion. When he finally put it in his mouth, a sweet and cold taste filled it, and at the same time, a new notification appeared at the bottom of his status window.
[Active Buff: Endurance Recovery.]
When he spat it out, the effect disappeared from the window too, just as it used to.
Reviewing every possibility and preparing for the future was what he had always done. He had no choice, because he lacked the physical skills of the others. Once, he had even dug through the droppings of an imp known for driving away gnolls, just to learn what it ate.
Jude picked a few more frozen berries and put them in his backpack.
He set out across the hills again. As he kept wandering over the unfamiliar ground, his breath began to grow rough, and soon he was panting, with sweat covering his entire body.
Sitting behind the counter of a grocery shop all day meant eating a great deal. The result was a body a hundred and eighty-seven centimeters tall that weighed ninety-five kilograms.
It was while he was walking with those thoughts that he saw something he never wanted to see.
"Damn it!"
It was the droppings of an imp.
An imp was a creature the height of a child, but its strength was comparable to that of a grown man. On top of that, it hunted with paralyzing darts, a method that was hard to deal with even for a veteran. An ordinary man like him would not have any chance against one.
The hair rose on the back of his neck. Danger seemed imminent, and cold sweat was breaking out from all over his body. That was the innate reaction of any living being that was about to face an unknown danger.
This was not the beta. If he died here, he would not come back.
Imps enjoyed disabling their prey with their paralysis poison and playing with it afterward.
He glanced around, and without even taking a second to think, he called out Random Teleportation. The space around him twisted fiercely, and the next moment, he was standing in his own room.
With imps on the hills, walking around aimlessly was the same as suicide, and Jude only had two choices. The first was to stay away from the hills forever, and the second was to prepare thoroughly.
After washing properly, he fell asleep as soon as he touched the bed.
In his dream, imps appeared, and he was fighting them among the trees with a wooden spear in his hand. Why was he using a spear, when the best weapon for hunting imps was a bow?
It was already morning when he woke. Like a dreamer who had been having a nightmare, Jude stepped out of that dream and back into reality.
It was time to restock the shelves for the day's business. He forced his body to move, and he grunted as he stood. Jude really needed to work out.
The old stone house in a residential quarter of Yorbia was his home, with the shop on the ground floor and his rooms on the floor above. Jude had inherited the house after he lost his parents in his second year of high school.
After moving between his relatives' houses and working one job after another as soon as he became an adult, he had finally been able to open a small grocery shop in his late twenties.
The streets around it were crowded with shops, so business was good. His main customers were students, and students only bought where the prices were low. That was why he had always kept his prices cheap.
That day, however, he could not concentrate on the shop at all, because his mind was busy with the status window and the hills.
"Mister..."
"Oh, yes?"
When Jude looked up, the girl from the café next door was smiling at him.
He did not know her age or her name, or anything else about her. All he knew was that she owned the café, and that her skin was so pale that it seemed to glisten under the bright summer sun. He drank his coffee at her café every morning, and she always stopped by the shop after work.
"I've been calling you for a while."
He had been lost in his own thoughts.
"I'm sorry. What would you like?"
"The usual, two bottles of milk, please."
She bought the same two bottles of milk for her café every day.
He put the bottles into a paper bag, while the young men passing in the street glanced at her back.
"Here you are."
When he held out the bag, she accepted it with delight.
"Thank you very much."
She smiled, and he had to admit that she looked cute when she did.
Anyway, she lived a life that had nothing to do with him. The only connection between them was that their shops were next to each other.
Jude watched the news on the television. It was about the weather again.
For the past year, the world's weather had become absurd from one day to the next. Deserts were suddenly flooded with all kinds of storms, and the poles began to thaw because of the high temperatures. This was not all.
Even when the icy places at the ends of the world thawed overnight, the next day the temperatures plummeted again, freezing everything over.
Scientists simply had no way of explaining the phenomenon. Now, even if the sun shone brightly, people always carried umbrellas in their hands, fearing a sudden storm.
It was exactly like the background story he knew.