Afterward, Makarov hauled Aibo by the scruff of his neck to apologize to the mayor, while the guild master covered the cost of repairing the riverbank.
This piled even more debt onto Aibo, who was already drowning in it.
At just six years old, he owed several hundred thousand J.
It was truly heartbreaking.
In the end, the guild master also ordered him to write a letter of apology and a statement of repentance, and strictly forbade Aibo from using Crush Magic anywhere in town.
As a result, Aibo went an entire day without gaining a single point of inspiration.
A total loss, really.
Strangely, though, Aibo’s reputation among the guild members skyrocketed.
A bunch of old men were loudly proclaiming things like “My path is not lonely” and “The next generation has arrived,” getting dead drunk and leaving Aibo completely baffled.
It wasn’t as if there were no gains at all.
That one Crush Magic blast by the riverbank had consumed about 100 points of magic power and earned him 2 experience points, allowing Aibo to test his mana regeneration rate—roughly 1 point per minute.
Well, he’d never had the chance to burn through a large amount of magic power before.
Telepathy Magic and short-range Requip Magic barely cost anything.
At the same time, the sheer power of Crush Magic gave Aibo a bit of confidence.
He was no longer a mage who couldn’t even truss a chicken.
But Aibo also knew he hadn’t truly mastered Crush Magic.
Was this perhaps a drawback of the system?
Magic that had been forcibly elevated in level was hard to control.
Requip Magic, which he’d learned on his own, didn’t have that problem at all—it was extremely stable.
This discovery made Aibo abandon the idea of continuing to use inspiration points to force-feed himself magic.
Ordinary magic wasn’t that hard to learn anyway, so he’d just take his time and learn it himself.
Besides, Aibo’s most pressing problem wasn’t learning magic anymore—he needed to make money!
Not to pay off his debt.
The guild could wait for its money.
The important thing was that he needed to move!
Aibo could no longer stand living in the guild’s men’s dormitory.
It wasn’t that the dormitory was poor quality—it was the environment that was terrible.
The guild’s men’s dormitory was packed with a bunch of unruly hellions.
Not only was it deafeningly loud at night, but they fought and brawled every single day.
And fighting wasn’t even the worst of it—they used magic, turning the dormitory into either a minor earthquake zone or a fire alert.
Fine, he could live with that.
They were just as bad in the guild hall anyway.
No matter how many times they got yelled at, they never changed.
Aibo was pretty much used to it by now. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The worst part was that this bunch of sexually repressed dickheads got horny every night, and all kinds of bizarre thoughts flooded straight into Aibo’s head—and damn it, he couldn’t block them out.
What made it even more painful was that Aibo had to swallow this bitterness like a mute forced to eat a bitter herb—suffering in silence and unable to blame them.
Aibo would never tell anyone that his Telepathy Magic couldn’t be turned off.
No one would want to be around someone who was constantly eavesdropping on their inner thoughts.
So Aibo always claimed he could control his magic perfectly.
Given his genius-level performance, no one had ever doubted it.
This suffering could only be endured alone.
At first, Aibo thought living in the dormitory could count as a kind of training.
Under pressure, maybe he’d quickly learn how to shut off his Telepathy Magic.
But reality was disappointing.
Over ten days had passed, and he was still helpless against the out-of-control Telepathy Magic.
Every night he was tormented—like more than a dozen burly men snoring right next to his ears.
It was practically hell on earth.
A harsh living environment affects your mood.
If your mood is bad, you can’t enjoy yourself.
If you can’t enjoy yourself, your rate of progress slows down.
And if he couldn’t get stronger fast, how was he supposed to build a harem in another world!?
This was a matter of life and death!
So now, making money to move had become Aibo’s top priority.
“Yo, Little Gil~ You here to take a job too?”
Macao, a guild mainstay who specialized in Fire Magic, slung an arm around Aibo, who was standing in front of the request board, and grinned.
“…Uncle Macao, if you call me that stupid nickname again, I’m really going to get angry!”
“Hey, hey, hey, what’s with the ‘uncle’?! I’m only 28, still young!”
Aibo swatted away the big hand rubbing the top of his head and let out a helpless sigh.
Ever since the people in the guild found out that Aibo had actually learned Gildarts’s Crush Magic, some busybody had given him the nickname “Little Gil,” which disgusted him to no end.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have the strength to deal with these drunk old men just yet, so he could only jot their names down in his little notebook for now.
“Because I got fined over a hundred thousand J, I’ve been thinking about how to make money lately. But I looked around, and none of the jobs I can take pay much…”
“Haha, you don’t need to rush to pay that back. With your potential, it’ll be easy to earn that money in the future!”
“It’s not that I’m in a hurry to pay it back…”
The mage guilds in this world were different from the otherworld adventurer guilds Aibo remembered.
Although mage guilds had a unified governing body, they basically operated independently, and the jobs they handled were strongly regional.
Most of the jobs in the guild were within Magnolia Town’s boundaries or came from residents of the surrounding villages.
Generally, only S-class jobs required traveling far, and very few people in the guild could take those.
Even Aibo could complete those on his own, and the guild master wouldn’t stop him from taking them.
But…
they didn’t pay much.
Even completing these jobs only earned a few thousand J, a little over ten thousand at most.
Renting a place outside the dormitory started at sixty or seventy thousand J a month, and buying a house was even further out of reach.
And even if he moved somewhere else and rented, it seemed like it still wouldn’t solve the problem of being tormented by inner voices at night.
He’d need to buy a big house at the very least.
Ugh, what a headache.
“Little Aibo~ Come on, big sis is taking you out to play!”
Cana came bouncing over, grabbed Aibo’s hand, and started pulling him toward the door.
[Time to take my little brother to meet new friends~ So happy~]
“Huh? Wait, Cana, mm—”
His mouth was stuffed with a peeled orange segment, and amid Cana’s giggles, he was dragged out of the guild.
This was probably a lingering effect of the riverbank explosion incident.
Cana had grown closer and closer to Aibo, treating him completely like her own little brother.
No—from Cana’s inner thoughts, he could tell she’d completely decided that Aibo was another illegitimate child of Gildarts.
Because Aibo had similar sakura-colored hair, and at just six years old he’d used Gildarts’s signature Crush Magic, while the guild’s shameless old men kept making wild jokes.
Cana was now utterly convinced that Aibo was her half-brother, sharing the same father.
She’d even…
in the snippets of Cana’s inner thoughts he occasionally overheard, her attitude toward Gildarts had undergone a subtle shift.
Now Aibo didn’t dare call Cana “big sis” anymore.
His original intention had been to get closer to the kids, but now the intimacy level seemed at risk of maxing out.
Too much is as bad as too little.
Ugh, what a headache.
“Cana, where are you taking me?”
“Geez, call me big sis!”
Cana pinched Aibo’s cheek and smiled:
“Big sis is taking you to make new friends. She’s one of my best friends. Didn’t Aibo want to learn more magic? Then studying all kinds of magical scripts is essential. That big sis can help you out.”
Although Aibo’s head was full of how to make money right now, and he’d already pushed magic study down his list of priorities, he couldn’t really refuse Cana’s kindness…
Cana led Aibo winding through the town until they reached a somewhat old bookstore.
Before they even entered, she started calling out enthusiastically:
“Levy~ Levy~ I brought my cute little brother to come play with you!”