Chapter 124: Chapter 116 – Happiness and Strips of Cloth

I greeted a pair of hunters as they were exiting the dungeon. It looked like they were just getting something for their own dinner.

This sort of thing was fine at this point, but it was only a matter of time before serious traffic would form around the entrance on a regular basis. Whether it was in months, years, or even decades in the future, it was something that would have to be dealt with.

But at the same time I didn't want to restrict people's freedom too much.

It was hard to come up with a balance, so in the end I just left it. The will to find a solution would rise up once problems started to form anyways. Even if it was a type of procrastination, this much should be allowable. I had more pressing matters to deal over convincing people that some sort of regulation for entry into the dungeon was required.

Before entering the dungeon, I took one last look back.

The sight of a group of fairies and spirits dancing around above the roofs of the town entered my eyes. Those four were probably a part of the group which had moved in to live together with the dark races.

The fairies had become split into three camps since the forming of the Hourai Commonwealth.

The gatherers who procured raw ingredients in the dungeon, the producers that crafted all sorta of things for everyone's daily lives, especially equipment for the gatherers, and the patissiers who made the treats that have so far not even come close to meeting demand.

And due to that demand for treats not being met, many fairies had moved to the dark settlement to access even a pool of freshly made confectioneries with lower local demand.

Alternatively, several people from the dark lands had moved to the fairy settlement due to the higher prices their products garnered.

Originally I had envisioned that some sort of incentive or even orders from the leadership would have to be implemented to have people from both sides move to the other to intermingle, but it seemed like I had severely underestimated economic forces.

Food really was a huge driver of people's lives. Something which had grown harder and harder for me to really grasp as I could no longer take in traditional foods.

But just because I couldn't experience the fruits of such things directly, didn't mean that I couldn't enjoy it.

Watching those fairies dancing around in the air together with those spirits that decided to follow them here past the untamed wilderness between the still separated settlements, my cheeks ended up rising before I even knew it.

Not only that, but the flickering lights that illuminated those little flying beings suggested that there was even a small outdoor party going on in that area.

The fact that not only the fairies and fluffballs were enjoying themselves this night, but even some of the dark people were joining in on the festivities pointed out just how well the two disparate groups were getting along despite the war between their races which lasted longer than history itself.

It was really good to know that the walls between these two groups really weren't as high as the stories had suggested.

The very fact reminded me of that one story regarding the first world war.

Despite the best attempts of the leadership during the time, the people in the trenches, the day of Christmas, established a temporary ceasefire. Not only that, but they even sang carols together and some even met together in no man's land and exchanged gifts.

It really was unfortunate that it had only happened once, as by the next year the animosity between the two sides had grown as the soldiers grew more jaded from the unending combat and death.

But that one day could be considered a genuine Christmas miracle.

And the sight of those fairies dancing and drinking above the heads of a group of dark people meant that a similar miracle had formed right here in the no man's land between the dark and light lands.

The urge to continue watching the small glowing lights flickering around with the unveiled stars as a backdrop grew ever stronger inside of me, but I had things to do as well. My sleepless nights would continue with little rest for a while longer, but hopefully my situation would improve soon so that I could take proper breaks here and there.

(Maybe instituting a regular holiday would help?)

But considering how much work needs to be done just to get the basics all covered for a pair of fully functioning settlements, something like everyone taking off a day a week didn't seem like something that could be workable for a while.

I could only lament my misfortune as I returned home, envious of all those who couldn't understand how much background work went into making this new nation happy and prosperous.

But it wasn't like I could really neglect my work either.

All those smiles, knowing that I had a part in creating them, any thought of abandoning my work was simply blown away.

 

"Mmmm~!"

Even if it made me sound old, I couldn't help but let that sigh escape my lips as I sunk my shoulders under the warmth of the hot water of my bath.

After a hard day's work, there was only a fresh, body temperature meal followed up with a hot bath to blow away all the stress that had accumulated. Together with the soft warmth of Claret's body as she gave her body to mine, I was in bliss.

Soon, very soon, Alicia's tiny body would join Claret in my arms as we enjoyed each other's warmth.

The skills to create her body had been finished, and I hadn't found a single error in the code in the last two weeks during my nightly checks. It didn't mean that there weren't any for sure, but I was pretty confident that there weren't any problematic ones at this point. The only way to know for sure was to execute the skills, but if there was any critical errors, especially on the main two skills, it would be too late by that point.

The very thought made me hesitant, but the longer I left things, the harder it would be for Alicia to adapt to her new body.

It was probably almost time to make a decision.

But before that...

I tossed the bar of soap that I held in my hand into a bucket at the far end of the room and rinsed my fingers in the bath water before stroking Claret's silky hair.

After all the work I had put into it, my dark spirit's silky strands not only had a beautiful gloss, but were wonderful to the touch. It was a far cry from the plain, slightly oily hair she had in the past due to her lack of care.

In fact, it was quite amazing that her hair managed to avoid being a tangled, broken mess. Maybe it had to do with her body's constitution, as her hair might have been comprised of living tissue, or whatever spirits had that constituted their body mass.

But whatever her hair was made from, it certainly benefited from being treated properly like normal hair.

And due to that, I refused to allow her beautiful hair to be subjected to that substandard soap which I had tested with my own hair just earlier.

That soap wasn't terrible by any means, but it certainly couldn't be called anything great. It was a test product by an alchemist who grew interested in the soap which I used when trying to introduce some basic hygiene practices to the nation.

While getting people to wash their hands after returning home didn't do well, nor making people bathe daily, I did manage to convince people the importance of washing after they became dirty from hunting or working which strong smelling chemicals.

A few simple bathhouses were erected with that, but when I looked at how many people used them, I couldn't really consider it much of a success.

The dark people already did minimal washing in the first place, just not with soap or hot water. The changes of simply using a river or well water to a bath tub and encouraging the use of soap while bathing could hardly be considered a big change when most people still weren't doing it habitually.

Hair oil was doing better, but it was severely limited by production. There were quite a few women who liked the results of using hair oil, and the fairies loved the scented variety regardless of gender. But for the fairies that was hardly any different from using perfumes and scented incense.

Personally though, I couldn't be entirely satisfied with my own hair. Claret's either, but the improvements to hers over the last few months was so good that it was hard to complain out loud this soon.

But as a person who had been using nice soap and hair oil for so long, I couldn't help but compare my own hair to those from the occasional commercial I had seen in my previous life.

(Maybe I should try out some of those weird hair remedies I had seen pop up here and there while searching for other things online?)

Every once in a while, my curiosity got the better of me, but back then I couldn't really get too interested beyond reading a random article that was pushed onto me from some web site's link or a stray ad watching videos for other things.

Especially due to its length, it was quite important to take care of my hair as it would take years for it to regrow if I was forced to cut it due to damage.

It was probably a good idea to look into some of those hair treatments once I had some more time for myself.

I played around with Claret's hair a bit longer before forcing myself out of the bath.

Once I dried myself, I fished out one of my few spare clothes from my bag.

I had Anathousai make me several pieces of inner clothes, but the one I opted to put on at this point was something different.

It was an extremely long sheet of processed silk with little gems sewn into them to resemble shooting stars running along the length of the black cloth.

This article was something which Elli had commissioned for me way back when we had first met. It was quite unfortunate that I didn't have the chance to ask about the particularities of what she was going to have one of her tailors make.

The horror which I desperately did my best to contain at the time bubbled up in my mind.

 

A few weeks after the meetings in which the Hourai Commonwealth was created, Elli had invited me to visit the tailor which was put in charge of making the outfit she had commissioned.

By that point, I had completely forgotten that such a thing was even going on, and I had nothing but a bad feeling about it. Dokkalfar fashion was quite peculiar. At least from my perspective.

The men wore hip wraps which the ends each wrapped around a leg and was tucked under itself just above the knees. A separate wrap went around each shin rising up from the low ankle shoes which they wore. Further up, they wore a long piece of cloth circled onto itself several times, and was worn like a sash, with one end looping around their necks and draped back over their other shoulder a bit like a loose scarf.

The women wore the same ankle wraps, but their hip wraps didn't separate and were shaped more like some sort of layered miniskirt. For their upper bodies they wore a long sheet which wrapped around their chest and shoulders loosely.

From a pure fashion standpoint as an outsider, they made it look real good. Especially despite the fact that they didn't diverge from this base style too much, it was quite incredible how each and every person managed to personalize their outfit. From dyed colours to different woven patterns to little decorations sewn into the fabric, even to the minutely different ways they wrapped the cloth around their bodies.

And while admiring and enjoying the view was one thing, it was a quite different thing when I considered exposing my skin the way they considered normal.

Showing my arms and legs was one thing. Unless if it was outside during the day, in which case I would refrain with everything I had. Exposing my belly in public wasn't something I had done since the last time I went swimming as a child.

Putting aside the time when I didn't even have a single article of clothes to my name after I was reborn, that was.

But the dokkalfar, especially the women, took pride in showing their bellies.

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It seemed like the roots of it came from the practical need of being able to bend their spines freely along with all their other joints. It was likely the reason why they didn't cover their knees and they didn't cover their arms.

That much I could understand. Though the degree of understanding changed drastically later on when I got to see how they fought.

The way they bent their bodies around enemy attacks to such extreme degrees that would make most chiropractors faint with froth coming out of their mouths, or along with that insane spine movement, the footwork which made you wonder how they didn't break or dislocate anything and the whip like ways their arms moved as they attacked. It really showed how much they valued the quick movements and flexibility of their joints.

I understood that. In my brain, I understood that.

But that had nothing to do with being able to accept the thought of wearing such an outfit myself.

And my fears would only intensify as I saw the inside of the tailoring building I was lead to.

The inside had all the tools of both weavers and tailors, along with the materials and products of their trade arranged in an orderly manner. There was a large group of people spinning threads by hand to a little wooden spindle from a larger rod with fresh fibres. That was most likely what was known as a distaff. Those people alone took up over half of the building's floor space.

Next to that group was another, working on a different part of the textile industry. This group had some wooden bars tied to their waists. Those bars in turn had a series of threads connected to them and were strung to a set of rods displaced to form the rough shape of a drum. Those bars in turn was tied to a point along the wall, with the people this contraption was tied to were leaning back to maintain tension.

These people, a quarter as many as the first group, were working on a series of sticks and threads connected in some bizarre way to the line of extremely long coloured threads. They each worked the rods in some complicated fashion, then passed another rod with thread looped around it before working on the rods again. What I was looking at, while a bit difficult to understand the exact way it worked at a glance, was obviously some sort of loom.

Though it was quite slow, that low speed wasn't comparable to how slow the spinning was, as was evident by the number of spinners that were involved.

While a more modern loom would help with the weaving they were doing, the real bottleneck here was spinning. That much was quite evident.

"Hmph! So you're here."

As I was looking at the spinners, a giant of a man appeared beside us. He was a good two heads taller than me, but that wasn't what made him giant. It was the bulge of his muscles that ran across his overly broad shoulders. It was so insane it felt like it would take three of me to make up his shoulder width.

The fact that he was a dokkalfar, and even wore their tradition dress, felt like someone was cheating somehow, somewhere.

"Here it is. You can use that room in the back. Now go. I'm busy."

He handed Elli a box and pointed at the room he came from before lowering his massive frame beside one of the weavers and tied the loom across his back and got to work.

Whoever he was, he was fast. In only a few moments, he had already started to weave and was going at it like a machine. Some sort of pattern was slowly emerging as I looked on, but as to what the final work would actually look like, it would take a while before I could find out.

"Now then, let us try this on!"

Elli pulled me towards the open door which somehow, combined with the way the elderly woman was gleefully gliding across the ground almost as if she was skipping, sent a chill down my back like it was the gates of hell itself.

But it was probably far too late at this point and all I could do was steel myself. At least whatever happened it would be in private, unlike what had happened when I got my robes made.

"Here, hold this."

Elli handed the box to me with its top removed as she went to close the door.

What was inside drew my eyes right to it.

A pitch black cloth with a soft lustre was neatly folded inside. There were little gems sewn into the fabric, and lines of thread trailed the jewels, creating the image of shooting stars that ran across the length of the cloth.

I picked up some of the fabric and rubbed it between my fingers. The smoothness of it was definitely silk, the same one which I had given Elli those weeks before.

But from what I saw, the looms in the previous room were all made to make long, narrow sheets of cloth. None of them were designed to make cloth wide enough to make normal clothes by any stretch without some creative sewing.

"Now open your arms."

Unsure where she was going, I did as I was asked. But before I knew it, Elli had ducked below my arms and had already undone the buttons of my robes. When I switched to holding the box in one hand and moved my arms as asked, a sudden gust of wind followed the incredibly fast and dexterous movements of the dokkalfar I was with.

"Oh my! Your figure is even more wonderful than I imagine!"

"Huh?"

Before I knew it, my robes had been removed and I was in my underclothes. A half length camisole and miniskirt. The top, bottom, and the shoulder straps of the white camisole were white lace which rather than properly cover me, blended in to almost look like a textured pattern on my skin. Together with the shiny black of the rest of the top, it felt more like an accessory to my bra than an actual top for public wear. Along with that, my miniskirt came as a matching set, with the lower third being entirely comprised of white lace.

As I had feared, Anathousai had created such an embarrassing set of clothes for me. They looked amazing, but it was still embarrassing. So very embarrassing. I wouldn't be so troubled with it if it was some sort of sleepwear. But I don't sleep.

And Anathousai refused to make something different. She even refused to let me go until she got to see me wearing it, so I ended up giving her a mini fashion show inside of a shadow bubble. The clothes she made really was nice. It felt great against my skin, and looked amazing. But it was embarrassing to wear.

And the fact that she only made me skirts instead of pants, I had grown quite conscious every time I took to the skies. What if someone was below me? I didn't want to flash everyone I flew past like how the fairies did without any regard.

But after going home hiding this embarrassing outfit under my robes, I had to admit it. It was way better than any of the other clothes that I had owned before. It wasn't rough against my skin nor restrictive like the things I had gotten from the dungeons nor made myself or bought elsewhere.

At least nobody would know I was wearing them, as I always wore my robes.

And now Elli saw me in it.

"The robes you were wearing were quite nice, but to think you secretly like dokkalfar style cuts!"

"Wha?!"

Dropping the wooden box, I moved to cover my body with the robes hanging off of my right arm. But before I could manage, it had somehow disappeared and was hanging from Elli's arms before I knew it. It wasn't like she was faster than me. If anything, she was a bit slow in comparison, but despite that she managed to cleanly extract my robes still looped around my arm.

(Is this the difference of experience?!)

There really wasn't any other reason I could think of as to how she could have done that despite our difference in stats.

But more importantly than that, despite how much I wanted to take my robes back, I didn't want to hurt this elderly woman before me, so my arms simply went to cover my body.

The problem was, which part?

In my confusion, my arms kept jerking from my chest, my belly, and my hips.

I had no idea how I should react in such a situation. What part was priority to cover and how to do it properly.

Or rather, there was too much I wanted to cover and the only thing that could save me was hung from the arms of the woman who deprived me of my salvation.

"Why do you pine so much to hide yourself in such suffocating cloth?"

"Why do you think?! I'm a vampire!"

I was already aware. After so long wearing such all encompassing robes, it was comforting. There was nothing to worry about when wearing something like that. People couldn't see what I looked like properly, so they had to judge me for who I was. Even if they thought I was simply suspicious or even threatening at first, they were forced to decide for themselves what I was to them when we interacted.

The fear of being discovered as a vampire by those who feared me for nothing but my race. Those that coveted me for my appearances. None of that mattered when I was wearing my robes.

But most of all, I didn't have to fear the sun. The fear and pain and hate I felt that first time it tried to destroy me for simply existing. That absolute, apathetic denial of my life. Thanks to my robes, I could proudly stand against the sun and deny it of its influence against me.

My robes were my bastion. The walls which protected me from my greatest foes.

They were my security blanket.

I was aware of all of that. But really, I had no issues regarding it. There was enough self preservation there to make such a thing acceptable.

"Then, as a vampire, I shall show you a new path forward!"

And against my wishes, I was stripped down to my underwear and forced to put on the strips of cloth that Elli called clothes, over and over until she was sure I knew how to put it on without fail. An upper wrap, lower wrap, along with large green and blue circular pin to hold them in place with a matching red one that went into my hair, each one textured with intricate details.

In the end, while I was emotionally exhausted, the elderly dokkalfar dragged me back to the other room, and while I could no longer resist her actions due to my face turning into a tomato due to all the stares, she dragged me in front of a window.

There was no pain, no real heat, but when I became aware of the culmination of hate raining down on me, never between my two lives did I scream as loudly as I did then.

I was reasonably sure I didn't have any real traumas, but I was also pretty sure what I suffered was a real panic attack.

The hole in the wall I made as I dove back to get my robes suggested it was one, at least.

After that, I refused to remove my robes even for bathing for three days.

 

Wrapping the long strips of cloth around my body the way Elli had taught me, I walked over to the giant mirror standing by the wall and peered at the figure reflected on it.

[It really looks good on you, Scarlet.]

"I know. That's what sucks about it the most."

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