ch1-ch20 · 003-ch3

Chapter 3

His smartphone alarm rang, and realizing it was morning, Sai awoke.

Still half-asleep, he washed his face and brushed his teeth.

It was mid-September—the brutal heat waves were gone, but the lingering shadow of late-summer heat still flickered here and there.

He turned on the air conditioner and gazed at his smartphone. Within the unhurried hours afforded by unemployment, he drank coffee and thought about what to do today.

Sai, having returned from another world, was living the life of an utterly ordinary Japanese person.

Some months had passed since his return to Japan via the ruins' teleportation trap.

At present, Sai was living in a renovated former small factory, which he called home.

That day he was teleported—

Sai had gone to a police box and explained his situation.

Of course, there was no way he could say he'd been in another world, so he conveyed his circumstances while fudging the details as best he could.

As a result, he discovered that his own name was listed among missing persons.

And before he knew it, he was reuniting with his parents.

The parents he reunited with after thirty years were elderly.

Not quite decrepit, but both were in their seventies, their arms and legs thin.

He was taken aback—had they always been this small?

That they hadn't passed away during the time he was transported, that he could see them again—it was a stroke of luck.

His parents were currently living in good health, free of any major illness, together with his younger sister and her husband.

When he had been about to reunite with them, Sai had been gripped by considerable anxiety and tension.

Even Sai himself no longer bore any trace of his high-school self, and he'd worried they might not recognize him when they met. But both his parents and his sister did realize it was him—Yamana Saito himself.

He'd achieved an emotional reunion with his family, but what came after was rough.

There were all sorts of administrative procedures related to his status as a missing person—that was unavoidable—but explaining "where he had been all this time" was difficult.

Speculation swirled: had he been abducted to a dangerous region overseas? Various theories were bandied about. But the truth was: he had been in another world.

To prove the story of having been in another world, he would have to show them magic or items from that world.

That said—what would happen if he did show them?

If it ended with him simply being a spectacle, that would be fine.

But there was also the possibility of being treated as a research subject in some institute…

He still didn't fully understand modern Japan, but in any world, rare things carried value.

There was even a chance he'd end up saddled with trouble beyond what the current Sai could imagine.

He had no noble backing like he would in the other world.

If things rolled in a bad direction—what would become of him?

Regardless of whether Sai wanted it or not, it would cause trouble for his parents, his sister, and her husband.

He couldn't face the parents who spoke of having kept searching for their missing Sai.

So, while he told his family the truth, to the outside world he said he had "wandered overseas."

He'd agonized over how to tell his family about the other world, but when he actually told them, they accepted it more readily than he'd expected.

It was thanks to the tower—commonly called the "Shinjuku Tower."

A few years after Sai had gone missing, in the year 2000—

That Shinjuku Tower had apparently emerged without warning.

Swallowing up everything around it.

This phenomenon occurred worldwide, and dungeons had appeared in various countries, or so he was told.

Thanks in part to the occult trends of the time, it had caused quite a panic.

Because of that, his parents believed him—"We don't really understand this other world business, but maybe that sort of thing really does happen." The normal, taken-for-granted reality had been shattered by something occult and mystical, utterly unexpected and defying all science.

In a world where such things could happen—

The Yamana family's eldest son had been taken somewhere far away, but he'd made it home safely.

Wasn't that good enough? That was the conclusion they reached.

If only things had ended there—with Sai living happily with his family. But it wasn't so simple.

At present, his parents and his sister's family lived under one roof.

His sister and her husband had a son in high school. From Sai's perspective, a nephew.

The five of them lived modestly, but adding Sai—just returned from another world—to the mix was a different story.

Simply put, there was no room for Sai to live in.

For a while he stayed in the living room, but to be blunt, a large-framed, tall man was nothing but a nuisance. It wasn't just his parents and sister—there was his sister's husband and his high-school-aged nephew.

A wife's older brother who'd been missing, or a mother's older brother.

It must have been terribly awkward to deal with.

His sister's husband was a good-natured man, and he'd said, "We want to do something about the room situation…" while apologizing profusely about the state of things.

But it was Sai who had suddenly dropped in on them.

Sai was the one who was filled with apology.

And so he spent the first few days in the living room, but as expected, continuing like this made it hard for Sai to do anything either—and it was unbearably awkward.

While he was pondering what to do, his father made a suggestion.

It was to move into an old, disused factory nearby.

It had been a small neighborhood factory, active in his grandfather's day, but it was shut down during that same generation and had been left abandoned ever since. Renting it out wasn't practical—it was too small as a factory, and the deterioration was severe, so demolition had even been on the table.

But demolition would require money upfront, and since it was land passed down through generations, there was hesitation about selling it.

Such was this old, small neighborhood factory site.

Sai himself certainly had memories of playing in this factory as a young child.

So he understood his father's reluctance to let it go.

Still, the deterioration was serious, and repairing it would likely cost a considerable sum.

He'd be shoving his eldest son—finally returned—into a shabby, dirty place.

His father seemed deeply apologetic, but to Sai it was a tremendous blessing.

Fortunately, electricity, gas, and water were all connected.

With renovation, it could be lived in.

Once the course of action was set, things moved quickly.

That said, as his father had noted, renovation would require a fair amount of money.

Even if he took out a loan, Sai had no credit or anything of the sort in modern Japan.

He'd been pondering what to do—but this was where Sai's gold coins proved useful.

He possessed quite a quantity of gold coins in themselves.

Stuffed inside his Item Box were continent-wide common gold coins, Tuare Kingdom gold coins, and more. He'd of course deposited some in the kingdom's banks, but even so, a considerable reserve was stored within his Item Box.

The earnings of Sai—veteran adventurer and instructor of the Adventurer's Guild—were nothing to scoff at.

He consulted his father, and using equipment left behind in the factory, they melted down some of the gold coins into ingots and sold them.

Thanks to that, Sai acquired a modest fortune and pushed ahead with the factory renovation.

He created an environment where a person could live.

Thus Sai obtained a base from which to operate in Japan.

His days were spent mostly maintaining his base in the former factory that had become his home, or taking walks.

At dinnertime and on weekends, he'd go to his sister's house, where he'd listen to stories of the past and recent happenings while learning the common sense of modern Japan.

He'd gotten himself the latest smartphone and was now checking the internet with still-clumsy fingers. Back when he'd been in Japan, it was pagers and flip phones—now they were smartphones, and even students having them was the norm.

…Back when he was a student, he couldn't get one bought for him, yet Sai's parents had apparently happily bought one for their grandchild. He'd felt a mild shock—that was a secret.

Was it the passage of thirty years that had changed common sense so much?

Still, Sai understood well the convenience of being able to contact people easily.

In the other world, there had been something called the magical communicator.

It could only send messages, more or less—but how many times had it saved him during his adventurer days?

So long as there was mana, it could communicate even from deep within caves or between continents.

From rescue situations to casual everyday correspondence.

It had truly been a convenient tool.

But even that magical communicator—unsurprisingly, it seemed incapable of communicating between Earth and the other world. Now it gave no sign of life whatsoever.

"I live… but no way to return."

He'd sent those words. Several months ago, now.

Naturally, there was still no response from the other world.

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Thank you for reading.

Today marks a two-chapter update.

Thank you very much.