14 - Saint Yuuta Hiraga
It seemed they had borrowed a side house from Aurelia as lodging while confined to the valley. Since the side house was originally prepared as a living space for disciples, it was equipped with all the necessities for daily life. Side house though it was, with fewer belongings it felt more spacious than Aurelia's house. There were only about a bedroom and a living room, but it had a kitchen and, delightfully, a bath.
...A bath!? Why is there one!?
Confronted with a bath for the first time in this life, I froze at the bathroom entrance. The tub was round in shape, but it was a perfect bath with even a washing area. As expected, there was no sign of running water, so the water was probably heated in the kitchen and carried over, or heated with firewood.
As I stood there dumbfounded by this completely unexpected encounter with a bath, Leonardo peeked into the bathroom from above my head and taught me the word "bath" and its use.
...Come to think of it, there was no bath in the village, so I didn't even know the word for bath.
"Bath, why? Village, didn't have."
When I conveyed this with added gestures as if to disguise my inner excitement, Leonardo gave a wry smile.
"So it didn't take hold in your village. Nowadays they're common even in small towns. Not quite one per household, but in the city there are big bathhouses called public baths."
...What!? I'd just arbitrarily given up, assuming baths didn't exist in a fantasy world.
"Bathing culture is a custom spread by Saint Yuuta Hiraga. Keeping the skin clean to ward off illness, warming the body to improve blood circulation, and various other effects—"
Leonardo had begun explaining, but there were too many words that caught my attention first, and I let the rest of his explanation wash over me.
"Shen... Yuuta Hiraga, who? Weird name."
Even without any doubt, that's a Japanese name, isn't it? I retorted only internally. After Leonardo patiently helped me until I could correctly pronounce "saint" which had come out as "shent," he gave me the explanation anew.
"Saint Yuuta Hiraga is the name of a reincarnator who appeared in this country about three hundred years ago. His real name is different, but... his previous life's name was apparently Yuuta Hiraga. He was a great man who developed various medicines using knowledge from his previous life, creating cures for several diseases that were considered incurable in this country at the time."
...In other words, he did the "I'm awesome with modern knowledge" thing, didn't he, that Hiraga Yuuta.
"Since he saved many people with his previous life's knowledge, it was decided that if he would leave his name to posterity for his achievements in medicine compounding, it would be under his previous life's name, and so the name Yuuta Hiraga remained."
He is now venerated as a saint in the Sedovara Church, and with that, Leonardo's explanation about Yuuta Hiraga concluded.
...Sedovara Church, that's a name I heard earlier too. Treating someone who made medicine as a saint... I wonder if that's different from religion?
Several words had come up that caught my attention. But there was something I had to ask about first.
"...Reincarnator, the weird person Leonyaldo-san came to the village for?"
Though properly, I think it was "came to buy."
"It's not that reincarnators are eccentric. Just that there are many unusual characters among them... Well. The reason I visited Meiyu Village was a reincarnator. I headed there after receiving a letter from the village chief with a purchase request for a reincarnator, but..."
"Too bad, huh."
With the village completely annihilated, there was no reincarnator or anything else. Well, the reincarnator he was looking for was already under Leonardo's protection, but. Not knowing what kind of treatment reincarnators receive, I felt that foolishly and honestly revealing that would be problematic in various ways.
"...Well, I think the likelihood of them being genuine was low. Even reincarnators come in hits and misses."
"Hits and misses?"
"If they have useful knowledge, they're a hit. If not, they're just an ordinary person who simply has knowledge from a previous life."
"...The person who was in the village before?"
I knew nothing about the Daltowa couple's child who had been sold. All I had heard was the rough information that they were apparently a reincarnator, and that they were sold.
"I've heard that the reincarnator in Meiyu Village twenty years ago was a Nihon person, same as Saint Yuuta Hiraga."
So the Daltowa couple's child was apparently a Nihon reincarnator like me. Which meant the reason the Daltowa couple were clean unlike the other villagers was indeed the hygiene concepts that child had instilled in them.
"Nihon person, hit? Miss?"
As a former Japanese person, this was something I absolutely had to know. The treatment after being exposed as a reincarnator should differ greatly between being a hit and a miss.
"...Nihon people are a jackpot."
"Huh? Weally?"
Not just a hit, but a jackpot apparently. If that's the case, even if I'm found out as a reincarnator with Japanese memories, I might not receive such bad treatment.
"Whether it's true or false, there's the story that every citizen of Nihon is educated to read and write. Just being able to read the Nihon language has value in this country."
"...Why? Different country's language, has value?"
In a different world, how could being able to read and write Japanese have value? Even if you can read and write Japanese, it should be useless in this world with a different language.
"If you can read the Nihon language, you'd be able to read what Saint Yuuta Hiraga left behind, wouldn't you?"
Yuuta Hiraga appeared roughly three hundred years ago. Without apprenticing himself to an apothecary, he investigated diseases and pharmaceutical arts in his own way, conducted research, and left behind several volumes of research materials and results. However, in this country where literacy was not high, the only script he could use was Japanese, and most of his research materials are recorded in Japanese. During his lifetime, he was able to spread methods of compounding medicines through oral tradition and dictation, but as expected after three hundred years, several medicines have been lost. The revival of those lost medicines is not a dream, if someone who can read the research materials he left behind should appear.
"...If the reincarnator who was sold from Meiyu Village long ago really was a Nihon person, if we could have bought them back, we might have been able to cure the village's disease."
"Divine retribution is swift, huh. If Oban-san hadn't sold his child, the village chief might not have died."
"That's just talk of possibilities though. This happened twenty years ago. It's just that with that much time, they probably could have revived ten or twenty of the lost medicines."
Now then, first let's take a bath, Leonardo said, opening the bath lid. Peering into the tub, there was a board slightly smaller than the tub inside.
"It's clean considering it hasn't been used. Can we use it right away?"
"The board inside, don't take it out?"
"You can't take a bath without that. You put water in and heat it from below with fire, like a pot. It's more of a footing board, that's the bath lid. Without it, it's too hot."
"The one Leonyaldo-san is holding, different lid?"
"This bath hasn't been used for a while, so it was probably used as a dust cover."
I had thought the lid Leonardo held was definitely the bath lid, but apparently not. As for its shape, was it a Goemon-style bath? I'd seen them in manga and period dramas, but this was my first time seeing a real one. Leonardo set the lid aside and checked the drain. There didn't seem to be anything clogging it that required cleaning right now.
"...Oban-san's child, find them, have them read the research materials?"
If Japanese reincarnators are valuable, the purchaser probably wouldn't want to let them go either. If buying them back is impossible, I wondered if they could just hand over the research materials and have them read those. I had merely voiced a simple thought, but Leonardo's back, as he was inspecting the bathroom facilities, twitched.
...Huh? Did I say something strange?
Wondering at Leonardo's lack of immediate response, after a short while, an answer came in a somewhat stiff voice.
"That reincarnator is probably no longer alive."
"Huh?"
"It was in the records from Gurnor Fortress at the time. Oban Daltowa's daughter Almelle was sold to the neighboring empire. There are still skirmishes with the Empire even now, but there's been no notable activity. Most likely—"
—they probably killed her after torture. At Leonardo's words that followed, my stomach grew heavy as if I had swallowed lead. In an instant, the blood drained from my face, and without thinking I clutched my stomach even though it didn't hurt.
"Reincarnators get killed...!?"
"That would absolutely never happen in this country. Almelle had bad luck. Jacob, who didn't understand her value, sold her off to the neighboring country, and the treatment of slaves in that country is..."
And at that, Leonardo clamped his mouth shut. He probably thought words like slave weren't something to let a little girl hear.
...So this world has slaves and stuff.
As I was assailed by a vague anxiety, Leonardo returned to my side and pulled me into an embrace. Perhaps trying to reassure me, he stroked my head over and over.
"Reincarnators who can read the Nihon language are treated with great care in this country. There are many documents we want read, and their contents are mainly methods for making medicines that save people. But that country... the neighboring Empire is a very belligerent... a country that loves war. They probably tried to make her develop weapons, and she resisted."
"...Making weapons, knew how, that person?"
Had the Daltowa couple's child, whose name I only learned today, known how to make weapons? An ordinary Japanese person wouldn't know such things. Military otaku or people who voraciously absorb knowledge like quiz champions don't just exist everywhere. If it's just about acquiring knowledge, there are plenty of methods, using a library, collecting e-books, and so on, but there aren't many people who can actually understand and apply that knowledge. I don't know what kind of knowledge Almelle had, but the probability that she had knowledge enabling weapon development is low. Did the neighboring country force weapons manufacturing on such a person?
"I don't know what kind of knowledge Almelle had. She might have only been able to read Japanese, without possessing any useful knowledge. Even just that has sufficient value in this country... but there are various legends about Nihon people. To those who believe them wholesale, they're thought of as some kind of race for which the concept of impossibility doesn't exist."
"...That's a bit unreasonable, you know."
I felt faint at the legends of reincarnators with Japanese memories that came from Leonardo's mouth. As expected, we can't fight for twenty-four hours, and as for being obsessive fanatics who once hooked on something become instantly preeminent in that field even as amateurs, well, it's not that I have no idea where that comes from, but basically it's unreasonable. There might be people who make the impossible possible, but it's not something every Japanese person can do.
...For now, I'd better keep quiet about having Japanese memories.
I wouldn't mind cooperating if it's just reading Japanese, but I'd rather pass on being sold off to some strange country once I'm no longer useful. Being forced to develop weapons without the knowledge after being sold is impossible. And if I refuse, death by torture, it's beyond refusal without even needing to think about it.
...Actually, there are probably reincarnators who reached the same conclusion as me and are keeping quiet, scattered around here and there.
[Author's Note]
The bath is the one thing I absolutely won't compromise on! ...And so, the bath was something spread long ago by the ancient reincarnator, Yuuta Hiraga. Tina thinks he did the "I'm awesome" thing, but Yuuta Hiraga was someone who'd never seen or used a real Goemon bath, so he's a hard worker who figured it out his own way from theory. So even though it seems like a Goemon bath, it's not actually a Goemon bath itself. In the first place, if he weren't a hard worker, inventing multiple medicines from otherworldly materials was probably impossible.