The Weakest Tamer Began a Journey to Pick up Trash - Volume 1 - Chapter 36

Chapter 36:

Staking My Claim at the Plaza

I PILED MY THINGS onto the chair to reserve my spot. Adventurers with tents used their tents to stake their claims, but some people like me didn’t have tents. We’d have to secure the spot by putting down a blanket or mat and weighing it down with things we wouldn’t miss if they got stolen. I’d learned from watching other adventurers when I first used this kind of plaza. There weren’t any hard rules, but there were basic unspoken manners between adventurers. I took a mat out of my bag and placed another bag on top of it. All done.

I looked around the plaza and saw about ten big tents set up on the other side of the kitchen. Veteran adventurers used big tents, but I heard that they didn’t use adventurers’ plazas much, so they were probably newbies or rookie adventurer teams. They got loud pretty quick once they started drinking, so I was glad to be far from them.

The spot I’d been directed to had a lot of solo adventurers, with their one-person tents set up here and there. Others just had a mat and luggage, like me. A comparatively quiet place like this would be easy to sleep in, so I was glad the guard sent me here.

I left the plaza and went out to the woods. The same guard still stood at the entrance, so I nodded a bow as I trotted into the forest. This kind of thing was new to me, so I was nervous when I passed through.

Forests were all the same, so I could relax here. I looked around for a trash dump. Would a big village’s dump be bigger as well? If they had contracts with a lot of tamers, maybe not—or so I’d thought. When I found the dump, it was in a similar place as in other villages, and it was just as big as the village’s size implied.

I was amazed. “It’s gigantic…”

I’d expected big, but this was something else. The trash was varied, too. I thought about leaving Sora at the edge like usual but hesitated. If I sensed people coming, the dump was so large that it might take me a while to get back to my friend. What to do? Maybe the safest thing would be to go in together, but…

“Sora, can you try not to bury yourself in the trash this time?”

Sora was unpredictable. When we went to dumps, it would often burrow down in the trash. It looked at me and streeeetched vertically. Wow, another new move! I had no idea it could—hmm. Yeah, I should definitely do what I can to keep people from seeing Sora.

My mind was made up. “Sora, let’s go in together.”

“Pu, pu!” It hopped excitedly into the piles of trash and rolled into the space between two dirty old bottles.

“I literally just said…” 

I extracted Sora from the trash and held it in one hand as I fished for necessities in the garbage with the other. It was a good thing my friend was still small enough to hold with one arm. I put blue and red potions into Sora’s bag, one after another, but there always seemed to be more potions to pick up. This was looking to be a major haul.

Oh, a magic bag! But it’s really torn up. Nah. It won’t work. Any others? Oh, what’s this here? Clothes…too big, though. Because of the sheer number of adventurers passing through, there were even lots of discarded swords. Some of them weren’t sheathed, so I had to be careful where I stepped or I could hurt my feet. After picking out enough things, I left the dump.

A short distance away, I sat down and leaned against a big tree. Sora had already jumped out of my hand and was quivering in front of its bag. No doubt it was begging for potions. The slime had been shaking like heck when I was picking out potions, after all. I had to laugh—Sora never changed.

I laid out ten blue potions and ten red potions. Before I had even finished setting out dinner, it was already devouring it. The potions fizzled into bubbles and dissolved in the body of the slime. Sora really ate strangely. Come to think of it, I’d never seen other slimes eat. I sure wanted to, though… Did they eat like Sora?