Afterword

Thank you for picking up this book. I'm Ishinomiya Kant.

Volume four. At long last, the era has plunged into a medieval level of civilization.

That said, "medieval" is an extremely broad classification. In European history, the thousand-year period spanning from roughly the fifth to the fifteenth century is apparently called the Middle Ages. Way too broad.

But from a fantasy standpoint, the medieval era is the golden age. Most fantasy works draw on medieval Europe, after all. Familiar terms like spirits, sorcery, and magic staffs will start popping up left and right from here on.

Meanwhile, quite a few technologies have been glossed over (or developed without Mentor's involvement), so I'd like to introduce a few of them here. To pad the afterword's word count.

Ironware: In Scarlet, scarlite was the first metal to appear, but in the wider world, iron is the most commonly used metal. By Volume 4, iron is widely used in Scarlet as well. It's called iron, but whether it's the same as Earth's iron is a mystery. Because there are no magnets.

Soap: Mentor, ever the bath enthusiast, had been trying to make soap for ages but could never get it right. One of his students ended up inventing it by accident. It had been used to make things slippery before Mentor stumbled across it and went, "Isn't this soap?" "We've had it for thirty years now."

Paper: Initially, behemoth hide was used, but you can only hunt so many behemoths, so they eventually developed methods using other animal hides as well. During processing, magic is used to bleach the hide, which is then tanned in that state to fix the color. Behemoth-hide parchment is prized as a luxury item.

I struggle with the afterword every single time, so I really should have been doing this since Volume 1.

Now for the acknowledgements. To my editor and Farumaro-sensei, whom I caused a great, great deal of trouble this time around: thank you so much. To the friends who offered their advice during the writing process: I'm always in your debt. And to my daughter and wife, who drew on firsthand experience to help me depict this volume's heroine in her early childhood. To everyone involved and to the readers who read this book, my heartfelt thanks.

-Ishinomiya Kant