The sun was still baking as if the night hadn’t shown up. Despite that he had only been here for three days, Hyōen felt like that he had lived in this port town for weeks. It felt so home for him… for once in his journey, he found a place that came a little close to how he felt back at Worth Woodsea. It was all too different from the forest, though, but he had adapted and even bought a few ice creams regularly. That also lead to his tremendous stomach-aches that soon would lead him to the hospital bed a few days later.

“…Ventre what?” he spoke up to the doctor. Whoever that man was, he stated that Hyōen had got a certain stomach disease from all the food poisoning. “Ventre crocodilus… it’s not that hard to pronounce,” the doctor replied back whilst adjusting his glasses, “but your stomach seems to have gotten a little too untrusty for foreign organisms due to all the… well, can you tell me again what you ate?” The doctor was trying to see if Hyōen had eaten anything that his body didn’t tolerate in the beginning, and even if he did, then he needed quite a huge amount of that certain food to cause this issue. “… Just ice cream,” the Fire Mage replied, which utterly surprised the doctor as he couldn’t recall anyone ever being allergic or intolerant to ice cream… unless if specific person was lactose intolerant. However, the boy had gone through some tests with certain, standard beverages earlier, and the doctor had the same assumption like this one, until Hyōen made it well through after drinking milk. It couldn’t be that, then.

Therefore, the doctor had just given him the recipe to the cure; he needed some milk that he stored in a bottle in his pocket, and at the large city known as Era, there grew a special plant that would soothe his stomach for foreign organisms. However, until he made it that far, he couldn’t eat without puking up again, so the poor guy couldn’t even enjoy his pocket meat like always. That made the journey to Era a long, painful, despicable walk through ice and fire and everything that stung the skin. Heck, when he made it at the entrance to the city, his face looked like that of a homeless guy who hadn’t eaten in days…