☆Isekai Husbands!☆

Chapter Ten: When There's No More Way Back, All We Have to Do is Move Forward!

What happened a few days ago was like a distant memories now. He had decided to stop moping and move forward. He knew that it was useless to be depressed about the things he couldn't change, while he had all those time to adapt to his new life. To adapt, he needed to know about this world. Well, at least about the country he currently lived in.

Just a few weeks ago, Hyde had helped him registered his name as the citizen of this country at the administration office. Hikaru had to met the head of the town to pledge his vow and he also had an interview. Of course he had to lie about coming from the other world, instead he told them that he had lost his memories when Hyde found him, except for his name. Hikaru also had to lie about his age because he was supposed to had a flower mark at the age of 15. They would never believe him if he said he was 16. So, legally, Hikaru was 14 because he had Doctor Noon's confirmation letter about his about-to-bloom flower mark based on the progress of his maturing womb. (Maturing womb means he was nearly 15.) It was unsettling to claim his age as two years younger, but he had no choice.

As of now, Noon had given him permission to read any books in Noon's collections when there was no customers to tend to. Ah! I didn't tell you this before, but Hikaru was assigned to tend to the counter in the pharmacy. He was still new to this job, so he wasn't allowed to treat patients. Once he was experienced enough, Noon would allow him to help them treat the patients as Noon's apprentice. Hikaru was happy that Noon trusted him enough to let him work there.

Right now, Hikaru was reading about the history of The Kingdom of Astradan. Hikaru knew about the alliance that Astradan and two other countries created decades ago. Hyde had told him that before. But, Hikaru couldn't hear the rest.

He flipped the first page of the book.

The Kingdom of Astradan consisted of twelve fiefdoms, governed by twelve feudal lords, also called the 12 Aristocrats or the 12 Families. The King was the ultimate ruler, with the 12 Aristocrats as his advisors.

The town where they currently lived in, Lowell Town was under the supervision of Earl Ethelwolf. The Ethelwolf fiefdom included two small towns and three villages. Hikaru had heard that the Earl was a competent lord who loved his fief and his people. The heir of Ethelwolf was still a child, at the age of 10, but he was already famous as the genius heir after he had solved a few problems that emerged in the fiefdom. Hikaru didn't know what the problems was, but if that was true, what kind of life did that kid lead until now? How could a 10 year-old be so reliable and mature enough to be helping his father governing the territory?

Anyway, the Earl's mansion was located in Soavest. That was where Reese worked as a knight. Usually, the time taken to travel between Soavest and Lowell was around a week by carriage, or only around 3 to 4 days if they chose to travel by cosmien, an animal that looked like a professional track athlete alpaca which was as tall and big as a horse.

Hikaru flipped to the next page. Now that he remembered, the first time he came here, he was amazed by how the foreigner-looking Hyde and the others could talk fluent Japanese. He thought that maybe he received a special skill such as language translator like most protagonists in an isekai (a/n: when someone transmigrate or transferred to another world ー literally means, "different world") manga. But, then he realized that the people there was really talking in Japanese when he saw the shop signs in town and couldn't understand it.

After a few days of observation, he finally noticed that the writing system in Astradan was similar to Latin alphabets in Earth, which had 26 alphabets. Only, the difference was that they use a bunch of completely different shapes from the usual ABCs. So, if he could learn and compare which alphabet is which, he could just read them like reading romaji. That was how he learned how to read and write.