The rest of the hike was pretty uneventful.

  I decided against exploring, and stuck mostly to the main path.

  Although Lilac could take care of herself, I didn't want to leave her alone for too long. Savi hadn't actually moved in yet.

  Just getting to hunt a few goblins was enough.

  Their cores weren't worth as much as hobgoblin cores, but it was still a lot.

  At 2000 per core, hunting a single goblin was about as good as a day's hunting in the Red Forest.

  The difference is that since goblins are near-intelligent, they're a lot riskier to hunt and harder to find. I got lucky on my first hunt.

  Plus, unlike the animals in the Red Forest, goblins could slowly learn and adapt. So could I, but it meant any income from them would be particularly unstable.

  But it wouldn't be bad to go there every now and then to supplement my income.

  The dungeon wasn't too close to my own, but it wasn't that far of a walk. I could have taken public transportation, since a bus line connected them, but since I'd left my phone with Lilac, I wasn't sure when the next bus would come.

  So I just walked home.

  Lilac didn't know how to say much in imperial yet, but I showed her a few basic things she could do, like how to answer messages by saying I'm not there, and how to ask for help, all using prerecorded messages.

  ***

  Van waited for Kid at the portal to the Lost.

  He felt anxious in a way that was new to him.

  Of course, the A rank adventurer knew what anxiety was. He'd felt all sorts of flavors in the past, from being anxious about passing a test of one sort or another, to the anxiety of not knowing if a companion made it through something alive and whole.

  But since he was in the business of dealing with dangerous things, he usually had to swallow such anxieties and press forward.

  This was, however, the first time he simply worried about a child who was out without explanation.

  He had to wonder if this was what being a parent felt like.

  There wasn't any rational need to be concerned. Aside from the child in question being particularly resourceful, the Empire was safe enough for children to wander.

  Seeing uniformed school children walking to school in the morning and back home in the afternoon was a common enough sight. Some even walked to beginner dungeons after school or on the weekend.

  For a man whose anxieties were usually founded in rationality, it was a new experience to effectively worry over nothing.

  "Kid! Where have you been?" He asked when he spotted the source of his worries arriving. "Lilac told us you were out."

  "I went to the Goblin Mines."

  'Wait... but that place actually is dangerous...'

  Well, he was pretty sure Kid could handle herself there, but he'd wanted to go back with her a couple more times first.

  However, between the dungeon's legal grade being temporarily raised, and all the guild business he'd been involved with, it had completely slipped his mind.

  "Ah... uh... how was it?"

  "I killed three goblins."

  "Oh. Did they give you any trouble?"

  "Not really."

  "That's great! Well done on your first D rank hunt!"

  He could tell Kid wasn't sure how to respond to that. It was a bit amusing in a cute sort of way, though he'd feel bad if he laughed at her over it. As a liaison, he really should avoid doing that.

  He failed to suppress a smile though.

  'Though, is she really getting enough sleep?'

  She always had slight dark circles under her eyes, but she also always claimed to sleep about nine or ten hours everyday.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  It was hard to imagine a child going to bed all on her own like that, but then again, most of the memories he had of his own youth were when he was a teenager, and thus a tad more rebellious than someone Kid's age would usually be.

  "But... why didn't you take your phone with you? Though... I guess you wouldn't get service in the dungeon itself, but still."

  "I left it with Lilac."

  '...'

  'Oh, crap.'

  ***

  Van told me to wait around a bit so he could get a phone for Lilac too, so that she wouldn't need to borrow mine.

  "Isn't that expensive?" I'd asked.

  But he seemed like he'd probably refuse to take no for an answer.

  Since it was for Lilac, I decided to just accept it.

  He also asked if I wanted the guild to take down any pictures people might draw that looked like me.

  I didn't have enough money to waste on a lawyer, and didn't really want the guild to do it on my behalf.

  'But people have probably already taken photos of me.'

  "It's fine, I don't really care."

  It might make it harder to someday fade into obscurity, but since I'd become a dungeon boss, and therefore a diplomatic entity, there were even bigger obstacles preventing me from simply disappearing.

  So it really didn't feel like a big deal.

  "Hmm... if you're sure..."

  He seemed unhappy about my answer, though I couldn't understand why.

  My best guess is that as an adventurer, he probably just found the notion of giving up less thrilling than if I'd gone after the artists.

  But if all they'd done was draw pictures of me, it seemed awfully aggressive.

  It wasn't like I could actually stop them, short of ruining their life in some way. I didn't see any point in making enemies of random people just to be a bit less recognizable, when anyone could tell who I was with just a glance.

  "You know, people can figure out who I am just by seeing me, right?"

  "Ah..."

  Apparently he hadn't thought of that.

  After that, I got back to my cave home a couple hours later and cleaned up my stuff.

  Lilac helped.

  I'd tried to ask her what she thought of the four women, but she still wasn't very good at having her own opinion, and just tried really hard to avoid offending me.

  ***

  It had been a little while since I'd started cultivating radishes.

  It was still too early to be certain, but the hybrid mix was very promising.

  There were losses in health and quality compared to the first batch of Terran-only soil radishes. However, the second batch of the hybrid had degraded significantly less than the second batch of the Terran soil.

  That is to say, it seemed that once mixed with Terran fertilizer, Lost compost could sustain life, just not quite as effectively.

  Mana dust helped make up the difference a bit.

  In other words, it seemed that self sufficiency could be possible, just very difficult.

  It goes without saying, but composting that only had Lost materials was just ineffective.

  The hybrid mix never got very hot, so it was definitely less effective, but it was at least alive.

  Of course, it could be possible that, similar to the bark stew I'd made years ago when I'd first arrived, the Lost materials might simply be prolonging the inevitable death of any microbes the hybrid composting had been reliant upon.

  There was still some degradation, so it wasn't clear how it would go in the long term.

  I decided to expand my research a bit, including ordering a few heavy bags of fertilizer that I carted all the way from the portal to my home, as well as some seeds for the plants I'd actually hoped to grow.

  Radishes had been useful for initial experiments, but now that I'd gotten some promising results, continuing to use them as I refined the process would be counterproductive.

  For staple foods, I wanted to try corn, barley, sweet potatoes, and spring wheat. Beans would provide protein in lieu of meat. I also wanted to grow tomatoes, peppers, basil, thyme, and sage for nutritional diversity and taste.

  I could get by with anything, but I didn't want to abuse Lilac that way.

  I also wanted to grow aloe and olives for utilitarian reasons, rather than for consumption, not to mention try different species of edible tree mushrooms to see if any could prosper.

  Of course, it'd take a while to set up a complete farm, assuming one was even possible.

  But it was definitely time to start seeing if any of these things could actually grow.

  The fertilizer was just to make more of my own, though. Since the hybrid compost was already a bit unhealthy, trying to stretch it seemed like it would take too long.

  ***

  Somehow, I'd gotten another job.

  Savi managed to move in much faster than I'd expected, having only needed a week to get everything ready.

  I made it pretty clear that I expected her to become Lilac's caretaker, and not mine.

  She didn't seem to mind, and even offered to adopt the girl.

  'Does this woman do everything so suddenly?' I wondered, though perhaps it was a bit hypocritical of me to think so.

  Apparently, I had become the legal authority that decided if she could or not. Any paperwork with the imperial government was just a formality to let them know.

  Fortunately for me, it didn't have to be me. I was just the default authority by virtue of being the dungeon's boss, but I could decide a puppet sovereign or government and then disappear, if I wanted to.

  If enough people realized they could live here.

  It seemed stranger that they hadn't already, so while I didn't want to be in charge of a new government, it seemed inevitable to me that one would form regardless.

  In any case, I approved of the adoption, conditioned on her becoming a citizen of the Lost and generally getting along well with Lilac, a condition she agreed with.

  I did ask her why she wanted to do it.

  "Who else will?"

  That wasn't a great reason, but since she didn't seem to have malicious intentions, the more important thing was whether the two could successfully bond.

  It really ought to have been Lilac's choice instead, but she still struggled with the notion of having her own free will.

  There was a reason I was for outright adoption. Well, there were many reasons, such as thinking it would be better for her development if there was no reason for her to worry about her caretaker simply leaving someday.

  But a big one was that Savi wanted to learn her language.

  "So I'll pay you to help teach me," she told me after revealing that.

  It wasn't a full time job, she wanted six hours of intensive lectures plus two hours every other day of practice.

  But she was willing to pay me 60,000 a week for it. That was about 8500 a day.

  I could possibly make that much hunting goblins, but it seemed very unlikely. Furthermore, although I still needed to walk to the city to buy things, it cut down on my necessary travel time by a lot.

  Since it was difficult to refuse, I accepted.