Extra Story 1: Life in Shion Castle

When I opened my eyes in the morning, I saw a fluffy white pillow.

The comforter wrapped in white sheets that wrapped around my body were also light and comfortable.

The white sheets are soft to the touch, so smooth and soft and warm that I can’t imagine they are made of cotton.

“Oh, thank God. It wasn’t a dream. Today, I’m still here, all right.”

This morning I thought as much.

The elegant mansion with a purple roof, called Shion Castle, is where Duke Frederick Zakash Vi Valmonter lives.

In the first place, it’s strange that I, an ordinary commoner, am even in the grounds of such a castle, but I was hired as his purifier to live here.

But for some reason, there seemed to be only ‘non-humans’ in this castle, other than me and Zak.

After arriving here, I was up and ready in the mornings for a while. The reason for this is largely due to my past habits.

Up until now, I had to do all the housework by myself at the house I lived in with my family, so I had to get up early in the morning to do various things, otherwise I wouldn’t have time to study.

I was obsessed with getting up early to do this and that so I could study. This habit of waking up in the morning was hard to break.

Before I ran away from home, the first thing I did was to get up in the morning, wash the laundry, and hang it up on the roof to keep it dry in case it rained.

If it rained while I was at school, my mother wouldn’t take the laundry in. I don’t understand how she could pretend not to know that her clothes were wet in the rain.

Of course, I tried to ask her to take in the laundry when it rains, but she said,

“Oh my, why should I do that?”

That’s only the beginning.

Once I realized that talking about it was useless, I began to think about how I could make the household chores run better on my own. If there was no one to rely on, I would have to manage on my own.

Thinking about where to hang the laundry and making space for it to dry was all on me.

Then I suddenly remembered my father.

He was like an airhead. Not in a good way.

If I talked to him, he would respond, but he seemed to have a tough job as a school teacher, and he was always absent-minded.

He didn’t actively think about the house or pay attention to me.

Whenever I talked to him about something, he would always say, “Tell your mother.”

I was telling my dad because it was useless to tell her. But he didn’t seem to understand the reality that the only people mother cared about were my brother and sister, and I was in a different category.

I tried my best to communicate that to him and make him understand, but I realized that it was impossible.

It must be hard to have the lives of a family of five on your shoulders. In Elementia, teaching is a sacred job that not just anyone can do. For that reason, I respect my father, who is a teacher.

I know he’s so serious that he can’t get away with educating people, but I wish he would have thought about his home a little more.

But once, when I asked him to help me build a drying area for my laundry, he helped me stretch a rope. That’s all I know…

There is no such thing as a washing machine, unlike in the civilized countries I remember.

Water drawn from a well is poured into a wooden bowl using a fishing bottle, and dirt is removed using a washing board and feet. It was a lot of hard work for me, who has little body-weight, to step on and clean the laundry for five people.

Fetching water from a well is also a lot of work for a small child. Moreover, the water must be squeezed out thoroughly afterwards.

It is hard to squeeze a large object, so I came up with the idea of wrapping one end of it around a fixed wooden stick to squeeze it.

It would not be wrong to say that my body was too thin having worked under these harsh conditions.

The fuel I used was always more than I could take in. No wasted meat.

There’s muscle, though.

And since soap was very expensive for the common man, I used it carefully, bit by bit.

Even though I did my best to help the family budget as much as possible in such a way, by accumulating a tiny amount of savings, my mother often bought unnecessary items.

Of course, there was no way I could stop her even if I complained about it.

But, well, even these things are something one can learn if you do them, and if I start working for myself, it will help me get away from home.

I spent my days with a rather positive outlook. I wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.

The idea, though, was that I had a goal of becoming a school teacher and leaving home.

The water work was still fine in the summer, but in the winter and other times, the skin on my hands and feet were so rough and cracked that it was hard to believe it was a child’s skin. My aunt, who used to take care of me, once shared some precious “horse oil” with me, because she couldn’t bear to look at it.

After the laundry was done, I would prepare breakfast for the family and make a simple lunch for them.

When my brother was home, he would make it for my father, my mother, me and my sister. In between, I would also prepare breakfast.

My mother was at home, but of course she ate that lunch at noon.

I didn’t have much time to make my family’s lunches and breakfasts, so I just threw the leftovers into my mouth. But that didn’t mean I was going to be a cheapskate, though. It would be the end of the world if I fell down.

Cleaning and tidying up in the house will pile up quickly if I don’t do it.

Eventually, I realized that this would only add to my burden, so I began to take care of the day-to-day things.

I didn’t want to skimp on my studies, so I studied whenever I could find the time to do so.

I would also sneak out the study books and other materials that were left in my brother’s room that my mother had bought for him to read and study. Books and paper-based print materials were very expensive, so there was no way my mother would buy me such things.

And as I remembered that, I started to wake up, flipping up the comforter, which was so nice that I wanted to crawl under again.

It’s really light and fluffy and comfortable.

The cotton fabric used in this comforter is said to be a specialty of the Fisaris Frontier Domain.

The word “cotton” does not refer to cotton flowers. It’s the white cotton wool that wraps around the seeds.

The territory of the Fisaris Frontier Count is adjacent to the southern continent of Rhodocaius, a dry land with good drainage.

The quality and tendency of the soil was particularly suited to the cultivation of cotton, and the cloth grown there and processed into cotton is of high quality and is said to be more valuable than silk, and is very expensive.

It is said that in humid and gloomy climates, cotton will not open due to mold and will become useless.

My bedding is Fisaris cotton cloth, cotton duvets and sheets, which are said to be more valuable than silk.

This white sheet has a lot of embroidered patterns of flowers, birds and ivy in the same color white as the cloth. What a luxurious article.

It is said that the cotton in it is all made from Fisaris territory. It is very soft and fluffy.

There are two main types of cotton grown in the Fisaris frontier county: short and long fibers.

The short fibers are very elastic and use cotton itself. And the longer fibers are used to make cotton cloth, which is said to be more valuable than silk.

It is a far cry from the unbleached cotton dress I used to wear in the house where I lived with my family, or the futon I used.

It was very uncomfortable, rough and sometimes prickly. They were inferior goods that had been processed without removing any impurities.

Is the technique and even the method of processing cotton different between ordinary people and aristocrats?

The one I was using seemed to be of inferior quality to the rugs of lower aristocratic dogs.

The clothes my brother and sister wore seemed to be of much better quality than mine, but my mother probably chose clothes that she didn’t care if they got dirty. As they say, things are always better than they seem.

If we compare the difference between the life of the aristocrats and the common people here in terms of the quality of cotton, the highest quality cotton, as the common people call it, would be considered to be at the upper end of the middle or even lower class of cotton used by the aristocrats.

There was that much difference.

However, the fact that ordinary people would sleep in a futon made of the highest quality cotton from the Fisaris Frontier County rarely happened, so it was probably unnecessary knowledge to know.

Suddenly, my eyes fell on a small desk beside the bed.

There is a small candy-pod-like container made of beautifully colored glass.

Removing the lid, I found a greenish creamy ointment with a refreshing herbaceous scent inside.

Silk told me that she will come to apply this ointment on my hands and feet before bedtime, and I told her it’s okay because I would make sure I apply it myself before I go to bed, so I make sure I apply it every day.

It’s not sticky, it’s smooth, and when I apply it, it seems to blend in and penetrate my skin immediately. Thanks to this, my rough hands and feet have regained their childlike luster.

My rough skin now contains moisture and is soft and moisturized.

I had apparently been watching it in a daze for a while when a knock brought me back to myself.

“Yes, come in.”

“Good morning, miss.”

“Good morning, Silk.”

As usual, Silk came in with a light movement and no sound of footsteps.

There was nothing but the sound of the cart being pushed.

“Here’s some warm milk for you. It has honey from your favorite shaded bee, Miss.”

“Wow, thank you.”

I love milk with shaded bee honey because it’s very tasty and slightly sweet.”

It’s strange how I know this, but when I wake up early in the morning, Silk immediately brings me a hot drink like this. I’m happy to see a thick biscuit on the side. They are crunchy.

I think it’s a great luxury to be able to get a sweet treat in the morning.

“Miss, the master invited you to take a walk in the morning, would you like to go?”

Then Zak invited me to go for a morning walk.

“Yeah, I want to go for a walk.”

“I’ll have your clothes ready in a moment, so please have a drink and wait.”

“Yes, okay.”

And so, as usual, Zak and I would go for a morning walk together.

He would take me by the hand to an orchard to pick rare sweet fruits, and by magic, he would take me to various places.

The fruits we picked in the morning were often served as dessert or baked goods for the day.

And so, little by little, I became more and more familiar with this Shion Castle.

Why are the people here so kind to me? I had a lot of confusion like that, but I got a lot of tender looks.

It was a story from when I was practicing magical power circulation on the sofa near Zak.

As usual, Zak was carefully checking my fingers, and after making sure my hand was no longer scarred, he didn’t say anything, but I noticed that his mouth was smiling slightly.

That made me feel very warm inside.

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T/N: So many fluffy feels~ I’m glad that Fii’s Cinderella story is playing out smoothly ❤

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