After confirming that no product of this kind existed on the continent, Jhin set his rather meager business instincts into motion. Once this sort of everyday necessity was rolled out, the profits it would bring were downright terrifying—because it was a daily necessity, something every woman of the right age would need to use.
No matter whether you were a great mage or a mighty dragon-slaying hero, so long as you were a woman, you absolutely could not escape the torment of that time of the month. As for how women dealt with their periods without sanitary pads—Jhin didn't go asking Pecorine and the others about it, for fear that Kyaru would beat him to a pulp on the grounds of sexual harassment.
But whatever methods they used, they surely couldn't compare to sanitary pads, which were the concentrated crystallization of technology. And so Jhin hit upon the idea of selling sanitary pads in Another World—a scheme that could rake in an absolute fortune.
He first sought out Megumin, a member of the Crimson Demon Clan. After making his inquiries and receiving the answer that pads could indeed be produced by relying on magic together with other materials, he laid out his follow-up plans and ideas for her.
The moment Megumin heard there was big money to be made, she agreed at once. She then wrote a letter, intending to send it back to the Crimson Demon Village along with a sample sanitary pad once they returned to Landosol. The recipient was, naturally, her mother—and surely, after reading the contents, her mother would diligently "urge" her father along to complete the manufacture of the sanitary pads.
On the road to the Maple Sugar Valley, Megumin secretly approached Kyaru and had her cast a [Linguistic Mastery] on her—a spell most often used to analyze ancient writing, or when the other party didn't know the continent's common tongue.
She did this, of course, so that she could understand the contents of that book. She felt that simply looking at the pictures wasn't satisfying enough; she absolutely had to read it together with the text in order to fully make up for the knowledge she lacked.
After receiving the [Linguistic Mastery] Kyaru cast on her, Megumin would sneak peeks at the book's contents bit by bit during the rest periods. Although she couldn't completely grasp the meaning of those strange characters, she could at least get the general gist by relying on the magic.
"I'm done eating!"
"Bang!"
Watching Megumin dash back to the bedroom like a bolt of lightning, Pecorine tilted her head, her face full of bewilderment: "Why has Megumin been heading straight back to the bedroom right after dinner these past couple of days?"
"...Maybe it has something to do with that matter I told you all about earlier."
"Oh... then I won't go asking."
Pecorine sped up her tidying of the bowls and chopsticks, then carried them at a trot into the kitchen—clearly, she too was too embarrassed to bring up that kind of topic with Jhin.
In the bedroom, only the bedside lamp provided a faint glow, barely enough for Megumin to make out the contents on the pages. She didn't mind in the least—rather, turning on the bright lights would have ruined that feeling of secretly reading this sort of manga.
"Here... take off... and what does this character mean?"
Her thin, pale-pink lips pressed together, and she scratched at her hair somewhat irritably before flipping over to lie on her stomach on the bed, laying the book flat in front of her. Even with [Linguistic Mastery] backing her up, her reading progress would still stall every now and then.
Since this sentence couldn't be understood, she'd just skip it.
Megumin bent her legs back and crossed them together, swaying them gently back and forth in contentment as her gaze shifted to the next page. In the manga, the boy's face was contorted with pain, and then he uttered two words that greatly caught her attention: "Explosion?"
What did this mean?
Carrying her confusion, she read on. The girl, her face full of concern, pressed down on the boy's thigh—yet there wasn't the slightest trace of urgency or worry to be seen.
"I know... don't worry... leave it..."
This boy is clearly about to explode, and she's still so calm—could the content described by these words be vastly different from the meaning I understood just from the pictures alone?
Megumin's delicate eyebrows knitted into a tight knot. She overturned her earlier impression of this book: she'd originally assumed it was an educational book laced with lewd content, but it turned out to be a perfectly proper, legitimate educational book.
She decided to reexamine the contents with fresh eyes. The pictures had to be paired with the text in order not to distort the message it was meant to convey. Flipping the book back to the first page, she ran the soft pads of her tender-white fingers down along the pitch-black characters bit by bit, striving to combine the obscure, hard-to-understand contents with the pictures to make sense of it all.
By the time a crescent moon hung high in the night sky, scattering its pure silver light across the earth, she had finally finished reading that copy of "Puberty Education."
Megumin closed the book and let out a long breath, her eyes brimming with admiration: "To think this book actually taught such important knowledge—my earlier behavior of trying to understand it through the pictures alone was so terribly disrespectful to the author."
She rubbed her sore, aching eyes and solemnly placed the book on the nightstand.
The contents written in this book—she had now completely understood them all!
The boy in the story needed to regularly release venom every few months, or else he would explode and die. Obviously, the girl was the one who came to deal with the venom. At first the boy was too embarrassed to confess to the girl that he would explode if he didn't release the venom, and even tried to figure out a way to solve it by himself—which clearly wouldn't work, since on his own he had no way at all to expel the venom.
Afterward, through the girl's unflagging efforts, he finally opened his heart to her and accepted her help. After the two of them labored for dozens of pages, they at last expelled the venom from his body. The two of them exchanged a smile, and the girl told him that if he ever needed help in the future, he should feel free to come find her.
Megumin felt this story was practically a carbon copy of what had happened between her and Jhin earlier—frightened by the symptoms appearing on her body, she'd run off to seek his help, and in the end Jhin had solved the problem for her.
Alike—so very alike!
It was just that she hadn't been as melodramatic as the boy in the story, who at the start had hemmed and hawed, unwilling to tell the girl, thinking he'd solve it himself.
Hmph hmph, this is precisely where I, Megumin, am clever—when in doubt, go find Jhin, and if even he can't solve it, then just wait for death directly.
As she took pride in her own wit and wisdom, she grabbed the blanket and pulled it over herself, intending to sleep. With a smile lingering at the corners of her mouth, she had just closed her eyes and was preparing to drift off into dreamland when a thought suddenly flashed through her mind.
Jhin has been in this world for so long now, and no one has ever helped him expel his venom—he wouldn't go and explode one of these days, would he?
"Hsss~"
Megumin sprang upright as though a spring had been installed behind her, the drowsiness in her eyes vanishing completely, leaving only worry and anxiety.
She would never do something like abandoning a companion to die—much less since Jhin was a very special existence to her.
The two of them could roughhouse with each other without too many reservations, and she could even join forces with him to unleash an even more powerful [Explosion magic]; he was always able to solve the troubles she ran into for her.
Jhin had once brought up the concept of "frenemies" to her. Now that she thought about it, the way the two of them got along, as well as their patterns of behavior, really did fit those two words, "frenemies," quite well.
Since they were frenemies, then even if I help him deal with his venom, that would be the most natural thing in the world, wouldn't it—not to mention that guy even accepted the slip of paper with his daughter's name written on it.
Thinking of this, Megumin couldn't help but feel a little angry. She didn't understand why Jhin had said nothing after seeing the name.
Could it be that the name she'd come up with wasn't good enough?
No good—I have to go find him and ask for a clear answer. Mm... I'm just going to get an answer, nothing else!
____
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