CHAPTER 327: CHAPTER 233 BLACK FOX FUR

"Achoo!"

On Yakushima Island, Ah Man sneezed while sitting on the snow sleigh. She looked around but didn’t find anything out of the ordinary. Muttering, "Which dung beetle is cursing me," she then lifted her head and gazed into the distance.

The distant landscape was still a vast expanse of white. Apart from snow, there was nothing but more snow. Even the stretches of pine forest barely showed any living color, as everything had been smothered by the heavy snow.

Yakushima Island in winter is truly an island of snow.

It was only after coming here that Ah Man realized there could be such an unlucky place in this world. Snow didn’t fall in little delicate flakes—it came down in fluffy clumps the size of a palm, just tumbling down from the sky. The snow was so soft that if the wind blew it into a dip in the ground and someone walked onto it, they’d sink in and disappear, leaving behind only a gaping black hole in the snow.

As for the cold, it was especially bitter at the start of winter, but after getting used to it, as long as the wind didn’t blow, it was still manageable. Once the wind started, though, it’d chill you to the bone and make a person like her, raised all her life in a warm climate, feel like she’d rather die than endure this.

She spent a whole winter on Yakushima Island, and even her habit of laughing out loud at the sky vanished.

Here, you can’t even laugh too hard, or else your face stings and your lips crack open.

She really regretted listening to Harano’s nonsense and agreeing to this damn job that supposedly only she could do. She was planning to tell Harano as soon as she got back that he could stop wasting energy on Yakushima Island—honestly, with how brutal the natural conditions were here at this time, even just basic development would take at least three or four generations. In the short term, it’d be nothing but a huge burden for Wanjin, with zero benefit.

The real issue is Wanjin people can hardly adapt to Yakushima Island’s climate either.

Back then, Harano left her with several dozen subordinates. Before winter was even over, six were dead, and more than a dozen were bedridden and not recovering—the odds were a few more would die soon. The casualty rate was just too high—so high it was hard to accept.

Unless you’re willing to be as heartless as the Lizi Family—sacrificing two or three adults out of every ten to forcefully migrate people here—there’s just no way to get a foothold.

Yakushima Island—well, maybe only the animal pelts are worth anything here, at least for now.

Still, after suffering through so much, of course Ah Man had made some progress with her mission. At the very least, she’d already made friends with several Ainu Tribes.

But... visiting these friends wasn’t easy. The Ainu didn’t have farmland, lived mainly by gathering, with some fishing and hunting on the side. Each tribe needed a territory dozens of times larger than any farming village just to support themselves, and their settlements moved around constantly with the seasons. That meant the tribes were all separated by long distances, and sometimes they liked to hide out in the mountains—good luck finding them.

This time, Ah Man brought her exploration team, using horse-drawn sleighs for transport, and had already been roaming the wild for nearly two days. If they still couldn’t find the tribe they were after, to make sure the horses would survive the trip home, she’d have to turn back, rest for a few days, and try searching in another direction.

Maybe thanks to being on someone’s mind, Ah Man and her exploration team pressed northwest for most of another day, and finally spotted a few hunters—hunters from the Zair Tribe.

Zai’er is a transliteration—the literal meaning is probably "people who live in the lowlands and mountains."

These hunters were lying in ambush for Ezo deer, the local breed of sika deer. When they saw Ah Man and the sleigh team cutting through the snow from a distance, they looked a bit wary and instinctively prepared to slip away. But when they noticed the "Colorful Gourd Banner" mounted on the sleigh, their expressions relaxed.

An older hunter waited for the sleigh to come closer, then greeted with a hearty laugh, "Ah Man, what good stuff have you brought this time?"

"Good stuff my ass, we’re practically bankrupt now. Where’s the black fox fur you owe me? If you don’t cough it up soon, don’t blame me for slapping you in the face right here and now!" Ah Man fired back fluently in Ainu, bundled up so thick she looked like a ball, grumbling as she staggered down from the sleigh, and didn’t forget to casually greet the younger hunters, "Utari! Utari!"

Utari means "friend." Sometimes it’s also a way to say hello, kind of like, "Hey buddy!"

She really did have a talent for languages, and her memory was freakishly good. In just half a year she’d taught herself Ainu, and all on her own too. If she’d been born in modern times, she would’ve been a "Foreign Languages Institute Saint"—learning seven or eight languages fluently would’ve been nothing. She’d been teaching her subordinates, but even with someone instructing them, after six months they were still bumbling and stumbling through the basics, struggling just to hold a normal conversation. Just goes to show—people really aren’t built the same, and talent is absolutely real. She truly was the best person for this job.

Of course, she only taught herself because she’d been forced to. At first, she actually wanted to find herself a proper Ainu tutor. She secretly took some people to kidnap an interpreter from one of the Lizi Family’s "miyake" (trade outposts in immigrant villages), but the translator turned out to be a total amateur. After ten days wringing him out, all she picked up were a few phrases like "How much is this?" "Cheaper." "Too expensive."—basically useless stuff.

In the end, she had to bring some booze, go undercover at a Lizi Family trade outpost in disguise, and proactively chat up the Ainu people until she learned the language herself. By now she was even starting to learn how to write.

Yeah, she used to think the Ainu were just some wild, savage, blood-drinking people. Only after getting to know them did she realize they actually had a written language—an obviously ancient pictographic script. She’d written it down in a letter to Harano, and Harano suspected it might be a form of regional script from the Spring and Autumn Period, at the very least influenced by Wu and Yue cultures.