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After leaving the weapon shop I turned and noticed the sign the guy at the counter was talking about. It had big blocky red letters that I unfortunately couldn't read.

“Beastkin and Demi-Humans are NOT WELCOME in my shop." Bella read out. "I'm actually a little surprised I didn’t notice it earlier, not that I'm used to being a beastkin," she added.

“Does that kind of thing happen a lot in this country?”

“Mmm, I haven’t done much traveling but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was pretty common. The Beastkin or I guess I should say beastfolk now, were known to be pretty bloodthirsty and ruthless fighters in the last war about five years ago. There are a lot of people that personally fought some of the beastfolk so tensions can be pretty high sometimes. beastfolk are still considered one of the civilized races though so after the treaty was signed individuals are free to come and go in most places. Some people don’t care about that and will still ban people from their shops. While it’s most common for it to be aimed at beastfolk there are also places that might ban elves or dwarves or something else instead. We should probably start paying more attention to the shops we enter just in case, we probably got lucky that time.”

“I agree, that could have gone a lot worse.”

“Oh by the way, now that I’m looking at this scepter more closely I think we got an amazing deal. This scepter is actually really high quality. The magic crystal attached to this scepter is so high quality that it l can already tell with my limited experience that it will make my nature magic more powerful and more efficient. It’ll let me do bigger spells with less magic,” she says beaming.

“Yeah we certainly got luck…y” Huh, we noticed a shop we weren’t supposed to go into, the guy who would get mad at us for it wasn’t there, the clerk happened to have gotten a nice item for us and sold it to us at a steal just to get rid of it. Could this be the benefit of my high luck stat or is it all just coincidence? Gah, stuff like that is impossible to know and it starts making you superstitious about things. Best not to think about it too hard.

I look up at the sky, It wasn’t quite sunset yet but it was starting to get to be pretty late afternoon. I didn’t get any armor yet but that could probably wait till later.

“Hey Bella, if you don’t mind, when we get back to the inn will you see if you can help me learn to read? I’m sick of not being able to and I’d like to read that ritual book we got from the guild. Oh! And let’s stop by that guild store, we totally forgot to pick up that magic chalk Mirianna mentioned.

“Sure,” she replied warmly. “It’ll be nice to help you out for a change.”

I reach out and grab her hand, lacing our fingers as we keep walking. I take a peak at her and her cute pointy ear tips start turning red again. How cute.

The quick trip to the guild store was pretty uneventful. The store was a pretty basic general store. There were things like lanterns, torches, rope, and the like. If it would have been in my old world it would have seemed like a strange cross of a hardware store and a sporting goods store. We bought a box of the magic chalk for 1 silver, a box of mundane chalk and a something akin to a blackboard for 30 copper, a leather-bound journal for 50 silver, ouch, and Bella picked up a tough looking backpack for 80 copper. The prices honestly seemed a little all over the place to me but I had no context for what was easy to get and what was rare. Paper sure seems expensive though, still this journal is really nice and I needed something to take notes in.

When I stepped in the door of our room I suddenly felt a wave of discomfort come over me. Our sheets were messy and the room still smelled of sex. At only a glance I could see the spot where I had been held down and violated. It wasn’t until I felt Bella’s hand on my back that I realized that I had slumped against the door frame.

“Maybe it would be best if we asked for a different room for tonight.”

“Y-yeah…”

It wasn’t quite dinner time but I had gone down to the open tavern part of the inn to wait for Bella to collect what was left of our things in the room and talk to the innkeeper. I hadn’t really spent time to process what had happened to me last night, I instead tried to distract myself with tasks and new things rather than confront how I felt about what happened. I sat there and stared at the grain of the wood.

Being violated had been… awful to say the least but… How my body reacted to it was the worst part. Some part of me enjoyed being treated that way as horrible as that makes me feel. And as helpless and weak as it made me feel in the moment, being able to turn it around on him made that particular inadequacy pass. After taking my revenge on him all I was left with was my self-disgust. It had been easy to distract myself with other things but when I stepped back into that room it was like it came back and slapped me in the face.

I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. I can’t let this cripple me. I’m only at the start of my journey here. I don’t know where I’m going, or if I’m even safe quite yet. This probably just illustrated that I’m far from safe here. It’s not even like I was in a compromised position, a dude just broke into my locked room and held me down. In this world of magic, everyone has a greater potential for individual power. Even if that means I can become stronger, it also means that I’m at greater risk from people who would do me harm. I can’t let this cripple me, I need to keep moving forward.

I need this awful scenario to be a lesson that I can’t let my guard down and I need to surround myself with people I can trust. Really the only reason I got out of that situation at all is because Bella helped me, ultimately I got lucky… Lucky huh? I don’t really feel all that lucky at the moment but I guess it could have been a lot worse.

In the corner of my eye I spot Bella walking back downstairs with our stuff, she’s walking over to the innkeeper to talk about swapping rooms. I feel a little bad making Bella do this for me but I suppose I need the help right now. It’s not just for my own benefit that I need to get stronger, I need to get stronger so she can rely on me too. I can’t shut down and become a wreck. It’s not just me that would suffer. Bella and I need to survive this new world together, she’s in danger too now because of me. Because I took her soul… because she was also turned into a succubus demon.

I sigh again. I’ll put this behind me, let this become something that makes me stronger, not something that defines who I am. I look up as Bella comes and sits down across from me.

“How did it go?”

“No issue at all. She gave me a new key on the other side of the hall and took the old one. She didn’t even ask me why.”

“...Thanks.”

“No problem Lilith.” Bella smiles warmly back at me. Ah, my heart, she’s too good to me.

“Do you want to go back up to our room now? I was kind of hoping you could help me with reading.”

“Sure.”

We head up the stairs to our new room. It’s a little bit bigger but the shape of the room is a little different so the layout changed too. Luckily this one has a table and chairs in the corner, perfect for a study session.

Over the next hour Bella wrote out something half way between an alphabet and a syllabary for me and then wrote out some basic sentences. It’s pretty weird learning how to write a language you already speak while a translation layer coverts everything for you. When I’m trying to focus on the sounds words make, I can clearly hear the other language. Then, when I’m trying to understand a word’s meaning, I ‘hear’ it in English. It’s pretty interesting though, once I had a grasp of the sounds I could just try to sound out a word and once I said it out loud, I instantly understand the meaning and could consciously speak it again with perfect pronunciation.

I wrote out a little cheat sheet with all of the pronunciations of the letters in my journal and started practicing by translating the magic ritual book onto the chalkboard so I could understand the words. The ringing of the status was going off periodically but I was too engrossed in learning about magic, it was super interesting. After another two hours of reading through the book on my own something just clicked and I was suddenly able to read this language as effortlessly as if it were written in English. Unlike when I spoke, I could still tell what language I was reading but I suddenly didn’t need to translate anymore I just knew the words. On a hunch I decided to open my status and I saw that I had missed some notifications. So much so that the skill level ups combined into one big one.

[Linguistics Lv.1 unlocked - Successfully created a translation tool]

[Linguistics has increased by 9 levels to level 10]

[Linguistics Skill Ability Sightspeak has been unlocked]

[Sightspeak - Lingustics Skill Ability]

Sightspeak gives the skill holder the ability to perfectly read and write any language the user can fluently speak. The skill holder must be able to identify the language in order to understand it.

Welp, if that isn’t some skill synergy I don’t know what is. I feel like I’ve leveraged my title in a way that’s just cheating. But hey, I’m not complaining, I honestly wasn’t looking forward to having to learn to read and write this new language anyway. Translating the magic ritual book would only have kept my attention for so long, language is normally a pretty use it or lose it skill so it would normally would have taken a lot more practice than that.

Doesn’t Sightspeak feel pretty powerful for only getting a skill to level 10 though? And was what I was doing really enough to level something to 10 so quickly?

“Hey Bella, apparently in the last two hours I got Linguistics, got it to level 10 already and got a new ability called Sightspeak. Is that normal?”

“What? You got ten levels in linguistics already? I thought you might get a skill like that with what you were doing but that seems a little extreme. What exactly were you doing again?” She walks back over from the bed and pulls her chair next to me.

I show her what I was doing, just taking a sentence and using my cheat sheet to rewrite the sentence in English as practice.

“What’s this language?” She says pointing to my English translation.

“Uh, that’s English. It was the main language of the country I came from… At least I think so.”

“I’ve never heard of English before, maybe you got extra experience for translating the book into a rare language. That or the reverse would normally level up a skill like this faster.”

“Would it level up that fast if I was the only one who spoke or understood English though?”

“Probably not, but there are other World Travelers, so maybe one of them speaks this language too. If there are books written in this language here, even things like diaries than it would probably count.”

“Huh, alright then.”

“It’s fairly common to get new skills when hitting multiples of 10. What does Sightspeak do?”

I read the description to her verbatim and her eyebrows raised.

“Wow, combined with the World Traveler title that seems really good.”

“If it was going to be so easy to learn to read and write everything I would have liked it to have just come with the World Traveler title.”

“Well, most of the time skills are rewards for effort not logic. You got the skill because you put effort into learning, not because it made sense to pair it with your ability to speak all spoken languages. Not everyone cares much about learning to read, there are probably many world travelers who didn’t even bother.”

“If you say so...”