A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation

I welcome your opinions, impressions, corrections, and questions.

“Hm, do I stand out that much…?”

A lone man was in a back alley. He was calmly taking off his coat, but in truth, just a few seconds ago he had been somewhere entirely different.

Without even so much as a blink, he had gone from the royal castle where the king resided to this back alley.

Even someone far from ordinary would surely panic, yet the man remained completely calm.

It was not that he lacked emotion—he was properly troubled—but you would never guess it from looking at him. That was how composed he appeared.

He—Lizel (his real name was much longer)—had been in his own office just seconds before.

His rank was duke, his post prime minister, and he had formerly served as the king’s tutor. Within the monarchy, in both body and mind, no one stood closer to the king than he did.

Incidentally, the position of prime minister itself had been created on a whim, as a supreme act of nepotism, by the current king, who had ascended the throne at the historically young age of twenty and wanted to keep Lizel at his side.

Lizel had immediately tried to decline, but the king had forced it on him. Had Lizel not actually been competent even by an impartial standard, the king’s approval rating would have plummeted right after his coronation.

Under such a reckless, fear‑of‑nothing king, Lizel should have been diligently working since morning as usual, so why was he now in a completely unfamiliar town?

For the moment, he decided to get out of the dark alley. Fearless in his own way, Lizel headed toward the main street.

(The language is the same, the currency is different. For now, the value of the money is… I really do stand out a bit.)

Lizel disliked ostentation, so although his clothes weren’t gaudy, they were sufficiently aristocratic that he still stood out even after removing his coat. Draping the coat over his arm, he continued to gather information from his surroundings without letting his thoughts break.

This unnerving calmness, as his former pupil had put it, asserted itself even in this irrational situation. It wasn’t that he felt no confusion, but he could suppress such emotions as unnecessary to grasping the present circumstances.

Such self‑control—enough that it would not be strange to call him inhuman—was a necessary ability in noble society, but Lizel’s far exceeded the norm.

He let his gaze drift casually around him. What was that child clasping a copper coin trying to buy? What had that housewife, handing over a silver coin at the market, purchased, and how many coins was she getting as change?

He took everything in one after another, indiscriminately feeding it into his mind. He learned how many lower‑rank coins made one of a higher rank, extrapolated prices, and compared them to the values he understood.

Lizel did treat money with that distinctive noble sensibility, but having occasionally accompanied the king on incognito visits to the castle town, he understood market prices.

“(Currency that hasn’t existed in my past either… Still, the relative value doesn’t seem that different.)”

Stone coins, copper coins, silver coins. Their shapes and designs were unlike those he knew, but their value as ores was the same. Wherever he currently was, there didn’t appear to be a radical difference in how things were valued.

At this point, Lizel was already convinced that this was a different world from the one he had been in moments earlier. His thinking was certainly realistic, but he wasn’t so rigid as to deny all things fantastical.

It was just that “another world” was what best fit his current situation; and even if that idea was wrong, the only one it inconvenienced was himself.

In any case, what he had to do did not change. He thought for a moment—hm—and then, with a decisive step, walked toward his next destination.

(…I’d like to see some of the higher denominations too.)

He had already grasped the value of the coins that changed hands at stalls and in the market.